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Middle East

Nuclear Options

Israel’s leading military ethicist, Moshe Halbertal, argues that in some cases a pre-emptive nuclear strike might be moral while nuclear retaliation might not. An exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.

By Ron Rosenbaum|February 22, 2011 7:00 AM|54comments
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(Mark Alan Stamaty)
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One of the saddest, most provocative things I’ve heard about the history of the Jews is the notion that while Christians preach turning the other cheek Jews are the ones who, through history, have actually done it. Berel Lang, one of the few scholars unafraid to face such questions, wrote an essay for a Jewish quarterly that he called “Why No Retaliation?” for Hitler’s Holocaust. Some Jews did attempt postwar to poison a few German POWs, a haphazard scheme that didn’t result in many deaths. There were virtually no Jews left in Europe to do any retaliating, and even those who tried to return to their old homes and might have been in a position to do so were forced to flee again by pogroms throughout Eastern Europe.

So it was more by default, not really by choice, that there was no retaliation. There was justice of a limited sort, the Nazi hunting of Simon Wiesenthal for instance. But no retaliation, just memory.

Next time, should there be a second Holocaust, Jews will have the means to inflict massive retaliation, they will have the choice at least, it will be by choice and that choice may well come down to a submarine commander. The last resort of choice.

Should he retaliate, regardless of his orders? Several years ago I gave a talk to a seminar sponsored by the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism about the idea of a second Holocaust and the controversy over it. And, at the end, the issue of retaliation came up.

One speaker addressed the question of whether the Israelis had provided for it and shielded their retaliatory forces. He told the story of the Isaiah scroll in Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book, the repository for the most ancient and revered manuscripts of the Jewish people, and how the Isaiah scroll, after a brief period of being on display in a super-hardened glass case, retracts deep, deep into the earth, into the titanium-steel-alloy silo you might say, that reaches far beneath the surface and is said to be able to survive a direct nuclear blast. They care about books there. You can’t use your library card to get the Isaiah scroll. The point he was making was that the Israelis guarded their retaliatory capacity with the same care as the Isaiah scroll and that was saying something.

Until the very end of the question-and-comment period no voices had been raised to question the fact that there would or should be retaliation. Then a grad-student-looking fellow at the back of the room spoke up and in a halting, tentative voice framed his question this way:

What if the Jews didn’t retaliate at all? What if they, the survivors, somehow declared there would be nothing to be gained, only a preponderance of innocent lives to be lost among the guilty perpetrators? Wouldn’t the Jews—however few were left alive—be honored then and for centuries afterward for this forbearance?

Interesting choice of words: honored. I thought of Falstaff: “What is honor?”

Before I could answer, a fellow on the side of the room spoke up and said such talk, or a public airing of it, would be dangerous because it would undermine the credibility of Israel’s deterrent, which depended on the certainty of retaliation. Not that anyone in that room was going to be giving the order.

It just so happened that on July 3, 2009, the Jerusalem Post printed a dispatch about one of Israel’s nuclear-capable Dolphin-class submarines. Israeli papers are not allowed to acknowledge possession of nuclear weapons by the state and so the dispatch was muted, although the reverberations must have been pronounced for those in the know about the role of the Dolphins as the Israeli launchers of last resort. “After a long hiatus the Israeli Navy has returned to sail through the Suez Canal,” the story said, “recently sending one of its advanced Dolphin class submarines through the waterway to participate in naval maneuvers off the Eilat Coast in the Red Sea.”

A message was being sent. A message about retaliation. And the means to do it. But what about the will to do it, the morality of the choice? And so as I write this a submarine that could start (or end) World War III is cruising into range. And no one knows what the commander thinks about the consequences of a second Holocaust. Or whether he carries a Letter of Last Resort.

It took me a while, but at last I found someone who was an authority on the ethics of the question and the military implications there of someone who was willing to talk about what was “new under the sun.” And for this, I am grateful to Arnie Eisen, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary. After hearing me complain about the timidity of his sages, he helped put me in touch with Moshe Halbertal.

