The Nuclear War Plan for Iran
Trump’s threats to Tehran are alarming. Here’s what they mean.
Donald Trump has laid down a Ukraine-like ultimatum to Iran: either agree to give up your nuclear program within two months or suffer the consequences. He’s been vague about what these consequences might include, but I can now report specifics that are as severe as you can imagine.
“We can't let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump says. “I would rather have a peace deal than the other option but the other option will solve the problem.”
To the casual observer that might sound like more of the targeted airstrikes the U.S. has been doing, but behind the scenes, as the Pentagon prepares for a "major" regional war with Iran, the use of nuclear weapons is on the table.
The new Iran war preparations that have been underway since last year include new nuclear options.
“One might find it extraordinary to think that nuclear weapons are even considered,” a retired senior military officer who has been briefed on the planning tells us, “but we have entered a new era.”
The officer says that a combination of factors — none of them precipitated by Donald Trump directly — have created a perfect storm to bring nuclear weapons back into the picture.
“Reintroducing nuclear deterrence,” the officer says, serves three purposes:
To directly deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons (or then from using them).
To convince Israel not to use its own nuclear weapons — that is, by making it clear that the U.S. equally would (or could) preempt Iran if something dire happened.
To dissuade Saudi Arabia from perceiving that it has to develop its own nuclear weapons because Iran is doing so.
To implement these seemingly unconnected national objectives, Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. combatant command for the Middle East, is charged with maintaining capabilities to back up Washington. Today, for instance, the White House claimed that in a telephone call between Trump and Putin that the two agreed “that Iran should never be in a position to destroy Israel.” To Washington, an Iranian nuclear program is just “destroy Israel” spelled another way.
“Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a top priority with global implications,” CENTCOM commander Gen. “Erik” Kurilla told Congress last year. “We will continue to develop military options for the Secretary of Defense and President, should they be necessary.”
Down in Tampa where CENTCOM headquarters is located, there is scrambling to make sure that whatever capabilities exist supports the new position. The nuclear options are contained in Appendix 1 to Annex C of the Iran war plans, I am told.
CENTCOM’s planning for the potential use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East has undergone three significant shifts in the past 45 years.
Cold War Era
The first generation of war plans (called the “OPLAN 1004” series) were written during the era of the Shah and were completed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The plans included the potential use of nuclear weapons to counter a potential Soviet invasion. This included two “vertical escalation” options — referring to stepping upwards on the nuclear escalation ladder —, one “passive escalation” envisioning the 5th Special Forces Group parachuting into northern Iran and detonating backpack nuclear land-mines on Iranian soil, and the other “active escalation envisioning B-52 bomber strikes on targets in the Soviet Union and frontline Army artillery and missile strikes on Soviet forces in Iran to buy time. The last war plan of this generation was completed in 1984.
“With four decades of hindsight, the idea of the US and the Soviets engaged in a great battle in the Zagros [mountains] for control of the Middle East seems unrealistic at best,” CENTCOM itself said at a retreat in 2020.
Planning for war in the Middle East was essentially moribund under the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. CENTCOM OPLAN 1002, finished in the 1994-1995 timeframe, included a nuclear annex that planned for nuclear strikes against targets in Iraq and Iran, now in the name of countering proliferation. U.S. policy had shifted to having the capability to threaten nuclear strikes against any and all potential nuclear adversaries.
War on Terror Era
After 9/11, new “strategic concepts” regarding Iran were articulated by President Bush. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its inclusion in the “axis of evil” dominated war planning during the next decade. The war on terror was the singular focus of Washington, and Iraq war planning (now under CONPLAN 1025 and first prepared in August 2003) ignored nuclear weapons. CENTCOM continued as a “nuclear” command, but “regional” nuclear planning was shifted to Strategic Command (STRATCOM) so that Tampa could focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and counterterrorism.
A U.S. military attack on Iran is "simply not on the agenda at this point," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in February 2005. That same month, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of CENTCOM, said that there were no new plans to deal with Iranian nuclear weapons. The command, he said, was focused on Iran’s support for the insurgency in Iraq.
In 2008, Iran test fired a new missile capable of hitting Israel. The next year, it launched a satellite into space. More missiles came. Gen. James Mattis, who was then CENTCOM commander (and would go on to become Trump’s first secretary of defense) pushed for a regional collective approach to air and missile defense against Iran but found no takers. The rest of the Obama administration focused on Iran nuclear diplomacy and the new war on ISIS, with Iran military options falling off of Washington’s radar screen.
