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The world’s nuclear-armed states are beefing up their atomic arsenals and walking out of arms control pacts, a think tank has said. A new arms race is emerging after decades of reductions in the stockpiles since the Cold War, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It comes amid escalating tensions between Israel, one of the world’s nuclear powers, and Iran. Israel said it bombed Iran over the past week to stop it from being able to produce nuclear weapons. Here, The i Paper takes a look at the countries with nuclear weapons and how dangerous they are.

Figure 1 – Global nuclear weapons (Source: MSN)

The timing of the acquisitions:

US (1945); Soviet Union (1949); UK (1952); France (1960); China (1964); India (1974); Pakistan (1998); North Korea (2006); Israel (estimated 1960s).

One interesting insight into the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) map shown above—especially looking at the timing—is the clearly paired relationship between many of these countries. This strongly suggests that fear is a dominant motive for acquiring nuclear weapons. Fear is often a binary power. The transparent pairs are the US and Russia, the UK and France, and India and Pakistan. The seeming exception to this motivation is the pairing of UK and France; here, fear seems like less of a catalyst than leading Europe’s alliance with the US in the fight against the Soviet Union (now Russia).

Two recent blogs that were posted during or immediately after the recent “12-day war” between Iran, Israel, and the US (none of the three declared this deadly “encounter” a war), mentioned two alleged Israeli doctrines that played important roles in triggering the events. One was the Begin Doctrine (June 18, 2025 blog), which states that Israel will destroy any effort to produce nuclear weapons by a country with a declared objective to destroy it as a “Jewish State.” Meanwhile, the “Samson Option” (July 2, 2025 blog), is an alleged Israeli army doctrine that will use nuclear weapons in case all other defense options appear to fail. Neither of these two “doctrines” has ever been stated as an official policy.

The results of the “12-day war,” in terms of Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, are still controversial. The latest “objective” assessment is given below:

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog says US strikes on Iran fell short of causing total damage to its nuclear program and that Tehran could restart enriching uranium “in a matter of months,” contradicting President Donald Trump’s claims the US set Tehran’s ambitions back by decades.

Iran’s efforts to produce nuclear weapons didn’t start with the present Ayatollah’s regime. The outline of the beginning of its efforts is summarized below by AI (through Google):

Iran’s nuclear weapons program, known as Project Amad, is believed to have begun in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This program aimed to develop and acquire weapons-grade nuclear material, test nuclear weapon components, and plan for the construction of a nuclear weapon. While Iran’s nuclear ambitions began earlier, with the establishment of a nuclear research program in the 1950s with US assistance, the transition to a weapons-focused program is what began in the late 90s/early 2000s.

As was mentioned above, it’s still too early to accurately predict the impacts of the “12-day war”—on Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, nuclear spread in the Middle East, and more broadly, globally. However, it’s not too early to try to analyze the timing and pathways to nuclear weapons by the nine countries shown in the FAS figure at the top of this blog that are known to have these weapons. I followed the two smallest countries in the figure through AI (Microsoft Copilot) and imposed an analysis based on the better-known history of the other seven countries. The basic assumption here is that aside from the US Manhattan Project, which required the development of the weapon from pure scientific theory (mostly dominated by German scientists), many of the other programs were able to build somewhat on those developments—largely through espionage. From there, the methods that Israel and North Korea used were “borrowed” from the knowledge of the bigger holders. The AI summary of the nuclear developments of Israel and North Korea is summarized below:

Israel and North Korea took very different paths to nuclear capability—one shrouded in secrecy, the other marked by defiance. Here’s a breakdown of how each country acquired nuclear weapons:

Israel: The Path of Secrecy and Strategic Ambiguity

Israel has never officially confirmed possessing nuclear weapons, but it’s widely believed to maintain a substantial arsenal. Its approach is known as “nuclear opacity.”

• Origins: Israel began exploring nuclear science shortly after its founding in 1948. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was deeply committed to developing a deterrent, partly shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust.
• French Collaboration: In the late 1950s, France secretly helped Israel build the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. This facility became the heart of Israel’s weapons program.

Plutonium Production: Israel is believed to have produced weapons-grade plutonium at Dimona, enabling it to build warheads without conducting public tests.

• Espionage and Covert Operations: Allegations persist that Israel may have acquired nuclear materials from abroad, including a suspected diversion of uranium from a U.S. facility in the 1960s.
• Estimated Arsenal: Experts estimate Israel has between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, deployable via aircraft, submarines, and ballistic missiles.
• Policy: Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and maintains a doctrine of preventive strikes, as seen in its attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria.

North Korea: The Path of Defiance and Isolation

North Korea’s nuclear journey has been marked by international confrontation and withdrawal from global treaties.

• Early Interest: North Korea began pursuing nuclear technology in the 1950s, initially with Soviet assistance for peaceful purposes.
• Yongbyon Complex: By the 1980s, North Korea had developed the Yongbyon nuclear facility, which became central to its weapons program.
• Withdrawal from NPT: In 2003, North Korea became the first country to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, citing U.S. threats.
• Nuclear Tests: It conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, followed by five more, including a thermonuclear test in 2017.

Fissile Material: North Korea produces plutonium and highly enriched uranium, with enough material for up to 90 warheads, though it’s believed to have assembled around 50.

• • • • • Delivery Systems: It has developed a range of ballistic missiles, including intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S..
        • Current Status: Kim Jong Un continues to expand the arsenal, with new enrichment facilities and missile tests defying UN sanctions.

The five references that were used by the AI to produce this summary are given below:

Nuclear weapons and Israel – Wikipedia

Fact Sheet: Israel’s Nuclear Inventory – Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

North Korea and weapons of mass destruction – Wikipedia

North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs – Congressional Research Service 

Kim Jong Un Quietly Advances North Korea’s Nuclear Program – Newsweek

Five of the nine countries shown in Figure 1 possess veto powers in the decisions of the security council that guarantee their central role in world affairs. This was not always the case:

On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly passed United Nations Resolution 2758 (XXVI) which stated that the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China. The resolution replaced the ROC with the PRC as a permanent member of the Security Council in the United Nations.

ROC refers to the Republic of China, the official name of Taiwan, and PRC refers to the People’s Republic of China, or China “proper,” which until recently (2023) had the largest global population.

As can be seen in the timing above, the UN resolution to replace ROC with PRC in the UN security council came well after 1949, the year that the PRC won control of the Chinese government. The resolution came after China acquired atomic weapons in 1964. China had some problems in the 1960s but they were mostly internal. Nuclear weapons couldn’t solve any of them. China wanted international respect and power. With the 1971 UN resolution, they got both.

Anybody who saw the recent movie “Oppenheimer” learned important aspects of the history of nuclear weapons. The development of the first atomic bomb, and its only deadly use in war setting, took place by the US during WWII via the Manhattan Project. The direct motivation was fear that Germany was already pursuing such development.

Important aspects of that fear are summarized by AI (through Google):

The fear that Nazi Germany was actively pursuing an atomic bomb was a primary motivator for the Manhattan Project. Fueled by reports of German nuclear research and the escape of scientists from Europe, including Albert Einstein, who warned President Roosevelt, the US initiated the top-secret project to develop nuclear weapons before Germany could. This fear, coupled with the potential for such a devastating weapon, drove the unprecedented mobilization of scientific and industrial resources.

• German Nuclear Research:

In 1938, German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, the process that could potentially be used to create an atomic bomb. This discovery, along with reports of ongoing German research, raised serious concerns in the United States.

• Einstein’s Warning:

In 1939, Albert Einstein, along with Leo Szilard, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, urging him to take action and begin research into nuclear weapons before Germany could.