The Determinate Versus the Immeasurable

“Do you think it’s wrong to write about this?” I asked Moshe Halbertal toward the end of our talk.

We were sitting in his office at NYU Law School, where he spends half the academic year teaching ethics and the international law of war; the other half he does the same at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is one of the most widely respected thinkers on the moral and ethical dilemmas of modern warfare. He was influenced by the writings of Michael Walzer, the author of the influential book Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. And Halbertal has gotten involved in a way that is more difficult and perilous than academic: He has co-written the code of ethics for the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces.

He admitted he had not written about how just-war ethics apply to nuclear war questions. He admitted he felt he was entering into a “no-man’s-land … beyond the law.” Occasionally he would say variations of “but you can’t say that” after he’d said it. Which is why I asked him if I should write about it.

We had been speaking as well about his shocking-at-first notion that a preemptive nuclear strike might be a morally justifiable act under certain restrictive conditions involving “thresholds” and “supreme emergencies.” We had been talking about submarines, the retaliatory weapons of last resort. And so I found myself asking in a guilty way whether deterrence was—or should be—a bluff, something you threaten but aren’t allowed to carry out, as Walzer believes. But of course even to discuss it is to make an attack by a foe more tempting should he think the threat might be a bluff.

“Wrong to write about it?” I asked. “Not that anyone is going to pay attention,” I hastily added, not wishing to risk being held responsible for a nuclear cataclysm, “but—”

“No, not at all, you should, you should definitely—”

“No one in Iran is going to say—”

“No I don’t think you’ll break the  … ”

He trailed off but I think he meant to break the veil of secrecy or the shroud of ambiguity that cloaks Israeli nuclear war plans, even nuclear weapons possession.

Halbertal was just the person I had been seeking to talk to, a much admired Talmudic scholar most well known among the Talmudists for his book on idolatry who had brought his immersion in the wisdom of the sages to contemporary military ethics. He is deeply knowledgeable about the whole tradition of just-war theory but willing to acknowledge that nuclear weapons presented new challenges to ancient conundrums. Something new under the sun.

He is a modest shirt-sleeved 50ish guy who says dramatic things in an offhand undramatic manner and is frank about his hesitancy, uncertainty, and agony on certain matters. He comes across as a someone of genuine humility who admits to being tentative. He’s a serious and courageous man.

I began by asking Halbertal to describe how his military experience led him to his current position. He told me that he had enlisted in the Israeli army and served as an artillery spotter. In other words his task was both military and ethical: to make distinctions—often difficult and immensely consequential ones—between civilian and military targets in the grim struggles of “irregular warfare,” where decisions were not always possible with precision. The artillery spotter is a battlefield ethicist who puts his life on the line getting to the forward-most position for the sake of saving innocents. A position where to make the wrong choice is to risk killing innocents.

Continue reading: “supreme emergency,” a wager, and World War II. Or view as a single page.

1 2 3 4 5View as single page

Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist for Slate, is the author, among other books, of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.
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  • Natan

    With all due respect, Ron Roasenbaum discredits and disqualifies himself from intellectually honest discourse by making a moral equivalence between Halbertal and a mullah blessing a suicide bomber. Let us hope that Israel has the necessary means and moral convictions to prevent a second Holocaust.

  • dani levi

    They went to Germany and played pimp my sub. And pimp they did.

  • fw

    Part of the extremely interesting panel discussion following airing of “The Day After” in ’83. Elie Wiesel starts in at about 3:30. Prescient in some ways:

    http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?c=1821&m=abc%20viewpoint%20day%20after

  • Tamir

    What a sick picture with which to open up this gravely serious conversation. It removes all objectivity from a topic desperately in need of it by completely lying about the context of the conversation at hand. If anyone is actually behaving like the Nazis today it is Israel so, for starters, the swastika should replace the star on Israel’s flag or be plastered as the background of the Israeli submarine commander. Lest we forget, it is Israel that has a history of international attacks and acts of piracy, not Iran. Ultimately, this only sets the tone of subjective apologetics. Israel can do what it wants to do because it says it has reason to fear an attack from Iran so it can attack Iran preemptively, or any other nation it puts in that category. Where’s the conversation? Its over. As long as Israel feels threatened, the rest is intellectual masturbation.

