Tag: nuclear weapons

Ex-CIA Officer Says The Agency Delivered The Same Iran Verdict Three Times Before The War

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou says the agency produced three separate national intelligence estimates before the Iran war began, and each one found that Tehran had no nuclear weapons program. He made the claim on the Nov. 6 “Intelligence Community Roundtable” edition of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, alongside Larry Johnson.

Napolitano asked what the CIA had told the president “about the practical consequences of his plan with Netanyahu to win the war in six days.” Kiriakou answered that “we know a little bit from leaks,” then said: “the CIA had published three separate national intelligence estimates and all three times concluded that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program. It just simply didn’t exist.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March 2025 that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” and Trump answered that he didn’t “care what she said.”

Kiriakou said the agency’s analysts were just as consistent on what a war would cost. “The CIA was pretty consistent that this was a bad idea from the very beginning,” he said, arguing that the analysis held “the Iranians were far tougher than we as policymakers believed.” In his telling, a look at the map was enough: Iran is “the size as the whole of Western Europe,” ringed by mountains on three sides, with “92 million people, all of whom will go to their deaths to protect their homeland.” Conquering it, he said, would have taken “one million ground troops.”

He also pointed to a leak from “less than three weeks ago.” A CIA “red cell” team, the kind of group meant to “think outside the box,” had concluded that “it was Israel that could break up and fall apart and cease to exist because of all of this, not Iran,” Kiriakou said. The person who leaked it, he said, was a CIA contractor who passed it to his girlfriend, who put it in her blog. That matches the case of Ian Brinksman, the contractor the FBI arrested last month, as we reported. His case is ongoing, and Kiriakou’s account of what the red cell concluded rests on the leaked reporting, not on a document we have seen.

The segment was part of a broader hour in which Johnson and Kiriakou argued that Trump’s Iran policy cost Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms. Both are known critics of the war, and the claims above are theirs.

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Tucker Carlson Says Trump Is Considering a Nuclear Strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain

Tucker Carlson claimed in a post on X on Sunday night that the Trump administration is considering launching a nuclear strike targeting Pickaxe Mountain in central Iran and that the president is expected to make a decision by November 7.

“Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran,” Carlson wrote.

Carlson said that Israeli intelligence has claimed that the “Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program” underneath Pickaxe Mountain, allegations that Tehran has denied.

“No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place,” Carlson said. “No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place.”

For his part, Trump has publicly ruled out using a nuclear bomb against Iran, but he has been threatening to strike Pickaxe Mountain. “We’ve knocked out their nuclear. We still have to take care of, I would say one or two sites, but we can do that in 10 minutes,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “You probably could look at Pickaxe Mountain, and you have to take care of that. We can do that all very quickly.”

In his post, Carlson said that Netanyahu was pushing for the US nuclear strike due to his precarious political position following Israel’s October 27 Knesset election. Netanyahu’s coalition led his opposition but failed to gain the majority needed to form a government.

“To that end, [Netanyahu has] applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations,” Carlson wrote.

The former Fox News host, who spoke with President Trump before he launched the war on February 28, went on to discuss the potential consequences of the US using a nuclear bomb, which would mark a first since World War II.

“An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final,” Carlson said.

He pointed out that the Pentagon has been rewriting the US nuclear strategy to “make first use of so-called ‘battlefield nukes’ easier and therefore more likely.” The Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”

Carlson cited “close observers” who said Trump would likely decide by the weekend, or November 7, whether or not to carry out a nuclear strike. He also said that the president is “hesitating” for the time being and is “listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.”

Trump was also supposedly favoring diplomacy before joining Israel’s 12-Day War against Iran in June 2025 and before launching the current war alongside Israel on February 28.

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WHAT ISRAEL WANTS FROM IRAN

I have been reliably told by American and Israeli sources that things are quietly happening in secret talks between Washington and Tehran as the economy in Iran continues to plummet and the only way forward for Iran’s leadership is to obtain a settlement focused on its nuclear program. Talk is cheap, but the current conversations have spurred some anxious Israelis with experience in military and nuclear activities to produce a position paper entitled “What an Air-Tight Nuclear Verification Regime in Iran Should Look Like.”

The existence and circulation of the paper to a small group of verification experts makes clear that the ongoing secret talks have profoundly distressed Israel, which is facing worldwide condemnation of its ongoing killings and abuses of Palestine civilians in Gaza and the West Bank that many call genocide. Israel remains convinced that zealots in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are secretly keeping the nuclear flame alive. The paper’s key point is that any newfound nuclear inspection regime “requires an unprecedented level of intrusiveness, far outstripping standard international safeguards.

“Because trust is nonexistent and Iran possesses deep technical knowledge and a history of covert sites,” the paper notes, “the regime must be built on the principle of absolute verification.” The normal verification procedures of the International Atomic Energy Agency that deal with declared nuclear material will no longer satisfy Israel. The Trump White House and Iran must go further and permit IAEA inspectors access to all information and locations. IAEA inspectors also must be given authority to access any nuclear site in Iran—military or civilian—within twenty-four hours “to prevent the sanitation of evidence.” In other words, there can be no cheating.