The aftermath of WWII put the power of the US and its allies (the West) in direct competition with the Soviet Union and its allies (the East). The rest of the world was still far behind. Once the US demonstrated the impact of the nuclear bomb with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, fear took over and the Soviet Union mobilized all its resources (mainly spying) to master the technology. They were able to explode the first one in 1949. The Soviet Union became Russia in the 1990s. As the figure shows, the US and Russia keep the balance of fear between them. Western Europe still largely relies on the US nuclear umbrella to protect them from Russia. However, since many Europeans did participate in the Manhattan project, UK and France decided to develop their own capabilities. They needed more power to keep the balance with the US.

Meanwhile, once China developed its nuclear weapons and got the power and respect that those confer, India followed suit:

India’s loss to China in a brief Himalayan border war in October 1962, provided the New Delhi government impetus for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression.^[32] By 1964 India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons.^[33] Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri opposed developing nuclear weapons but fell under intense political pressure, including elements within the ruling Indian National Congress. India was also unable to obtain security guarantees from either the United States or the Soviet Union. As a result, Shastri announced that India would pursue the capability of what it called “peaceful nuclear explosions” that could be weaponized in the future.^[26]

Three years before the first test of India’s nuclear bomb, East Pakistan split from West Pakistan to form the independent country of Bangladesh. India played a key role in the process. Below is a short AI (through Google) summary of the Indian involvement in the Bangladesh Liberation War:

India played a crucial role in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, providing military, diplomatic, and humanitarian support to the Bangladeshi independence movement. This support ultimately led to the defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.

The tension between India and Pakistan continues, mainly focusing on the divided area of Kashmir and the treatment of the large Muslim minority in India (approaching 200 million or about 15% of the population). It took some time, but in 1998 Pakistan announced its own nuclear weapons, becoming the only Muslim-governed country shown in the figure to have such capability. Fear was the main motive. In the recent “12-day war,” Iranian voices could be heard saying that if Israel were to use nuclear weapons against Iran, Pakistan would retaliate. Almost at the same time as this announcement took place, Pakistan recommended that President Trump be this year’s recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The last two countries that are shown in the figure to posses nuclear weapons are Israel and North Korea. What distinguishes them from the rest of the possessors is that while their fear was existential, it came from overwhelming hostile conventional powers rather than nuclear power. Next week’s blog will focus on their road to nuclear weapons and the extension of the “holders” map to “thresholders” map (see last week’s blog) that includes Iran.

Figure 1 – Map of nuclear reactors and weapons in the Middle East (Source: DiaNuke.org)

Last week’s blog ended with the following short paragraph:

A ceasefire was declared on the day before posting. Next week’s blog will focus on some of the war consequences and on the question of whether this constitutes the beginning of the first nuclear war following the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The top figure in this blog is taken from an end-of-2017 article that shows the resurgence of nuclear power in the Middle East and asks if this resurgence is aimed at the development of nuclear weapons.

I asked AI (through Microsoft CoPilot) whether the recent Israeli-Iran war can be considered a nuclear war. Below is the answer that I got:

Despite the intense focus on nuclear facilities during the recent Israel-Iran conflict, it cannot be classified as a nuclear war—at least not in the traditional sense.

A nuclear war typically involves the use or detonation of nuclear weapons, which did not occur in this case. What did happen was a series of precision strikes by Israel and the U.S. on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, including sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. These attacks were aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear capabilities, not unleashing nuclear devastation.

Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes on Israeli cities, and while the conflict was destructive—with hundreds of casualties—it remained conventional in terms of weaponry. There was no reported nuclear fallout, and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed no increase in off-site radiation levels.

That said, some analysts are calling this a “threshold war”—a chilling new category where a nuclear-armed state (Israel) uses conventional force to prevent another state (Iran) from crossing the nuclear threshold. It’s a dangerous precedent, but still distinct from an actual nuclear exchange.

My following question was: Can I count with positive numbers only? This was the answer:

If you’re doing something like accounting, physics, or data science though, negative numbers are useful for showing things like loss, direction, or comparison. 

Israel’s nuclear capacity plays an important role in the balance of power of the Middle East. At the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli situation didn’t look good. A story is still circulating that Golda Meir, in her meetings with Henry Kissinger, threatened to retaliate with nuclear weapons. Here is what AI (through Google) “thinks” about it:

While Golda Meir and Henry Kissinger had many meetings, sources suggest that discussions about Israel’s nuclear program and the use of nuclear weapons were primarily held in a highly secretive manner, particularly between Golda Meir and President Nixon, with Kissinger being involved in the policy review and implementation.

Here’s what the search results suggest about their involvement:

• • • • 1969 Nuclear Understanding: In a private meeting with Golda Meir in September 1969, President Nixon and Meir reportedly reached a “nuclear understanding” where Israel agreed to keep its nuclear weapons under wraps, and the U.S. would not press the issue or ask further questions about it. Kissinger was involved in developing the policy options for Nixon regarding Israel’s nuclear program and recommended discussing the issue with Meir.
      • Kissinger’s Memo to Nixon: A memo from Kissinger to Nixon in July 1969 outlines the U.S. goals regarding the Israeli nuclear program, which included preventing Israel from visibly introducing nuclear weapons and getting them to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Kissinger also notes that a secret Israeli nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge of it is also dangerous due to potential international repercussions.
      • The Nixon-Meir Deal: A memo from Kissinger indicates that Nixon emphasized to Meir during their private discussion that the U.S.’s primary concern was that the Israelis make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program. This agreement was likely the basis for the U.S.’s continued silence on Israel’s nuclear program.

This AI summary is focused on 1969, during the Israeli War of Attrition, from 1967-1970, which almost immediately followed the Six Day War. The Yom Kippur War started on October 6, 1973.

About the threat of using nuclear weapons, AI (through Google) added the following:

There’s no confirmed evidence that Golda Meir ever directly threatened to use nuclear weapons. However, the concept of the “Samson Option,” a deterrence strategy involving massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a last resort, is associated with Israeli military doctrine and has been discussed in the context of Israel’s security concerns. While Meir’s government was involved in developing Israel’s nuclear capabilities, there’s no public record of her explicitly threatening to use them.

Figure 2 describes the global distribution of nuclear power plants. We can see that the sunny Middle East (grouped here with Africa) has way fewer nuclear power plants than anywhere else in the world. However, the Israel-Iran war is reminding all of us that in many countries nuclear power plants are a first step toward developing nuclear weapons.

Figure 2 – Distribution of nuclear power plants (Source: World Finance)

Table 1 shows where Iran and Israel stand in agreements and treaties regarding multilateral weapons of global mass destruction.

Table 1 – Major Multilateral Weapons of Mass Destruction Agreements and Treaties (Source: EUIdeas)

NPT – Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty

Wassenaar Arrangement – Multilateral export control regime focused on promoting transparency and responsibility in the international transfer of conventional and dual-use goods and technologies.

Future blogs will focus on the prospect that the Middle East might be the testing ground for a nuclear confrontation that not only aims to limit membership to the “nuclear club” but also experiments with actual use of the weapons.

Map of the region before and after the Six-Day War (Source: BBC)

*Note: there was a development in this matter after I wrote the post that you may know from recent news. I address it at the end of the blog.

The Israel-Iran war is entering its second week (see last week’s blog). Prospects are cloudy, not only because of the fog of war but also because of electronic contributions on both sides and the almost total inability to predict President Trump’s reactions. Even though, like many others, I have access to certain American, Israeli, and Arab (Al Jazeera) news sources, this does not improve my ability to predict future outcomes. Below is an AI summary (through Microsoft Copilot) of the latest efforts to de-escalate the conflict. There is a good chance that by the time you read this, it will be mostly obsolete:

Efforts to de-escalate the Israel-Iran conflict are underway on multiple diplomatic fronts, though the situation remains highly volatile:

• European Diplomacy: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi recently met with counterparts from the UK, France, Germany, and the EU in Geneva. These talks, which lasted twice as long as scheduled, aimed to explore a diplomatic resolution. Araghchi expressed Iran’s willingness to continue discussions, though he emphasized that Iran’s defense capabilities are non-negotiable.
• Gulf States’ Mediation: Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are actively engaging both Iran and the U.S. to prevent further escalation. Saudi and Emirati leaders have spoken directly with Iran’s President, and the UAE has also reached out to Russia, which has offered to mediate.
• United Nations Involvement: The UN Security Council convened following Israeli airstrikes on Iran, with widespread calls for de-escalation and diplomacy. The UN’s political affairs chief warned of the regional and global consequences if the conflict continues unchecked.
• S. Position: President Trump has set a two-week window to decide whether the U.S. will join Israel’s offensive. While he has floated the idea of a military strike, the U.S. has also offered Iran a deal allowing a civilian nuclear program under international oversight—an offer still on the table.