  • fw

    Iran’s leaders sponsor and direct Hamas and Hezbollah, who have waged continual war against Israel, even after Israel has withdrawn from their territories in Gaza and Lebanon, provoking the two most recent wars in the region.

    Iranian leaders talk about eradicating Israel with nuclear weapons.

    Israel is contemplating what its response ought to be, in the event of such a contingency, hence the article.

    May none of it ever come to pass.

  • JCarpenter

    Would Iran risk killing Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians with a nuclear attack and subsequent fall-out? Hopefully the U.S. hasn’t taught the lesson of “collateral damage” being negligible in attaining the larger goal . . . .

  • shavit

    Natan: Both are providing justification for acts of violence are they not? You may think one is wrong and the other right, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing the exact same thing …

    Tamir: “Lest we forget, it is Israel that has a history of international attacks and acts of piracy, not Iran.” If they paid for the bomb, does it matter if they detonate it? If they pay for the missile, does it matter if it is Iran and not a proxy that launches it? In any case, you seemed to have missed the point of the article. There were no “subjective apologetics” justifying anything based on fear in this article. There were two people having a conversation about a topic that has enormous consequences but no answer.

  • dani levi

    Tamir understands nothing. He defends the greatest exponents of 21st century fascism. Iran has bombed and shot its way from Berlin to Argentina, from Iraq to Kandahar to Beirut to Gaza and Egypt. The Iranian Mullahs insane suppression of its own people with its very on SS, the Revolutionary Guards. I encourage you to read a little on the fate of gays and the Bahai in Iran or the Kurds before you out yourself here as a fan of mondoweiss and Finkelstein. Last I heard the second wave of the coming Green Revolution was clubbed and shot to pieces only last week.
    There is only one good fascist, a dead one. Read some European history.

    Here is a great Halbertal quote from wikipedia:
    “Democracy is a non-violent form of adjudicating different ideologies. It’s very easy to be non-violent when stakes are low; in Israel we are in a condition where the stakes are very high. It’s a tribute to Israel that it has managed to maintain democracy under such conditions of diversity and high political stakes. I would like to see other Western states deal with this condition without becoming fascistic.”

    I look forward to the day, when people like Tamir and Nir Rosen look back in history and see who they championed.

  • Shmuel Lifshitz

    In Syria Assad(the father) destroyed a city and killed 30,000 of his inhabtants when felt an uprising threatened him.
    Khadaffi did not hesitate in using his Air Force to strife his protesting citizens.
    Ahmandijad is constantly declaring he will obliterate Israel.
    The Muslims did not have any scrupulosity when doing their rebelious brothers their due, we have to believe them that their rethoric is not in vain. I do not understand Ron Rosenbaum’s moral pilpuls.
    The comment by Tamir and his flthy comparison made me puke.

  • Ury Vainsencher

    Disclaimer: I am an Israeli citizen and resident. So I don’t really know that we have nukes. It is all speculation in the foreign press (including Tablet, yes).

    Having said that, and assuming for the sake of argument that we do:

    Ethics shmethics. Nobody analyzed this better than Dirty Harry: “Well, do you feel lucky today? Do ya, punk?”

    Every morning when he looks in the mirror and doesn’t shave, Ahmadenijad has to realize that even if he does get lucky, he won’t get lucky. That from Teheran to Cairo, very little will be left.

    We should send all those (alleged) submarine commanders to a press conference and make them swear on their children’s heads that yes, they will push the button. It’s our only chance to ensure they won’t have to.