The Trump Era
When Donald Trump announced in May 2018 that he was withdrawing from Obama’s nuclear deal, he said that during Washington’s singular focus on nukes, Iran had “escalated its destabilizing activities in the surrounding region.” Trump didn’t know it, but he was articulating the Obama administration “whole of government” approach, that everything was connected. He reinstated sanctions on Iran and designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. It was the first time that the U.S. officially identified another country’s military as a terrorist organization.
Throughout the next year, Trump imposed more sanctions even as he articulated that the U.S. “does not seek conflict with Iran.” Iran had other ideas though, and in September 2019, Tehran shot missiles and drones at Saudi oil facilities. It was at a time when Secretary Mattis was declaring the war on terror over and a new era of “Great Power Competition.”
Iranian attacks continued, and in December 2019, Secretary of State Pompeo said that any attack on a U.S. base by Iran or its proxies “will be answered with a decisive U.S. response." The next month, Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike. “They see we have the will to act,” said Gen. Frank McKenzie, the CENTCOM commander at that time.
“For far too long, all the way back to 1979, to be exact, nations have tolerated Iran's destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond,” Trump said in an address to the nation upon Soleimani’s killing. “Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen.”
That same month, my editor revealed that nuclear weapons were already back in the picture and that a war game undertaken just days before Trump was elected in 2016 ended with the U.S. nuking Iran. A new nuclear weapon was deployed in February 2020, a low-yield warhead for Trident II submarine-launched missiles. The Pentagon said it was “to strengthen deterrence.”
Just days before Biden was elected, responsibility for Israel shifted under CENTCOM for the first time, accelerating the current generation of war plans. Iran’s development of a full array of missiles and attack drones, now combat proven in the Houthi war (and later in Ukraine) finally resulted in the collective air defense system for the Middle East and even put Arab and Israeli generals in the same room to discuss common war plans against Iran.
President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Lapid met in Jerusalem in July 2022 and signed a declaration reaffirming the "unshakeable U.S. commitment to Israel's security," and, as part of the pledge, to use "all elements of its national power" to ensure Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.
With the Saudis now saying that they could pursue their own nuclear capability if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon and Israel saying that its capabilities against Iran had “dramatically improved” and that it was “ready for the day when an order is given,” the Gaza war erupted. The ingredients came together as Iran put its full might behind Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah and then attacked Israel directly. The massive use by Russia of Iranian drones (and, more recently, ballistic missiles) against Ukraine has raised the stakes.
I described yesterday the general development of the war plans against Iran, but buried within those plans, I’ve learned from procurement documents and corporate internal communications, including a renewed focus on nuclear weapons. The basic framework of OPLAN 1025 persists, but behind the “C-Iran” strategy (counter-Iran) to attack Iran’s missile and drone capacity, and now to attack Iranian leadership, either with “kinetic” or “non-kinetic” means (including covert and cyber actions and special operation forces) lurked the nuclear options.
As part of the current “SEED Project” that I described yesterday, there is a more highly classified nuclear planning effort. Escalating an Iran conflict to the use of nuclear options can originate in two ways: One, with the CENTCOM commander “requesting” the use of nuclear weapons, mostly to stave off Iranian conventional military success; and two, in a “top down” order, that is, by the President, mostly as a “demonstration” to “signal” to Iran.
Once again the Trident II low-yield option is in Donald Trump’s hands. A submarine can stealthily deploy and the White House can decide. This is the problem of having secret and unexamined plans. The option is now available to this president.
In the decade or so I’ve been reporting, I don’t recall ever once writing about nuclear weapons. Not because it wasn’t important, but I didn’t take it seriously and it never seemed real. Now, the nuclear threat seems very much a live issue with this latest generation of detailed military planning that could be put in motion at any time and by a single person who has already shown himself to have a much bigger appetite for risk, even than in his first time.
The voices of complacency, those who are telling America to go back to bed and that everything is under control, will insist that all of this is hypothetical and that military plans are just plans. (He’s just loading the gun and cocking it, what’s the big deal!) As I’ve shown, the nuclear options go way back; but they’re now being actively modified in completely novel ways. With Donald Trump openly threatening “the other option,” it’s surreal that this isn’t front-page news.
The press needs to be way more vigilant than it has been; and I need more of you guys to become paid subscribers so I can keep reporting on our alarmingly quiet march to war.
It’s Donald Trump waving that gun, after all.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Hey subscribers, will answer any questions you have here. - Ken
Unbelievable stuff here, Ken. The public really is sleepwalking to Armageddon with the rest, including the MSM, seeming to cheerlead the way, or at least obscure the reality. Nuclear weapons means the extinction of us all. Thanks for your reporting, even though I do not want to hear or believe it.