Despite these efforts, Iran has stated it will not negotiate while under attack, and Israel appears committed to continuing its military campaign. The diplomatic window is narrow, but not yet closed.

The central issue is the degree of American involvement in helping Israel to destroy critical Iranian nuclear facilities—specifically, the Fordo nuclear enrichment site—and the Iranian reactions to such involvement.

The Iranian Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which also serves as the storage site for the highly enriched uranium, is deep underground. According to publicly available information, Israel doesn’t have the weapons to destroy it. Only the US has such weapons and the means to use them.

The  June 13^th Israeli attack on Iran was triggered by applying the Begin Doctrine, which was described in last week’s blog. Essentially, it states that Israel will do everything it can to prevent its direct enemies from acquiring nuclear weapon capabilities. This implies a frightening future escalation that could involve Pakistan, which borders Iran and is the only Muslim country with known nuclear weapon capabilities. However, Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities have always been considered in the context of its conflicts with India (also a nuclear weapon-possessing country). In May, Pakistan nominated President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize based on his involvement in the two countries’ recent conflict, a move that pandered to his ego and was potentially meant to affect his approach to Israel and Iran.

As the previous examples show, one thing should be certain: the results of the Israel-Iran conflict will have a major impact on the Middle East and possibly on the rest of the world. When the future is unpredictable, we usually resort to the certainty of a relevant past. The most relevant past conflict between Israel and its strongest neighbor was the Six-Day War. The map at the top of this blog shows the direct consequence of that war on the Arab countries that surround Israel. The strongest impacts were on the Palestinian populations that resided in the territories that changed hands. One can find details of the background and the evolution of the war through the BBC link below the figure. Not surprisingly, it is a long article. A short paragraph in Wikipedia summarizes the most relevant aspects in terms of the Israeli policy at that time that initiated the Israeli attack on Egypt and Syria that started that war:

In the months prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite casus belli [act of war]. In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels. He subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel^[37] and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF personnel.^[38][30]

I participated in that war, and I don’t care to cite my experiences here. Since this blog is focused on my personal experiences that are associated with major reality changes, I have written extensively about my Holocaust experiences. One experience, directly connected with the Six-Day War was never mentioned. June 13^th refocused my memory on that event.

Starting with my first blog (April 22, 2012), I described my background and its impacts on how I view the changing reality. Others have labeled me as a “Holocaust survivor” and I identify as one. Per definition, I am a member of the last generation that carries this label. However, there is another label that fits my background, of which I am not the last generation. In fact, I share that label with my son: “pre-war baby” defined (by AI through Google) in the following way:

A “pre-war baby” generally refers to a child born or conceived before a significant war, most commonly World War II. This term is also sometimes used more broadly to describe those born before a major historical conflict. In the context of World War II, “pre-war” often refers to the period before 1945.

My son was born in Israel 10 months before the start of the Six-Day War (June 5, 1967). At that time, my wife and I were doctoral students in Israel. During the war, I was in the army and my wife shifted her doctoral research to something that could be useful in the war effort (battery development). My mother well remembered her experiences in Warsaw, a few months after my birth and during the six years that followed, and decided to try to change the scenarios. She contacted a friend from Bergen-Belsen, who at the time lived in Switzerland, and asked her permission to send my son to them. The friend agreed. My mother got permission from my wife, and my son was soon on his way. My son was accepted by the Swiss family, which has its own rich history, as a “refugee.” In few days, when the results of the war became clearer, his label changed from “refugee” to “tourist.”

I will finish this blog with excerpts from a recent Time Magazine special report on the Middle East (A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes) that will help us understand some past developments and prepare us for future developments:

It might be difficult to discern through the black clouds billowing from bomb craters in Tehran, but Iran has spent most of the 21st century as the region’s rising power.

Until recently, things had really been going its way. In Iraq, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, then departed, having turned Iran’s largest and most dangerous neighbor from an enemy to a vassal even before Tehran’s militias rescued Baghdad from ISIS, and then stayed. The forces Iran sent to Syria did double duty, rescuing the Assad regime while opening an arms pipeline to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia fighting beside them. Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah was the crown jewel in the “Axis of Resistance” that Iran had arrayed against Israel.

For the Islamic Republic of Iran, it still does. Removal of the Jewish state from “Islamic lands” is core to the ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which casts Iran in the unlikely role of leader of the Muslim world. America is the Great Satan, but for Iran’s proxies in Baghdad, Lebanon, and Yemen, Israel is the target. So on the eve of Oct. 7, 2023, the leaders of Hamas, the only prominent Palestinian node in the axis, had reason to assume that after breaching Israeli defenses on the Gaza Strip and pouring into Israel by the thousands, they would not be fighting alone for long.

But the axis of resistance barely resisted at all. Hezbollah launched a few missiles a day toward Israel when the “Zionist entity” was most vulnerable. Iran’s leaders had scanned the battlefield, and, seeing an opponent backed not only by U.S. arms and intelligence, but also a nuclear arsenal, remembered why they were investing in one of their own: survival. In the words of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, creator of the theocratic system that governs Iran, “The preservation of the system is the highest priority.” Solidarity with the Palestinians was laudable, but there’s also such a thing as self-interest.

The fact is, most of the Arab world had made some accommodation or other with Israel. Egypt and Jordan, which share borders with Israel, signed peace treaties with it after suffering repeated military defeats at its hands. The Gulf states aligned with Israel in large part out of a shared enmity for Iran. As home to Islam’s dominant Sunni branch, the kingdoms know Iran not only as radical, but as the nominal leaders of the minority Shi‘ite branch, and thus a rival. Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s holy sites, has its own claim to leadership of the world’s Muslims.

As autocratic states, the Gulf kingdoms were also eager clients for an Israeli tech sector that had grown out of its military. Surveillance, not least of millions of Palestinians under occupation (and obliged to use Israeli phone systems), generated startups like the spyware firm NSO Group, which soon found clients in the Arab regimes. One, the United Arab Emirates, was the first nation to cement diplomatic ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords, the signal diplomatic achievement of the first Trump Administration. Three other Arab states followed, and the Saudis keep signaling their intention to do the same once the situation in Gaza permits.

A day before this blog was shipped to my editor, Sonya, a major, though not unexpected development took place: the US entered the war. The key development was that the US bombarded the Fordo nuclear site (mentioned above) with bombs that only the US possesses, and this bombardment constitutes the first test of this weapon in a combat situation. Below are two independent references to these developments:

Reuters: Trump says Iran’s key nuclear sites ‘obliterated’ by US airstrikes

NYT: Trump Claims Success After Bombing Key Iran Nuclear Sites

A ceasefire was declared on the day before posting. Next week’s blog will focus some of the war consequences and on the question of whether this constitutes the beginning of the first nuclear war following the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Doomsday Clock (Source: BBC)

I finished last week’s blog with the following paragraph:

Next week’s blog will be the last attempt to connect the Holocaust experience to the present reality. It will focus on the practice in certain quarters of using the Holocaust as a shield to cover aspects of present realities.

On Thursday (June 13th), I had almost finished that blog. However, as often happens in blogs that aim to discuss changing environments, changes can take place unpredictably fast. For me such a change took place with the Israeli attack on Iran on Thursday evening (NY time). The main question that I—and most of humanity—have is, how will this war end?