  • George Murphy

    The author wrote-

    “I decided to ask Halbertal about Israel’s nuclear “opacity,” the refusal of Israel to admit officially that it had nuclear weapons. The carefully worded, scarcely plausible statement by the Israel Ministry of Defense that “Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons” into the Middle East. This has often been decoded to mean, at best, a situation in which not all components of Israeli nuclear weapons had been joined together, although readiness to fire was a few bolts and a few minutes away, for an arsenal most estimated at some two hundred warheads ready to “introduced.” Not counting the ones on subs.”

    Looking just at this phrase-

    “Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons” into the Middle East.”

    I believe that the Israelis knew at the time that the US had already introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East on its aircraft carriers. This was not known publicly, as it was denied by the US, but Israel and others knew. Consider that the US always had nuclear arms aboard many of the carriers deployed to postwar Japan, but never admitted it until recently.

    So it was a trick statement – since the US had already introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East, no matter how many bombs Israel assembles and readies for deployment, it can never be the first.

  • George Murphy

    Oh, and hell yes Israel should retaliate in the event it is attacked with nuclear weapons.

    As a lesson to the others.

  • http://www.depthofrevenge.com Richard Golden

    The novel “Depth of Revenge” is based on the exact scenario addressed so well in this article by Ron Rosenbaum. Mr. Rosenbaum praised the book during his review of the new generation of nuclear war novels published in Slate.com on May 8, 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/2217899/

  • Leon Perez

    Mr. Tamir, you are a disgusting “human being”, to state the State of
    Israel is behaving like nazis after offering repeatedly, starting in 1948, to share the land with the Arabs, while ignoring the terrorism
    that Iran has conducted in the last 31 years is beyond the pale.
    You sir, need a big dose of reality.

  • Ari Venere

    why do you think that Israel will be attacked and not the way around? Israel is the one which starts wars in the region. It occupies parts of Syria and Lebanon and don’t forget whole Palatine.

  • Tamir

    This is the main problem, Ari. What is plainly before us all, namely that Israel is the clear aggressor, as seen through “the facts on the ground”, seems to be constantly ignored. There is this ubiquitous mantra that evil surrounds poor, victimized Israel on all sides and that all these “arab” armies, conveniently indistinguishable from each other, are looming on the borders of this little innocent state, hell-bent on its total destruction. But we should not be fooled that these catch phrases are actually being originally manufactured in the minds of those claiming to defend the terrorist state of Israel. A simple exercise of copying them from these comments and pasting them into a google search box reveals most of them are robotically being rebroadcasted directly from Hasbara sources easily identified on the web. An honest study reveals that little of what is passed for reality when singing the praises of Israel’s government and its rogue military is actually true. For example withdrawing a few hundred radical settlers from Gaza is often called “a total withdrawal of Israel from the territories”, when in fact, “Israel” didn’t withdraw at all. Gaza has not known a single day without total and complete military occupation since this form of world-class Nazism began. What is referred to as heroism when it was meted out by Mordecai Anielewicz and Marek Edelman against the German occupation in Warsaw only a few decades ago is now ignorantly referred to as terrorism by Hamas simply because its against Israel. I don’t support any of Hamas’ violence, but please! They are clearly on the defensive by any standard! All objectivity is completely abandoned and we’re left with hasbarabid bullshit that masks the facts from our minds completely. The consistent and quite deliberate destruction of all Palestinian culture and its deeply rooted history in the land now called Israel is also a work of monstrous proportions with which supporters of the terrorist state refuse to contend.

  • Shmuel Lifshitz

    The jews are defending their right to have an independent, democratic and soverein state. The arabs refused to accept the partition as decided by the UN in 1947. This is their original sin.Before that the grand mufti of Jerusalem colaborated with the nazis.No separate Arab state was formed by the palestinians and the war to erase the new born Israel was initiated by the surround Arab states and others and the result was the Nakba. Since then the arabs tried to get even and were repulsed and defeated by Israel.
    Israel is defending itself,in spite of it Israel is democratic and the Arabs in Israel have the highest standard of rights and living in all the Middle East.
    Ari and Tamir perceptions of history are, maybe, motivated by personal psicological problems, their “facts” are not facts, are delusions.