Another longstanding Israeli concern is the Iranian stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent known to be stored at various underground nuclear sites. The paper says the stockpile must either be completely blended down or shipped out of the country. (That condition indicates that Israel, despite its talk of a covert operation to find and remove or destroy the materials, has understood all along that such a mission would be impossible.)

I was given a copy of the paper, and I shared it with an American expert who found it to be a first-rate discussion of the technical and verification issues involved in shutting down Iran’s nuclear facilities. The paper does not, the American pointed out, deal with the political issues involved in preventing Iran from obtaining the bomb. Nonetheless, he added, speaking of the Israelis, “They’ve put something on the table.”

The Iranian regime, the American acknowledged, is now facing a collapse of institutions, including the IRGC. Many Iranian citizens are out of work, hungry, and financially desperate. He believes the population could soon be on the verge of open revolt that would not, as in earlier demonstrations, be subject to murderous retaliation from IRGC members because many in the rank and file are unpaid and demoralized. He noted that just this past weekend there were demonstrations throughout Iran, including in Tehran, by retirees and workers who, according to published reports, were protesting rising poverty and unpaid retirement funds. There was no intervention by the IRGC, although executions of dissidents are still being authorized by the Iranian judiciary.

The most recent round of talks between the United States and Iran have been far more substantial and technical than earlier discussions involving Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate mogul and longtime friend of the president. Neither of those envoys knows much about nuclear weapons.

Iran is still capable of producing and firing drones and rockets, but its economy, as has been widely reported, is in shambles. I’ve been told that Iran’s longtime trucking and smuggling outlets for its oil to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are no longer functioning as before.

The American expert cautioned that progress with Tehran while “great” is very limited. He said he believes the White House “is not going to start a ‘we won’ election ploy.” He reminded me that the Iranians had made similar promises on nonproliferation to the Biden administration “and then proceeded with weapons-grade refinement capability. No let-up this time because the current economic pressure is working. We are not going to ease the pressure until it’s in the bag.” (After alluding in a speech Monday night in Nebraska to Iran’s ability to “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego if it developed a nuclear bomb, Trump said that the ongoing war is “going to end very soon.”)

The American said that “the Israelis want verification negotiations to fail to avoid settling short of obliteration of the whole of Iran’s weapon program.” The visceral Israeli fear of a US settlement with Iran that falls short of that objective, unlikely as that may be in the Trump era, explains the production of what the official called Israeli’s “super requirement list” of safeguards, laid out in the paper cited above, for any nuclear agreement with Iran.

The conflict between Israel’s security demands and the international demand for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz makes for complex diplomacy, the American told me. The first step is to define and respond to the Iranian view of “peaceful development” that would deal with nuclear energy for domestic use. At the same time, Israel possesses dozens of nuclear weapons that it has never officially acknowledged, although its reactor in Dimona is widely known to have begun producing warheads by the late 1960s.

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Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Including Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked

Now it’s no longer just high-ranking Kremlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials.

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he’s willing to use “all weapons” in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.

“The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region,” Putin said.

“If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable,” he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.

NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.

Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described:

The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has “information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region.”

The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency.

The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany.

Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.

The letter accused NATO of an “unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia’s region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies’ officials.”

“This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance’s member states right from the outset of the conflict,” the letter said.

NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow’s letter:

“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.”

Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.

Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:

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Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month

Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario – one in which the US military’s reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China – went mostly unnoticed by the public.

The biggest international AI news of the past three weeks was the Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon’s resignation. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. Coxon’s description of a “terminator” scenario, a machine becoming much smarter than humanity and deciding to wipe us out, captured the public’s, journalists’ and politicians’ attention, stirring waves of fear-inducing, credulous reporting, and policy actions.

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, issued a mandate to create an “AI kill-switch”; New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is similarly exploring the possibility of having “AI kill-switches”; and Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar introduced legislation to “ban artificial superintelligence”.

While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported.

A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.

Unlike the terminator, “rogue AI”, scenario, this incident didn’t galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn’t warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military’s reliance on error-prone chatbots.

We describe the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots as stochastic parrots, that is, models that are designed to regurgitate the patterns of the data they are trained on. News coverage describing them as “powerful” “rogue” models that could render humanity extinct all on their own, bolsters perceptions of tools based on these models being infallible enough to merit usage in stakes as high as warfare.

Even CNN’s more critical coverage describes the chatbot used by the US military as presenting “profound risks” because it is “powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology”.

In fact, today’s LLMs and the chatbots they power are not poorly understood, nor are they powerful in the sense of being effective tools for this use case. They are systems for generating plausible-looking text, built out of enormous, haphazardly collected datasets and then “fine-tuned” (that is, further trained) to be especially appealing to their intended users.

CNN wasn’t able to learn which chatbot product was used in this case, but the LLM powering the product was probably fine-tuned to output text with the stylistic hallmarks of intelligence reports. Both the basic functionality and the risks of such a model have been well-understood and well-documented for years, including in our 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

Claims that system behavior is mysterious arise from deliberate mystification on the part of those selling those systems, and a misapprehension of what their output is by those procuring and using it.