The figure at the top, with the link below, is an attempt to predict a relative timeline for nuclear doomsday for humanity. A valid question to ask is: will this conflict accelerate the timeline? A short description from the same link outlines how the Doomsday Clock works:

The Doomsday Clock – which shows how symbolically close the world is to nuclear Armageddon – is to remain at 90 seconds to midnight.

Scientists have listed reasons for keeping its hands the closest they have ever been to “Doomsday” – but stopped short of nudging it further forward.

The threat of a new nuclear arms race, the Ukraine war and climate change concerns were all factors, they said.

The clock is set annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Since 2007, members have considered the impact of new man-made risks such as AI and climate change, as well as the greatest threat – nuclear war.

The last two years (2023-2024), the clock moved forward because of “War in Ukraine, Nuclear, bio, climate and AI concerns.” AI was added in 2024. How much the new Israel-Iran war can be defined as “defensive” if nuclear war is added, is unknown.

The Russian attack on Ukraine was added mainly because Russia is the only nuclear power in this war and Ukraine is doing relatively well and is being supported by most in the rich West. Russia regularly threatens to respond by starting a nuclear WWIII.

As I mentioned in previous blogs, I am a dual citizen of Israel and the US. I love Israel; I have family and friends there, but I don’t love the present government. I also don’t love the present American government. I am deeply worried. I, like most people, have no idea how the new war will end. The “official” reasoning that Israel gave for the attack was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It viewed nuclear weapons at the hands of the present Iranian government as an existential threat. It viewed diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons as failing.

By most accounts, Israel has nuclear weapons. It is not surprising that despite my dislike of both the Israeli and the American governments, I view nuclear war capabilities in the hands of the present Iranian regime as a much greater danger for instigating nuclear war than the threat posed by both the US and Israel.

Israel has a long-standing policy of taking preventive military action to stop its adversaries who have declared policies to destroy it from acquiring nuclear weapons.  This policy is referred to as the Begin Doctrine:

The Begin Doctrine is the common term for the Israeli government’s preventive strike, counter-proliferation policy regarding their potential enemies’ capability to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD), particularly nuclear weapons.

The roots of this doctrine can be tracked at least to Operation Damocles at the beginning of 1960s. Secret and diplomatic operations against the Iraqi nuclear program were started by the Yitzhak Rabin government in the mid-1970s.

The doctrine itself was enunciated by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in June 1981, following Israel’s attack on Iraq‘s nuclear reactor Osirak in Operation Opera. The doctrine remains a feature of Israeli security planning.^[1] The initial government statement on the incident stated: “On no account shall we permit an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against the people of Israel. We shall defend the citizens of Israel in good time and with all the means at our disposal.”^[2]

Two days after the attack in a dramatic press conference in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Begin took full responsibility for the operation, praised its execution as extraordinary, and justified it both on moral and legal grounds.

Other examples of the doctrine can be seen in the Israeli strikes on nuclear reactors in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007).

The Begin Doctrine was not, up to now, a major consideration in the setting of the Doomsday Clock. It remains to be seen if this will now change. The 1981 and the 2007 Israeli strike on Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear reactors were targeted strikes. There were limited opportunities for the conflicts to expand further. The Israel-Iran war is different. A paragraph from an article on the issue is cited below (NYT; Much of Iran’s Nuclear Program Remains After Israel’s Strikes. At Least for Now.):

“Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium for nine atom bombs — nine,” he said. (Other experts put the figure slightly higher, at 10, but the actual number would depend on how efficiently the Iranians prove to be at producing a warhead or a bomb.)

Mr. Netanyahu went on to discuss the danger he believed the stockpile’s existence posed: “In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before, steps to weaponize this enriched uranium.” He argued that if Iran was not stopped, it “could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time.” “It could be in a year,” he said, “it could be within a few months — it could be less than a year.”

It could have easily been yesterday. All of these estimates are based on intelligence. Good as the Israeli intelligence is, it is rarely certain. The head of the Israeli intelligence is now in the process of being replaced.

We will follow the developments and pray! 

Figure 1 – Protest in Israel calling for early elections (Source: The New York Times)

Last week’s blog was focused on the present weaponization of the term “genocide.” This blog will focus on the recent weaponization of antisemitism — specifically, the relationship of the opposition to the policies of revenge war that the government of Israel is conducting in Gaza in response to the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians.

Last week’s blog also detailed my sensitivity to these issues, so I strongly recommend reading last week’s blog before reading this one. The net result of the present atmosphere is that antisemitism now is a real threat and Jews everywhere are afraid:

Jews are Afraid Right Now!

By Sheila Katz

In one city, two are dead. In another, 12 were wounded. Two horrific attacks against the Jewish community in less than two weeks.

For over 600 days, since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, the conditions in the United States for deadly antisemitic acts have grown. At rallies and on campuses, in coalition rooms and online spaces, slogans sometimes directly drawn from Hamas’s terrorist manifesto have been chanted and painted on placards, and shouted from stages and in the streets. “Globalize the intifada.” “By any means necessary.” “From the river to the sea.” “Zionists out.” These are not simply words; they can be interpreted as calls for violence.

The call was heeded on May 21 by a shooter who took the lives of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside a Jewish event in Washington. The call was heeded on Sunday, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, by someone firebombing a peaceful Jewish march in Boulder, Colo., calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas. Several older protesters, including at least one Holocaust survivor, were left critically injured. The victims were targeted because they were at Jewish events.

To many Jews, like myself, these attacks are terrifying, but not shocking. Antisemitism is surging. When antisemitic rhetoric is left unchecked, it costs lives and leaves others fighting for theirs.

I encountered antisemitism before October 7, 2023 and I wrote about my experiences (see the December 3, 2019 and February 11, 2020 blogs).  After October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, antisemitism acquired much more complexity. This blog will focus on the Israeli connection to antisemitism. The American connection was well covered in Senator’s Schumer’s new book “Antisemitism in America: a Warning,” published this year by GCP Grand Central. I strongly recommend reading that book, irrespective of readers’ background.

The antisemitic mail that I received and described in the February 11, 2020 blog included Figure 2. I am also citing my response below:

Figure 2 – the antisemitic mail I received

Indeed, the writing at the bottom of the cartoon above talks about the suffering of the Palestinians. For me, however, the images sting much worse than the writing. They are based on old, anti-Semitic tropes and their message is clear: if the Nazis had finished their job and murdered all Jews, the Palestinian problem wouldn’t exist. That is anti-Semitism reduced to its essence.

Figure 2 was obviously triggered by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but the 2019 and 2020 blogs did not focus on that connection. This blog will.

Let me start with the definition of antisemitism. Unlike genocide, there is no specific crime of antisemitism. However, there is a widely accepted definition from the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance):

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

The same publication specifies the connection between antisemitic behavior and anti-Israel behavior:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.

What is IHRA? Here is how they describe themselves:

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is an intergovernmental organization with 35 Member Countries and 8 Observer Countries. Founded in 1998 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, we address issues related to the Holocaust and genocide of the Roma.

There is a strong tendency by many to want to free themselves from the boundaries of the IHRA definition. This is similar to the many voices that want to free themselves from the 1948 Genocide Prevention Convention’s definition of genocide and the original Lemkin definition that were described in earlier blogs. This relates to my perspective in the context of genocide: I view such efforts as a weaponization of the concept. Below is Wikipedia’s description of the weaponization of antisemitism:

The exploitation of accusations of antisemitism, especially to counter anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel, is sometimes called weaponization of antisemitism.^[1] Claims of weaponizing antisemitism have arisen in various contexts, including the Arab–Israeli conflict and debates over the concept of new antisemitism and the IHRA definition of antisemitism.^[2][3]

Charges of antisemitism made in bad faith have been described as a form of smear tactic^[4] and likened to “playing the race card“,^[5] and when used against Jews has been said to take the form of labeling as “self-hating Jews“.^[6]

The charge of weaponization has itself been criticized, with scholars of contemporary antisemitism saying it is a common rhetorical device and trope employed across the political spectrum to delegitimize concerns about antisemitism, particularly in anti-Zionist discourse on the left.^[7]

One frightening example of this weaponization has been the Trump government’s attack on faculty and students who express objections to Israel’s almost indiscriminate attacks on Gaza in response to the October 7, 2023 massacre:

Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames
By Peter Baker

President Trump’s effort to punish Harvard over antisemitism is complicated by his extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbols.

