[Israeli Zionists badgered every American President since Reagan to bomb Iran and Hezbollah, why would they they would let Trump get away with "Taco-ing" out now?]
Trump deploys 'Doomsday' nuclear command planes to the Middle East as WW3 fears surge
The World Is on the Edge of Nuclear War. Only Russia and China Can Stop It.

Israel is under unprecedented military pressure, and if conventional war appears unwinnable, the world is approaching a potential nuclear escalation – unless Russia and China draw a clear red line.

Firefighters at the site of a hit by an Iranian missile strike in Tel Aviv, Israel, February 28, 2026. Photo: Tomer Neuberg/AP.
In the early morning of March 8, the war unleashed upon Iran by the United States (US) and Israel took a dangerous new turn. The US launched a deadly attack upon Iran’s oil refineries and associated facilities around Tehran and the neighbouring city of Karaj that turned the air over the region into poison. The Iranian government warned its people to wear masks, throw away the food in their refrigerators and change the filters in their drinking water systems immediately. Then, within hours, it gave the Gulf Arab states a warning that it was going to destroy the oil facilities in their countries in four hours, and launched a deadly attack upon Israel’s main oil refinery in Haifa Bay.
The Haifa Bay attack has dealt a severe blow to Israel’s economy and military capability because the refinery meets more than half of its oil consumption requirements. With these attacks, the US-Israel war on Iran has taken a dangerous turn towards total war. Were that to become a nuclear war, it could become the end of the world as we know it today.
I have two reasons for fearing this dire outcome: first, prior to the twelve-day war, Israel had never known the intensity of attack that it suffered in those few days, and is suffering now. It got its first shock when it found that Iran had a new generation of missiles that could penetrate its “Iron Dome” of interceptor missiles. The Israeli government has not officially revealed the full extent of the damage that the country suffered during those twelve days, but estimates concur that 33 or 34 persons were killed and 3,500 were injured.
In the current round of combat, Iran is not only sending a much larger number of missiles, but these are considerably more sophisticated than those it used last June. The Haifa refinery was attacked with a solid fuel rocket, labelled the “Khebar Shekan”, that is 11 metres long and carries a more than half-tonne warhead.
Video shots of the night sky over Tel Aviv taken by Al Jazeera show that Iran’s hypersonic missiles are finding little difficulty in evading Israeli interceptors, and that many not only have an independent manoeuvring capability that makes it very difficult to intercept them, but also “cluster” independently releasable warheads that deny the intercepting missiles a target and pose a serious danger to the civilian population, especially to children, in the daylight hours, if some of these fail to explode immediately.
According to several American estimates, the proportion of Iranian missiles that are penetrating Israel’s interceptor defences had risen from 10% at the beginning of the conflict to between 20 and 35% by the end of the sixth day of war. This rise in the interception ratio confirms the widespread belief that Iran first exhausted its stockpile of older missiles and is only now beginning to use its newer, hypersonic and independently manoeuvrable missiles.
Israel and the US’s efforts to destroy Iran’s missile launch sites have also met with only partial success so far. This is because most of these are buried underground where they are not visible until after the launch has taken place. These single-shot missile launch sites can be recognised on television by the huge brown explosion of dust that precedes the white smoke of the missile’s exhaust.