  • Mitch

    Palestinian culture? “long” history? did I miss something?

  • Leb

    judging by what is going on in the Arab world, it is clear who are the “rogue” states Tamir. Last I checked there were thousands of Tunisians and Libyans crossing the Med to freedom, and thousands of Eritrean’s coming to Israel. None of these people wish to stay in self governed Arab states for lack of a decent future or human rights abuses.

  • Philip

    The author was remiss in not asking some leading rabbis about revenge. They have a tradition of making some very tough decisions ,from the times of the Roman wars,through the Inquisition,to WWII. They had to live with the consequences of ther decisions,and did not shirk their responsibility.

    You may not like what they have to say,but their response would be well thought out.

  • Tamir

    Leb: So what? would you ignore the millions that are staying there to ensure their own freedom, to depose, even in the face of death, the dictator that the US has been protecting, along with Mubarak and the Saudis, for years? Libya is rogue because of one man leading it? All Libyans are rogue because of Qadaffi? That monster will be gone in a few days if he isn’t already. Don’t the millions of Libyans that made this nightmare end for themselves and the hundreds if not thousands that must pay with their lives to create a new dawning of self-determination deserve a little more than to be labeled “Rogue”?

  • Leb

    tamir
    you make your own reality, clearly.
    the fact that every day thousands of Arabs risk their lives to cross the Med tells you nothing does it? It is not only the Libyans.
    When the young flee in such numbers, one must ask why ? And What sort of places do they come from?
    But arguing with you is pointless. Because you clearly have no concept of rational, reality and truth. You make it up as you go along.
    Another point. If Israel were the Third Reich, why are there over a million Arab Israelis here? They seem to be in no hurry to leave. In fact more and more Palestinians are applying for Israeli citizenship, because the thought of becoming a citizen of a future Palestine does not appeal to them. Because they know that they will be exposed to tribalism, clanism, corruption and what not.
    You should stop reading mondoweiss.

  • Tamir

    Germany WAS the Third Reich in 1939 and there were more than 200K Jews living there at the time. The Israeli government today tolerates the same kinds of treatment of Arabs who live in Israel as the Nazi government did of Jews in 1935 to 1939. Arabs live in apartheid conditions and are persecuted all the time so pull your head out of the sand and read an Israeli newspaper from time to time. I have many Arab friends who live in Israel, even some who served in Tzahal as did I. They tell me on their own how they’re being treated so forgive me if I decline to entertain your baseless hypothesis.

    Not long ago 20K Israeli Jews marched in Israel demanding equal rights for Arabs in Israel and freedom of political expression. Were they inspired by Arabs waving the Israeli flag? I think not:
    http://www.peoplesworld.org/thousands-of-israelis-march-against-witch-hunt/

    Shulamit Aloni explains on DemocracyNow why she stepped down:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsZRGB9mcYk

    Notice that, as someone that really wants to know the truth, I refrain from telling you what NOT to read and encourage you to rather read more.

    http://www.counterpunch.org/aloni01082007.html – “They are not ready to hear criticism”
    Do you really expect me to take your word over Shulamit Aloni’s? What qualifications to you have?

    Read! Understand!
    http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/are-israel-and-apartheid-south-africa-really-different-1.265580
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3111727.stm

    Obviously confusing day and night, right and wrong, Israeli piracy is actually used as a context for removing Arab-Israeli representation from the Knesset
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/interior-minister-seeks-to-strip-israeli-arab-mk-of-citizenship-1.294091

    A larger Arab citizenry might demand fair representation in the Knesset. Fully 20% of Israel is Arab yet only 14/120 MKs are Arab. As an Israeli citizen, I defend their rights even if I don’t agree with them! Democracy is better than Nationalism.