In other words, it’s hard to believe that President Trump is actually concerned about antisemitism but it’s a powerful charge to level at an institution, and therefore a useful weapon for his administration.

As I mentioned in the last blog, I am a dual citizen of Israel and the US. I grew up in Israel, I got all my formal education there, and I have many family members and friends there. I have a WhatsApp group text with Israelis that I grew up with, all around my age (86). Before October 7^th, politics was a relatively small component of our conversations there. Not anymore. The discussion is focused on objections to the present government’s war policies; almost as a single voice, the group’s opinion can be summarized as follows: “Bring back the Israelis that were kidnapped during October 7^th—both the dead and those still alive. Stop the war now, if that is the price that needs to be paid.” Some in the group have pointed out that the 60,000 casualties that the revenge on Gaza has now claimed, all have names, just like the kidnapped Israelis that are constantly being named. There have also been many voices calling on the government to stop the war because of the price that it is currently taking on Israel (both economically and politically). I have not heard many voices calling to stop the war purely because of the toll it is taking on the Palestinians. The thinking of “it’s either us or them” is common, and fits in with the genocide exchanges that were described in last week blog.

Almost all the polls in Israel are unified in finding that if an election were called now, 60% would vote to throw the current government out of power. The photo at the top of this blog is an example of the intensity of these feelings. That is the main reason that the government is doing everything it can to avoid the need for early elections.

The majority of Israelis are now against their government. In some quarters they are called “self-hating” Jews. In other quarters, the attitude is labeled as “antisemitic.” There are also those who see this as patriotic.

Next week’s blog will be the last attempt to connect the Holocaust experience to the present reality. It will focus on the practice in certain quarters of using the Holocaust as a shield to cover aspects of present realities.

Last week, I promised to discuss issues such as the required “motive” in the context of the recognized legal definition of genocide: “Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” In addition, I promised to address the fact that the 1948 Genocide Convention didn’t exclude the possibility that the perpetrators of the genocide could be part of the afflicted group. I also said I’d discuss whether or not the judges determining if the action fits the judicial constraints of genocide must be part of the afflicted group.

However, Memorial Day and birthdays intervened. For some reason or other, many birthdays in our family, including mine, are concentrated at the end of May. We drove to a celebration in Connecticut, where my wife’s niece had a party to celebrate her husband and her five-year-old son John’s birthdays. For his birthday, John got a set of Picasso magnetic tiles, shown at the top of this blog. He was using the tiles to construct impressive structures in the middle of the family’s guest room. During our stay, there was heavy traffic in the room, which resulted in an unintentional kick to the structure and its complete destruction. The result was expected: John got seriously upset. His upset lasted for about five minutes, after which he started to rebuild the structure. This dynamic repeated itself two more times (including his own destructive kick, which made him just as upset). Each rebuilding looked to be better than the previous one. I was sitting there, watching and thinking, “is John trying to send the adults a constructive message about creative destruction??”

My thinking quickly shifted to the propriety of my increasing use of the expression “self-inflicted genocide,” which I coined much earlier (2008) than my first blog (April 22, 2012), where I tried to justify my use of the term.

As I mentioned in earlier blogs, I just came back from Europe. There, I attended the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army and my own liberation, along with the with remnants of my family, by the 30^th Infantry Division of the American Army. The Holocaust has played an important role in my life, especially as a shield and a lens through which I attempt to understand the future global threats that I have outlined repeatedly in my writing and school lectures.

My initial focus was climate change but more recently, I have included other anthropogenic threats as part of this label. Throughout the blog, but particularly in early blogs, I included some reactions to the label, not all of them positive. However, over the last 600 days or so things have changed. Roughly 600 days ago (October 7, 2023) Hamas broke through the Gaza border with Israel and attacked many of the Israeli settlements,  killing 1,200 mostly civilian Israelis and kidnapping 250. There are 57 remaining hostages but nobody is sure how many of them are still alive. During the attack, the Israeli army was mostly dormant. The moment that the circumstances of the attack became clear, Israel attacked Gaza in a war that is still ongoing.

I am a dual citizen of the US and Israel. I arrived in Palestine (which was ruled British mandate at the time and became Israel in 1948) as a 6-year-old kid, a few months after my liberation. I got all my education in Israel, and I served in the Israeli army. My wife was Israeli with a similar background and my son was born in Israel. I came to the US as a postdoctoral fellow and stayed for professional and family reasons.

I don’t like what’s going on right now in Israel and I am not alone. Because of my background, until now I have not made any direct comments about the situation in Israel on this blog. However, watching John’s productive response to the repeated destruction of his creations made me think again about my frequent use of the term “genocide” to describe current global trends.

Some details about the sizes of the forces in this war might help: Hamas’ estimated numbers before October 7, 2023 were 30,000. Half of them have been killed since the October attack. There is no estimate of the new recruits. The estimated population of Gaza is more than 2 million. Palestinian deaths, estimated by the Gaza Health Ministry, come to 55,000.

The population of Israel is around 10,000,000, more than 20% of whom are Arabs. The estimated size of the Israeli army is 170,000, with 465,000 in reserve (currently on call). These numbers are misleading, however because Israel sits in the mostly-Arab-populated Middle East, in which several large Muslim countries support Hamas, whether directly (Iran – population of more than 90 million) or indirectly (Turkey – population of 85 million).  Israel is also in the middle of a strained relationship with Egypt, whose population is 115 million. It is a challenging neighborhood.

Support and condemnation of both sides have spread globally. As I mentioned in the May 21, 2025 blog, a small pro-Israeli group assembled outside the Bergen-Belsen gates during the memorial, mainly objecting to chants such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” which anybody with a sense of Middle Eastern geography understands means replacing Israel with a Palestinian State. Last week’s blog continued my focus of exploring the legal definition of genocide based on the 1948 Genocide Convention. According to that definition, such a call is a call for genocide on Israeli Jews.

Many have also labeled the original October 7th attack a genocidal attack, which stopped at 1500 Israeli victims only because of the power imbalance between Hamas and Israel. On the other hand, Israel’s extensive use of bombing to kill individual Hamas members in a dense civilian population has almost completely destroyed the piece of land that 2 million Palestinians call home and caused immense civilian casualties. This has also been labeled a genocide by many serious international voices.

In my opinion, these accusations of genocide have been weaponized. To test the accusation, I asked Google AI about its understanding of “weaponized genocide”; this is what I got:

“Weaponized genocide” is a term that describes the deliberate use of strategies and tactics, beyond direct violence, with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. This can include the manipulation of resources, systems, and societal structures to inflict harm, create conditions of life that lead to a group’s physical destruction, or systematically prevent their survival and reproduction.

AI continues with examples of the concept. This is not how I thought about the term; the AI explanation fits more with the detailed legal description of genocide. I went further and asked AI to describe what it understands  “weaponized” to mean. Below is what I got:

“Weaponized” means to adapt something, whether an object, an idea, or even an aspect of oneself, for use as a weapon or to gain a powerful advantage. It can range from physically arming something, like rockets, to using something like a characteristic to manipulate others.

This is exactly what I had in mind, with genocide being the “object and idea.”

The recent weaponization of “sacred” concepts such as genocide now extends, through different players, to Jewish hate concepts such as Antisemitism. My next blog will try to expand on this.