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America’s Greenland deal has a radioactive backstory

The US, Denmark, and Greenland have signed a new agreement to expand American military activity on the island. Washington calls Greenland vital to its security, but an expanded military presence also raises an older question: What risks does the Arctic island take on in return?

The agreement builds on a defense partnership dating back to 1951. That history includes an episode that brought the risks of Washington’s Cold War strategy into sharp focus: An American mission over Greenland that ended in a nuclear disaster.

The nuclear patrols over Greenland

In the 1960s, in the middle of the Cold War, the US Air Force launched Operation Chrome Dome. This mission implied keeping bombers armed with nuclear weapons on continuous airborne alert, ready to strike the USSR if necessary. If you’ve seen the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’, you’ll remember that Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong’s crew was involved in such a patrol mission.

Theoretically, this strategy was feasible: It would have made it impossible for the USSR to disarm the US with a single blow. However, in practice, as the number of nuclear-armed aircraft patrols increased, so did the number of incidents involving nuclear weapons.

Then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocated for ending this program, arguing that Americans had already established an effective early warning system for ballistic missile launches, so the US could take fewer risks and cut costs. However, the Strategic Air Command resisted this idea, fearing it would decrease their importance and result in budget cuts. 

A horrific incident occurred in 1966 over Spain when a bomber collided with a refueling tanker aircraft, resulting in several fatalities and nuclear bombs landing on beaches and in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite this incident, the US considered the nuclear threat from the USSR a matter of primary importance, one which justified any security measures. 

Eventually, after intense debates, a compromise was reached: The number of patrolling bombers would be reduced, but the airborne patrols would continue.

Thule Air Base in northern Greenland was established in the 1950s. A Mercator projection map gives a distorted sense of distance; in reality, its location was very convenient for potentially launching missiles at the USSR and monitoring missile launches from there. It also provided a convenient vantage point for reconnaissance of the Novaya Zemlya Soviet nuclear test site. 

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Has prelude to World War III arrived? ‘Key players greatly underestimate the potential for disaster’

A growing collection of wars and military flashpoints involving several nuclear powers is raising concerns that miscalculation or escalation in one region could pull major powers into a far wider conflict.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a “dangerous new phase” in which the threat of regional spillover is growing, U.N. Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo warned Wednesday, according to the United Nations. The Middle East is simultaneously confronting the continuing U.S.-Iran conflict and renewed fighting in Yemen, while tensions involving China and Taiwan and nuclear-armed India and Pakistan remain potential avenues for another major confrontation, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“It’s possible to consider that World War III has begun,” defense policy analyst and retired Marine Dan Grazier told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The big problem before World War II was there were all these separate conflicts that were going on at the same time, and it was only a matter of time before they all got linked together.”

The number of armed conflicts worldwide has reached its highest level since the end of World War II, according to the CFR. Roughly 620 American government officials, foreign policy specialists and academics responded to CFR’s 2026 Preventive Priorities Survey, which identified a Taiwan Strait crisis and clashes between Russia and NATO as scenarios with potentially severe consequences for the United States.

“I would characterize the current environment as extremely dangerous, in part because key players greatly underestimate the potential for disaster,” the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, George Beebe, told the DCNF. “The biggest problem is that many leaders in the West believe the key to avoiding war is to demonstrate our resolve to escalate the use of force against our adversaries. They believe that diplomatic compromise constitutes ‘appeasement’ that endangers us.”

The nuclear danger extends beyond the sheer size of the world’s arsenals.

Of an estimated 12,187 nuclear warheads worldwide at the beginning of 2026, roughly 9,745 remained in military stockpiles available for potential use, 4,012 were deployed with operational forces and as many as 2,200 were kept on high operational alert aboard ballistic missiles, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. All nine nuclear-armed states also continued modernizing and enhancing their arsenals during 2025, with most deploying new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons systems.

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NATO member moves closer to lifting nuclear weapons ban

Lithuania’s parliament has backed a constitutional amendment that would lift a ban on nuclear weapons, thus bringing the NATO member a step closer to hosting them on its territory. Russia has warned the Baltic country, which borders its Kaliningrad Region, that such a move would have significant security implications.

The proposal was backed by 99 lawmakers on Tuesday, with 13 voting against and five abstaining. Two more votes are required, scheduled for October 6 and January 12, 2027. At least 94 of Lithuania’s 141 MPs must support the amendment in each vote.

The measure would remove Article 137 of the Lithuanian constitution, which prohibits weapons of mass destruction and foreign military bases on the country’s territory. Supporters argue that the provision no longer reflects Lithuania’s security needs, while opponents have raised concerns over sovereignty and called for the issue to be put to a referendum.

President Gitanas Nauseda has backed removing the restriction, while Lithuanian officials have argued that allowing nuclear weapons would strengthen deterrence against Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly rejected claims that it intends to attack NATO countries.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova last week called the proposed change “absolutely irresponsible,” accusing NATO members of pursuing provocative policies and treating Lithuania as a potential staging ground against Russia.

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