  • Tamir

    Mitch: Yes you did miss something. It was systematically removed from your education because it didn’t fit in with the ideology your education was delivered through:
    http://www.palestinehistory.com/history/brief/brief.htm#01

  • Leb

    Tamir,
    great link. a more political source could not be found. from the bronze age straight to Arafat. Love it. It was bound to be, judging by your earlier comments. And it explains your ignorance about fascist Europe.

  • Tamir

    History may not be pretty, but at least we have it.

  • Tamir
  • Leb

    Tamir
    You remind of the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage
    http://www.youtube.com/user/LatmaTV#p/a/8B99644BD8FE4070/0/M87C7i8X09I

    Did you ever read the article? Or did you get stuck with the illustration ?

  • Tamir

    At least we’re clear about our respective sources of news

  • Leb

    Tamir
    So we have identified three things for you to look up. One is German fascism. One is satire and the third is Hebrew history.
    And do read the article, because it is of interest when trying to understand Hebrew thought processes.

  • Philip

    Leb;

    Thanks for that YouTube link. Absolutely fantastic.

  • ZT

    Unfortunately, there’s an aspect the article ignores. Let’s say Israel is nuked, and makes the “moral” choice not to retaliate. Where does that leave extremists in Pakistan and India who see that as an example of what would happen if they struck first? The failure to retaliate could be the spark that causes nuclear deterrence to break down everywhere else.

  • George

    Rosenbaum makes a number of quite elemental errors in his analysis, but they all revolve around his unstated assumption that the nuclear exchange ends history–it’s actually rather ironic that a steadfastly secular Jew would embrace eschatology!

    If there is a nuclear first strike against Israel, Israel is hurt, terribly. But Israel does not vanish–it can continue, both with its remaining population and the potential influx of future settlers. It is only through inaction following the nuclear blasts, and a resulting invasion of Arab forces finishing the job, that Israel and its Jewish inhabitants are truly extinguished. The nuclear response of Israel is warfighting, nothing more and nothing less.

  • Shalom Freedman

    Ron Rosenbaum cites the major moral dilemna which confronts Israeli leaders should there be , God forbid, some kind of nuclear strike against Israel. This underlines of course the absolute importance of preventing such a strike against Israel. It underlines the importance of preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. It underlines the importance of supervising nuclear material in the hands of states which threaten Israel, today first and above all, Iran.
    Rosenbaum also makes the point that in order to maintain deterrence one must be inflexible about retaliation. I think that this must be the posture of Israeli leaders. But of course this posture is not a matter of words, but of deeds. In destroying the reactor in Baghdad and in making the strike against Syria in 2007 Israel did show this kind of determination.
    With this another point I am not too happy about making. There are those who say that the destruction done by a single nuclear weapon would no more eliminate Israel than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki eliminated Japan. This is a point to be kept in mind when considering retaliation and its consequences.
    On the whole Israel because of its size, and because of the number and size of those who would destroy it faces unique and terrible threats.
    It is to be hoped that ‘retaliation’ will not be the means of dealing with those threats, but rather that forms of prevention and preemption will suffice. Here of course Israel needs the cooperation of the United States to be fully successful.
    This subject is a terrible and frightening one. I cannot write about it without praying to God that the Jewish people will never know again terrible disaster.