Back to John:

I am interested in what would happen if we were to look at John’s construction improvements following the accidental destruction, and shift our view from personal to collective response.

Getting the topic into institutional learning and research might be even harder. Substituting genocide for destruction will not work; destruction is the prerogative of the military. Most military entities now include “defense” in their title. However, one of the first things that new recruits learn is that the best defense is a good offense. Since most countries have security-first budget priorities, it is not a surprise that security-funded research that is focused on destruction is common. Many of the most threatening global destruction trends started with academic research. These include nuclear threats, AI, and climate change. This issue will be further developed in future blogs.

Back from Connecticut to NYC: we got a beautiful, end-of-spring sky, good enough for posting, and settled back into our routines. One of the first things I did to entertain myself was to watch the new movie, “Mountainhead,” on HBO Max. The movie is about four technology billionaires meeting up at a mountain-top mansion that one of them owns. I am including spoilers about the plot, so if you plan to watch it, you can skip this part. The get together is supposed to be for fun but three of them are trying to coordinate a reaction to the global chaos that the other one triggered. That character is now offering a new AI system that can differentiate between real and fake, which—in principle—could fix the world. The other three see this AI system as a threat (to their pocketbooks) and decide the best solution is to kill the fourth guy. They try and fail.  AI was one of the trends that I included in earlier blogs about what might trigger a “self-inflicted genocide.” The guy directly responsible for the chaos is shown to have a small kid. Unlike John, he is too young to do much.

For reference, Elon Musk is known to have 14 children (with 4 different wives). The youngest, Romulus, is 5 months old; the oldest, Vivian Wilson, is 20 years old. In his recent departure from the Trump administration, he had a black eye after a challenging his 5-year-old to hit him. Good luck to all of us!

Last week’s blog focused on my recent return from a trip I took with my wife to Europe to memorialize 80 years since the British army’s liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the American army’s rescue of me and the remnants of my family near Farsleben. The events made me think harder about my efforts to address the present and future global dangers that I have long referred to using the term “self-inflicted genocide(s),” and to follow up on my last examination of the topic from March 25, 2025. That blog expanded the term from my usual focus of climate change to other global threats such as AI, nuclear war, epidemics, and the chance of an asteroid hitting Earth. This blog should be read as an extension of that earlier blog.

Before returning home to the US, we stopped for two days in London to meet some friends. These friends are international lawyers. The first question that they asked me, after I described what we did in Germany, was whether my efforts to address future global threats focused on addressing future genocides of Jews, following the often-repeated line of “never again,” or whether my focus was more general. The question reminded me of some of my Jewish friends’ earlier objections to my writing that expressed reservations about my use of the term genocide based on the argument that it might have the impact of devaluing the horrors of the Holocaust.

This and next week’s blogs will attempt to extend the March 25, 2025 blog to include a closer look at the legal definition of genocide and to examine whether it still fits the extended definition described in that blog.

The March 25^th blog mentions that the only accepted legal definition of genocide remains the one defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Definition:

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. 

Key Elements:

• • Intent to Destroy: The most crucial element is the intent of the perpetrators to destroy the group, not just to harm or persecute individuals. 
  • Targeted Group: The victims are targeted because of their membership in a specific group, not because of their individual actions or characteristics. 
  • Acts of Destruction: These acts can include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The American Holocaust Museum cites that definition, but adds the following sentence:

“Although the term “genocide” is often used, its commission is rare when compared to other serious crimes that are not defined by an intent to destroy a targeted group, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes”

Recently, genocide accusations have increased significantly, focused on the following countries (Google AI):

1. Sudan:

• Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – The RSF denies these accusations.
• Janjaweed Militia: The RSF has historical ties to the Janjaweed militia, who were responsible for the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s.

2. Israel:

• Accusations of Genocide in Gaza. Israel has rejected these accusations as baseless.

3. Myanmar:

• Rohingya Genocide:  The UN and other international organizations have called for accountability for these actions.

4. China:

• Uyghur Genocide:  China denies these accusations.

5. Azerbaijan:

• Nagorno-Karabakh:  Azerbaijan denies these accusations.

Important Note: These are accusations of genocide, and determining whether genocide has occurred is a complex legal and factual matter. Accusations are often based on preliminary information and evidence, and formal legal proceedings may be necessary to establish guilt or innocence.

The American Holocaust Museum, through its Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, gives an explanation and adds a few countries to that list (Country Case Studies – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

The introduction to that list states that:

The Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide focuses on threats of large-scale, group-targeted, identity-based persecution potentially rising to the level of genocide and/or related crimes against humanity. We work on select countries where these crimes are ongoing or at serious risk, prioritizing cases that are receiving insufficient policy attention. Below is a non-exhaustive list of cases on which the Center has worked.

The added countries include Afghanistan, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mali, Rwanda, South Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Israel and Azerbaijan from the AI list are missing from the Holocaust Museum’s list.

Accusations that were proven by courts of law to be Genocides (Google AI):

Three instances in history have been recognized as genocides under the 1948 Genocide Convention: the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Srebrenica massacre. Additionally, Israel has faced accusations of genocide against Palestinians, particularly in relation to its actions during the Gaza conflict. These accusations have been formally presented to the International Court of Justice by South Africa, who requested a provisional order for a cessation of military operations in Gaza.

While the Genocide Convention’s official designations are limited, the phenomenon of killing a certain group of people based on their race or ethnicity has been studied extensively. Figure 1 is from “Genocidal Massacres in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas: Xaragua, Cholula and Toxcatl,” in The Cambridge World History of Genocide.

[They carried out]…genocidal massacre[s] targeting a specific community because of its membership of a larger group: the primary objective of the European perpetrators was to provide an object lesson for the surviving members of that group.

Figure 1 – Genocidal massacres in the Spanish conquest of the Americas (Source: The Cambridge World History of Genocide)

The 1948 Genocide Convention didn’t exclude the possibility that the perpetrators of the genocide could be part of the afflicted group. Nor did it state that the judges determining whether the action fits the judicial constrains of genocide must be part of the afflicted group. This issue and the intrinsic difficulty of proving intent, which is an important constraint in the 1948 definition, will be discussed in next week’s blog.

The origin of the term that was described in the March 25, 2025 blog has its obvious roots in the Holocaust. Being a Holocaust survivor gives me “license” to try to extend and generalize the term to include recent global threats.

The March 25^th blog describes the origin of the word genocide:

The word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin and used in the 3^rd indictment of the Nuremberg Trials. The definition used in the trial was: “Extermination of racial and religious groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particular Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others.”

As mentioned before, the issue of “motive” in the definition of genocide is complex and will be further discussed in next week’s blog. To prove it in terms of the Holocaust was no problem because the Nazis openly expressed their intention to kill all the Jews. Their wish to eradicate Jews was not unique; they expressed it in context with their wish to eradicate other groups such as Roma, Sinti, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents. Lemkin realized that and used the more general term “racial and religious groups.”

The legal definition is important because international—and sometimes national—court systems are often the last resorts to save many of us from such threats. This was discussed in terms of the present hostile governmental environment in the US and more generally in terms of the threats of climate change in the March 31, 2025 blog.

Figure 1 – The planned evacuation of some of the Bergen-Belsen prisoners to Thereisenstadt, a camp farther from the front line. The train was liberated by the American Army in Farsleben on April 13, 1945 (Source: Daily Mail)

The title of this blog is based on a publication that I wasn’t aware of until two days before my recent departure to Europe, which I described in a recent blog (April 16, 2025)

As can be seen through the link, the title of the Smithsonian Magazine piece, written by Meilan Solly, and submitted on April 10, 2025, was “How Bergen-Belsen, Where Anne Frank Died, Was Different From Every Other Nazi Concentration Camp.” The article was based on a recent exhibition in London that memorializes 80 years since the British army liberated Bergen Belsen. It started with the following paragraphs:

A new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London chronicles the German camp complex’s history, from its origins housing prisoners of war to its afterlife holding displaced persons

Surviving records of Bergen-Belsen are few and far between, as the Nazis destroyed much of the evidence documenting the camp’s operation, and the British soldiers who liberated the camp burned its barracks to control the spread of typhus. But testimony collected by the library, personal items preserved by survivors, art created by liberators and objects unearthed by archaeologists have all helped scholars piece together the camp’s story.