Smoke billows following an Iranian missile attack in central Israel, Monday, March 9, 2026. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP
The underground launchers are spread all over the vast terrain of the country, so they are virtually invisible until they self-destruct during launch. Iran is building more and more such launch sites every day. No one knows how many are spread around Iran because we only get to know of them after they have served their purpose. But they are believed to run into thousands.
Thus, far from creating confusion, rebellion and regime change, America’s decapitation strikes of the past fortnight have hardened the Iranian regime’s resolve and the support of the Iranian people for their government. It is also apparent that Iran is following a strategy that it had decided upon months, if not years ago. It first targeted American military bases in the Gulf Emirates that were hosting them, and hit some hotels where it believed American military personnel were housed.
With the help of the Houthis, it is also gradually choking the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 billion barrels of oil flow every day.
If Iran is able to keep up its present rate of attack on Israeli cities, Benjamin Netanyahu will face a serious dilemma: Israeli citizens have grown used to taking their safety for granted. They had implicit faith in the Iron Dome, and right till last June that faith had been justified. But they began to lose faith in it and on Netanyahu even before it began to crack. In June last year, Israelis found themselves at the receiving end of war for the first time in more than a generation. The very large number of persons injured, the partial destruction of the Mossad headquarters at Tel Aviv and the damage inflicted on Haifa airport severely damaged the fragile cocoon of invulnerability in which they had been living until then.
The Netanyahu government did not release figures for the persons killed or wounded until much later, but the nightly attacks had forced increasing numbers of Israelis to seek shelter in basements and bunkers. And while the government was not releasing any tally of casualties sustained, it was apparent to everyone that people were being killed or severely wounded.
For the first time, therefore, Israelis experienced the fear that their victims in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been living with for the past several decades. This is that they can no longer be sure when they go to bed at night that they will wake up the next morning; or that when their children go to school in the morning they might not return that afternoon. This is the fear that hundreds of thousands of Arab families in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been forced to live with during the wars that the US has, with Israel’s misleading inputs, inflicted upon them from 2003 till the present day.
The few days of Iran’s nightly bombing in June therefore did more than just destroy the illusion of invulnerability that Netanyahu has strenuously tried to maintain. It also destroyed much of the public’s confidence that the right-wing coalition that he leads will keep the country safe. A ‘Preferred Party’ survey by Pew in May 2024 had shown that by then 58% of the electorate had turned against Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition and only 38% supported it.
Two months after the twelve-day war, another survey, carried out by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv, projected that opposition parties would win about 62 seats in the 120-member Knesset if elections were held – reversing who held the governing majority. More significantly, only 27% of Israelis retained any confidence in Netanyahu as their prime minister.
Netanyahu’s response to this has been to increase his persecution of the hapless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. In the 120 days between October 10, 2025 and February 10, 2026, Israeli forces broke the ceasefire Trump had brokered between Israel and Hamas 1,620 times, i.e., around 15 times every day. During this period, Israeli forces fired at Palestinian civilians 520 times, raided residential areas beyond the yellow line 79 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 749 times, demolished people’s properties on 232 occasions and took 50 Palestinians from Gaza into custody.
Israel has also continued to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy homes and infrastructure across the entire Gaza Strip. It is difficult not to conclude, therefore, that Netanyahu has continued his crusade to create Eretz Israel “by other means”.
Those ‘means’ have created a war that, Israelis are increasingly realising, cannot be won through conventional warfare, even with all the technological might of the US behind them. So what is the last arrow left in Netanyahu’s quiver? The answer is Israel’s nuclear bomb. No one has a precise idea of how many of these Israel has today, but an estimate publicised by Al Jazeera in 2009 showed that Israel already had 118 nuclear bombs by then, with varying explosive powers.
In case the present generation has forgotten the devastating power of even “small” nuclear bombs, the Uranium bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, had an explosive yield equal to 15,000 tonnes of dynamite. It razed and burnt around 70% of all buildings in the city and caused an estimated 1,40,000 deaths by the end of 1945. The plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki three days later, levelled 6.7 square kilometres of the city and killed 74,000 people by the end of 1945. Ground temperatures in both explosions reached 4,000 degrees centigrade and radioactive rain poured down upon both cities.
At any normal time, and in any normal place, the use of such a weapon would be unthinkable, but Israel under Netanyahu could prove to be the exception. For he is a convicted felon who will have to serve prison sentences on three counts of bribery the moment he ceases to be the prime minister of Israel or hold some other office in government. He has found that pursuing the goal of driving every last Palestinian Arab out of “Greater Israel” is his surest way to staying out of prison. And so his government has felt no qualms about killing at least 75,227 Palestinians and injuring 1,54,525 more between October 7, 2023 and February 21, 2026.
Since the truce with Hamas forced upon him by the US and the international community, Netanyahu has found it necessary to find a new enemy – a new mortal threat to Israel, to stay in power. For this he has zeroed in on the supposed threat to Israel and the US posed by Iran. In Donald Trump he has found the stupidly arrogant American president he needs to serve his purpose.
It normally takes between a year and two years to arrange a Head of State’s official visit to the USA. In 2025, every time Trump talked of an agreement with Iran over limiting its uranium enrichment to levels needed for its peaceful use, he found Netanyahu at his doorstep the next day. Netanyahu met Trump six times in 2025-26, and on each occasion Trump pulled back from peace talks with Iran and made further demands instead.
Today, with the war in Iran not going his way, Netanyahu is left with only one other option, and it is to use nuclear weapons against the State. There are unconfirmed reports that Israel has already shifted much of its nuclear weaponry onto submarines, possibly to keep it safe from an accidental explosion. But the only way to make sure that this is, and remains, his sole aim is for Russia and China to make it crystal clear to the Israelis, and the world, that all bets will be off if he uses one of these on Iran.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist and commentator










Eric Trump is married to Lara Yunaska who has two Jewish parents



@mikec4845
19 hours ago