  • Elliott Tepper

    I find it strange that professor Habertal can say. “I cannot see a world in which you are allowed to actually kill an innocent person intentionally.” Has he not familiarized himself with the course of human history? War has almost always entailed the death of civilians alongside of their warriors. Wars and their sieges, famines, and plagues have always been the shared portion of a civilization’s armies and its citizens. Perhaps professor Habertal and I would not want to see a world like that, but it has and does and will always exist. That is why civilizations must be very slow to war. Innocents always suffer. That is why most nations have embraced just wars and reserved the right to self-defense and retaliation as a strong deterrent to needless suffering.
    There have been some civilizations where different forms of chivalrous codes of conduct have been practiced imperfectly, most notably among Judeo-Christian nations–and very imperfectly so. But Islam hardly embraces any such code and a significant element of Islam is working day and night to ultimately utterly destroy Israel and then work towards submitting the entire world to Islam. It is no exaggeration to note that the vast majority of Muslims in the world, though not directly involved in working towards the destruction of Israel, are rooting for its destruction. Yes, even moderate Muslims. If such a civilization attacks and largely erases the Jewish testimony from history, that civilization deserves to be destroyed–all of it, for judgment’s sake, lest it turn its attention to its next victim.
    Let there be no doubt that if even one nuclear bomb is exploded in Israel, those responsible can expect not ten or twenty million of their citizens to dies, but their entire civilization to be turned to glass. They, not Israel will be responsible for the collateral damage. If they grasp that fact, then perhaps no one on either side will need to die unnaturally.

  • Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

    My name is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and I approve this message.

  • Adam F.

    Look, you farking monkeys have had 2000 years to try and sort out your differences, and guess what, both sides are not going to give. So let the nukes rain. Look, if I had a nuke, That’s where I would put it. The only difference is I would tell the bastards the date. Give them an opportunity to leave, or stay, it doesn’t matter to me. I would nuke all your retarded religions holy ground into dust, and then if you STILL insist on going back to that wasteland, the nuclear fallout will hopefully sterilize you, preventing you from continuing this cycle of which cultures imaginary friend is better. No one cares. Moses is make believe, Allah is imaginary, and seriously if you think that someone else DRAWING your prophet is an offense punishable by death, get the fuck off our planet. You and your stinky, brown, bearded, women-hating kids should be exterminated like the cockroaches you are.

  • Adam F.

    And oh by the way, Jews, you don’t belong in Israel. You got your asses kicked outta there a long time ago. You think you’re any better than the Muslims or the Christians, of course you do, because your the “chosen people”. Its a fucking piece of land. If their is a God, he doesn’t give a fuck about the rocks where Jesus’ blood was spilled, he most likely wants to know why YOU think that 2000 years later it’s ok to still be spilling blood in his name. Look, unless you’re Buddhist, your religion practices intolerance. That’s a fact. And you can tell me all the great things you do with your Church on the weekend, but the bottom line is you think your answer is the ONLY correct answer, and you do humanity a disservice by pretending or even actually believing that you know the answers to the big questions of creation, and what happens after death. Kevin Smith said best, “Don’t have a belief, have an idea. Ideas are much easier to change.”

  • Highlander

    I ve spent the night in a structure full of nuclear weapons. It makes even the youngest, most bellligerent of warriors fall silent, when contemplating their power to harm humanity.

    But for Jews, the obliteration of Israel will only be the beginning. Do you, seriously think, the savage barbarians of Islam, will want to stop at incenerating 4 or 5 million Israeli Jews?

    Next, New York with its millions of Jews will beckon to them. After that, they can systematically track down the rest of you. Ironically, after 2,000 years Israel is the key stone to the survival of western civilization as well as the Jews.

    So,if it comes down to that awful day, you better pray to GOD that, those Sub Commanders do their duty. And don’t just decide to surface, and say, “I read mr Rosenbaum’s book, and now, can’t we all just love one another?”.

  • http://none Jan Sand

    History will not end with Israel’s initial bombing of Iran. Nor with an atomic bombing of Israel. But for sure the degrees of hatred aroused may become unimaginably intense if Israel makes the first unprovoked atomic strike and the disgust the world now obviously feels for Israel will become hugely magnified and the Jews around the world may suffer interminably and very horribly. There is no easy solution to the problem but atomic interaction does not seem sensible.

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Nuclear Options

Israel’s leading military ethicist, Moshe Halbertal, argues that in some cases a pre-emptive nuclear strike might be moral while nuclear retaliation might not. An exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.