The central exhibit about the camp describes in some detail what the British Army found before the highly publicized bulldozing of the victims into mass graves:

“‘Traces of Belsen’ takes a fresh look at a subject that many of us think we are familiar with, because of the images of overwhelming death and suffering that were broadcast to the world in April 1945,” says the library’s director, Toby Simpson, in a statement. “The more we look at the evidence that remains, however, the more we can see that the catastrophic conditions in Belsen during the last months of the war, which so appalled the camp’s liberators and the wider world, produced shocking impressions which tend to obscure as much as they reveal.”

Today, Bergen-Belsen is best remembered as it was in April 1945, when British troops finally liberated its survivors. These soldiers found around 55,000 emaciated, severely ill prisoners left behind by the retreating Nazis, as well as thousands of rotting corpses.

“The dead and the living were all together,” said medical assistant William Arthur Wood. “They hadn’t the energy to take the dead out, and there were so many piled outside … that it was hard to see, to pick out the dead from the living.” Despite British liberators’ best efforts, nearly 14,000 of the surviving prisoners died in the weeks immediately following liberation.

At the end of my trip, I visited London for two days to meet good friends that my wife and I hadn’t seen for a long time. The two-day visit didn’t allow us to see the exhibition but after returning, I looked at the website of the Holocaust Library. My exposure to the article allowed me to open my eyes to the large British contribution to the liberation of the site that is less well known, through visits to the large encampment that the British army used for the liberated prisoners and the cemetery that was constructed for many individuals that passed away shortly after liberation.

Previous blogs throughout Climate Change Fork have mentioned Bergen-Belsen (put it in the search box) but none, as yet, mentions the context of the memorial with post-war visit. This blog focuses on the following:

• Bringing some members of my family that are second and third generation
• My contribution to the museum, based on my 2002 interview
• The small “civilized” pro-Israeli demonstration in response to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the US.
• The publicity of the story of my family liberation in Farsleben.

This time, a second cousin once removed, who is also a good friend met us in Bergen-Belsen. He is part of the “marginal” second generation (his mother was born in 1945 in Poland) and a direct cousin (the daughter of my mother’s younger brother, who was with us in the camp and on the train) and her son (see Figure 4) traveled with us to Farsleben.

Throughout the years after liberation, I sort of boycotted Germany, not traveling there unless absolutely necessary. One thing that contributed to that was that Bergen-Belsen ended up in West-Germany and Farsleben, where I was liberated by the American army, in East-Germany. With the unification of Germany (1990), held a meeting in Berlin in 2002, which was an appropriate time for me to break my “boycott.”

I used the opportunity to visit Bergen-Belsen and give a testimony. In subsequent visits, most of which are covered in previous blogs, the museum was opened, and the location was converted to a memorial site. I never saw any trace of my testimony. This changed over the last visit when a colleague of mine who was also a passenger on the Farsleben train, came and asked me a question about the testimony. I asked how she learned about it. Her answer was simple: she saw it. It turned out that the museum was structured mainly around survivor testimonies that circulate at various contact points. Visitors like us usually spend a few minutes at most of the contact points, hearing random samples. She happened to hit on mine. I followed her instructions to locate the contact point and set a timer for about 30 minutes, until my “turn” came. Figure 2 is the beginning of this testimony.

Figure 2 – The beginning of my 2002 interview

The Israel-Hamas war that started with the October 7^th massacre by Hamas on Israeli settlements near the border, resulted in 1200 mostly civilian deaths and kidnapping of around 250 Israelis. The massacre triggered an Israeli response that resulted in the destruction of a large chunk of the Gaza strip and 50,000, mostly civilian casualties. The conflict is still a center of upsets around the world and the association of the world genocide with this event will be covered in next week’s blog. The memorial in Bergen-Belsen was no exception. The site itself contains direct Israeli imprints and a small group, shown in Figure 3, was a constant reminder of the conflict. However, they stayed outside the site, and they only waved their flags against cries that called for Israeli destruction. The situation was “civilized.” To contradict that, upon our return, we attended a thank-you party that Brooklyn College of CUNY arranged to express their thanks to my wife for her long service to the school. The party was almost cancelled because of an attack by a pro-Gaza, anti-Israel group of students and faculty. They ended up needing to call the police, as was described in the NYT (Police and Brooklyn College Protesters Clash After Pro-Palestinian Rally – The New York Times).

Figure 3 – A small demonstration of a pro-Israeli group outside the camp site

The location of Farsleben, the site of my liberation by the American army, is shown in the opening map above relative to Bergen-Belsen. It is now part of Wolmirstedt, with the closest large city being Magdeburg. The three-train story of our departure from Bergen-Belsen, is detailed in the museum description of the liberation. In previous blogs, I wrote some specifics about being involved in the planning and construction of the memorial to the liberation.

Through this, I acquired many friends in that community. Frank Towers, who passed away at age 99 in 2016, had written and delivered details about the liberation. For the 80^th anniversary of the liberation, I was tasked with adding my viewpoint about the importance of the event in my own life and the role that Frank played in connecting soldiers with survivors (for a picture of the participants during one of these meetings and a 2012 photograph of Frank, see the June 11, 2019 blog). The original intention was to give the honor of the follow-up to his daughter but she couldn’t make it because of an injury, so I was selected to replace her. I delivered my lines from the top of the monument seen better in a previous blog (April 12, 2022).

We had full television coverage (in German) of the occasion that can be seen here.

Figure 4 was mentioned earlier and was taken near the memorial with the German side of the liberation marker. The same message in English and Hebrew are carved on the other sides.

Figure 4 – My first cousin (the daughter of my mother’s younger brother who was also rescued in Farsleben) and her son, with my wife and me, near the liberation memorial in Farsleben

The focus on the liberation and its aftermath is now in production to be a 4-part documentary film on Netflix, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5 – An early announcement of the coming Netflix documentary on the American army’s April 13, 1945 liberation of our train

The next blog will be an expansion of a previous blog (March 25, 2025) regarding the issue of self-inflicted genocide and looking into some of the differences between the Holocaust and the current usage of the genocide label.

I started the April 16^th blog with the announcement that my wife and I were leaving for three weeks to Europe mainly to memorialize 80 years of liberation in two locations in Germany. The next blog will focus on that experience. We were “grounded” in the US for the last two years mainly because of health issues (an 80 year memorial of something means that I am older and health is an issue). We decided that before the memorials we deserved to be tourists for one week. Neither my wife or I had ever been to Yugoslavia and it doesn’t exist as a single country anymore. During the years after the Yugoslav Wars, Yugoslavia was split into 8 small countries, which are shown in Figure 1 and listed in Table 1.

Figure 1 – Countries in former Yugoslavia

Table 1 – The 8 countries formed after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s
Population and GDP – Nationmaster, Tourism – AI (Through Google).

As the table shows, tourism is an important element of the economy in 2 out of the 8 countries: Croatia and Montenegro. We decided to follow the trend and were fortunate to have a Croatian travel agency, Jay-Way agency, help in designing this trip. We started in Dubrovnik, from which we traveled for a day trip to Kotor, Montenegro. From Dubrovnik we traveled by boat to the fascinating island of Hvar. We ended our “tourist” week in the second largest city in Croatia, Split. All these places are located in the southern part of Croatia on the Adriatic coast.

Figure 2 – Split, Hvar, and Dubrovnik (Source: Tripmasters)

The distance between Dubrovnik and Split is 232 km (144 miles).

