{"id":58419,"date":"2026-03-26T11:28:40","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T19:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=58419"},"modified":"2026-03-26T11:28:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T19:28:40","slug":"israel-has-nuclear-weapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/26\/israel-has-nuclear-weapons\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Has Nuclear Weapons?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.substack.com\/\">Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>This morning, I went on \u201cJudging Freedom\u201d with Judge Napolitano to discuss the latest tomfoolery by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4DS3ATghyZE?si=7HbQUcG-FxvZnNV9\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Judge Napolitano showed a clip of a U.S. government official, a nuclear proliferation expert, explaining he could not comment on whether Israel had nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n<p>WTF? Israel started working on nuclear weapons early in the 1960s. Everyone knows they have a nuclear arsenal of somewhere between 90 and 200 nuclear bombs (some estimates go as high as 300). Yet Trump administration officials can\u2019t even acknowledge that Israel has nukes. Could you be more slavishly subservient to Israel than that?<\/p>\n<p>(A lyric from Elton John\/Bernie Taupin comes to mind: <em>It\u2019s a sad, sad situation\u2014and it\u2019s gettin\u2019 more and more absurd<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Iran has zero nuclear weapons and did not have an active program to build one, so said America\u2019s 18 (!) intelligence agencies. But Iran is the nuclear threat in the Middle East? I\u2019m not buying it, and neither is any other sentient human.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I mentioned on the show were reports on U.S. troop deployments to the region, including Marines and elements of the 82nd Airborne division. Those reports have been exaggerated, notes <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kenklippenstein.com\/p\/is-a-ground-war-with-iran-imminent\" rel=\"\">Ken Klippenstein<\/a>, and I hope he\u2019s right about this. Any U.S. ground invasion of Iran proper or Kharg Island would be a total <strong>Schei\u00dfesturm,<\/strong> to use a technical term.<\/p>\n<p>The Judge and I also talked about airpower and its <a href=\"https:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/william-astore-the-dark-side-of-air-power\/\" rel=\"\">lack of decisiveness<\/a>. Put simply, airpower can be effective at destroying specific targets, but it doesn\u2019t control territory, it lacks persistence and staying power, and its effects can be counterproductive. Think here of the London Blitz in 1940, which united the British against the Nazis. Attacks from the air often serve to unite a people against a common foe, a result we\u2019re witnessing in Iran right now.<\/p>\n<p>Airpower proponents like to sell air attacks as decisive, but short of total annihilation with nuclear weapons, bombing from the air, in and of itself, isn\u2019t war-winning. If it was, the USA would have won in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else it\u2019s fought since 1945.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, as the USA denies any knowledge of Israeli nukes, Israel itself continues on a warpath to create a Greater Israel irrespective of the cost to America (and of course the peoples of the Middle East).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. This morning, I went on \u201cJudging Freedom\u201d with Judge Napolitano to discuss the latest tomfoolery by the Trump administration. \ufeff Judge Napolitano showed a clip of a U.S. government official, a nuclear proliferation expert, explaining he could not comment on whether Israel had nuclear weapons. WTF? Israel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-58419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Sorry, Can't Comment On That"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58424,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58419\/revisions\/58424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58419"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=58419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}