The main attraction of these cities is that although they are modern urban environments, they contain “old cities,” so you can walk through two thousand years of history in one day. The additional attraction, obviously, was the beautiful Adriatic coast and the fact that almost everybody speaks fluent English. To get a sense of the history, I am summarizing below the highlights of the changes in governance there over the last 2,000 years (earlier for Split and a bit shorter for Dubrovnik). The end of April there is early summer and the water was too cold for us but the weather was very cooperative. However, the rich history was a great attraction.

History of Dubrovnik and Split (AI Through Google):

Governance of Dubrovnik:

• Ancient Period (before 614 AD):

Dubrovnik was part of the Roman Empire, specifically the Province of Dalmatia.

• Early Medieval Period (614-1205 AD):

Dubrovnik was founded by Roman refugees as Rausa and later came under the control of the Byzantine Empire.

• Venetian Influence (1205-1358 AD):

Dubrovnik acknowledged Venetian suzerainty, but retained much of its independence, becoming a powerful mercantile power.

• Republic of Ragusa (1358-1808 AD):

Dubrovnik became an independent city-republic, known as the Republic of Ragusa or Ragusa, ruling its territory along the Dalmatian coast.

• Napoleonic Period (1808-1813 AD):

Dubrovnik was conquered by Napoleon’s French Empire and annexed into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.

• Austrian Habsburg Rule (1813-1918 AD):

After Napoleon’s defeat, Dubrovnik became part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Austrian Habsburg Empire.

• Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918-1941 AD):

Following World War I, Dubrovnik was part of the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

• Yugoslavia (1941-1991 AD):

Dubrovnik was later incorporated into the Socialist Republic of Croatia within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

• Modern Croatia (1991-present):

With Croatia’s independence in 1991, Dubrovnik became part of modern Croatia.

Governance of Split:

Roman Period (3rd-7th century CE):

• Split began as the Greek colony of Aspálathos, later becoming a prominent settlement after Salona was sacked.
• It was part of the Roman province of Dalmatia.
• Following the fall of Salona, the Palace of Diocletian in Split became a fortified refuge for Roman refugees.

Byzantine Period (7th-15th century CE):

• Split became a Byzantine city.
• The city played a role in the struggle between the Byzantines, Venetians, and the Kingdom of Croatia.

Venetian Period (14th-18th century CE):

• Venice eventually gained control over Split and other Dalmatian city-states.
• Split remained a Venetian city, a fortified outpost surrounded by Ottoman territory.

Habsburg Period (18th century):

• In 1797, the city was ceded to the Habsburg monarchy after the fall of Venice to Napoleon.

Napoleonic Period (1800s):

• In 1805, Split was annexed to the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and later became part of the French Empire.

Austro-Hungarian Period (19th century):

• After Napoleon’s fall, Split came under the control of the Habsburg Empire, eventually becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Italian Period (early 20th century):

• During World War I and after, Split was briefly under Italian rule.

Yugoslav and Croatian Periods (20th-21st century):

• Split became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally the independent Republic of Croatia.

Modern Croatia (today):

• Split is the second-largest city in Croatia and a major port and tourism destination.

The rich history is visible in the buildings of the old cities. Some of the walls of the structures expose their origins. Not surprisingly, we had our mobile phones with us and we were able to follow the adventures of the Trump administration at home. He seems to be focused on destroying much of what previous administrations built. What will come after seems unclear. All of this has happened in 100 days. In Croatia, the “sticking together” took 2,000 years. We fully realize that this picture is misleading because what we saw in Croatia was only what “survived” the process. The destroyed part was unseen. Recent history is trying to “immortalize” the destruction. The breakup of Yugoslavia (in the 1990s), the results of which are shown in Table 1, was a bloody process that almost everybody we talked to regretted (we didn’t talk to Serbs). The monument to Croatian veterans, shown in Figure 3, does a great job representing the destruction that comes with every war.

Figure 3 – Monument to Croatian Veterans (Split, 2020)

If the Croatians hadn’t had the foresight to preserve the “old cities,” their economy wouldn’t have benefited from the inflow of tourists, including us.

Figure 1 –  Preparation of the World Summit on Inclusive Global Governance Plan of Action: Roadmap to 2023 (Source: Democracy without Borders)

Are we ready to change global governance to face threats that do not recognize state boundaries? The figure above shows that some people are working on it. However, the trends in many countries (led by the US) indicate growing tendencies to work against such a change.

Here is how Google AI defines the present state of global governance:

Global governance refers to the system of institutions, rules, norms, and processes that enable international cooperation on issues that transcend national borders, aiming to address collective challenges and promote shared interests.

Key Aspects of Global Governance:

• Focus on Transnational Issues:

Global governance deals with problems like climate change, pandemics, trade, human rights, and economic development that require international collaboration.

• Diverse Actors:

It involves various actors, including states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and civil society groups.

• Rules and Institutions:

Global governance relies on a framework of international law, treaties, and institutions to facilitate cooperation and resolve disputes.

• Examples of Global Governance:
  • The United Nations (UN) system, with its specialized agencies and programs.
  • The World Trade Organization (WTO).
  • The International Monetary Fund (IMF).
  • The Paris Agreement on climate change.
  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Evolving Landscape:

Global governance is not static; it adapts to new challenges and actors in the international system.

• Challenges:

Global governance faces challenges related to the rise of nationalism, the changing global power dynamics, and the need to address inequalities and injustices.

• Importance of Multilateralism:

Multilateralism, or cooperation among multiple nations, is crucial for effective global governance.

An important tool of global governance that is not mentioned above is international law. Below is how international law is described by AI:

International law is a system of rules and principles that governs the relations and conduct of sovereign states, international organizations, and individuals, encompassing areas like trade, human rights, diplomacy, and environmental preservation.

Here’s a more detailed overview:

Key Aspects of International Law:

• Scope:

International law deals with a wide range of issues, including:

• • Human Rights: Protecting fundamental rights and freedoms.
  • Trade: Regulating international commerce and economic relations.
  • Diplomacy: Establishing rules for interactions between states.
  • Environmental Preservation: Addressing global environmental challenges.
  • War Crimes: Defining and addressing violations of international law during armed conflict.
  • State Sovereignty: Recognizing the independence and authority of states.

• Sources of International Law:

  • Treaties: Agreements between states that create binding legal obligations.
  • Customary International Law: Practices followed by states that are considered legally binding.
  • General Principles of Law: Principles recognized by civilized nations.
  • Judicial Decisions and Writings of Scholars: Can be used to interpret and develop international law.

• Enforcement:

  • International law relies on a combination of mechanisms for enforcement, including:
    • International Organizations: Such as the United Nations, which can play a role in promoting and enforcing international law.
    • International Courts and Tribunals: For resolving disputes between states.
    • State Responsibility: States are responsible for upholding international law and can be held accountable for violations.

• Relationship to National Law:

  • International law and national law are distinct but interconnected.

  • National law is the law of a particular country, while international law governs relations between states.

  • States are generally obligated to comply with international law in their domestic legal systems.

In essence, the definition of international law (as described by this AI) is circular: international law can only be enforced by sovereign states, but state sovereignty is defined through international law. If we click on the Google entry of state sovereignty in the definition of international law, we get the following:

State sovereignty refers to a state’s supreme authority within its own territory, meaning it’s independent from other states and can govern itself without foreign interference. This includes the power to make its own laws, operate its own judicial system, and effectively govern itself.

Elaboration:

• Definition:

State sovereignty is the legal authority and responsibility of a state to govern its internal affairs and external relations without interference from other states. It’s a key concept in international law and political science.

• Internal vs. External:

Sovereignty encompasses both internal independence (governing its own territory) and external independence (being free from foreign control).

• Sovereign Equality:

Under international law, states are generally considered equal in their sovereignty, regardless of their size, population, or power.

• Limitations:

While sovereignty is a core principle, it’s not absolute. States can voluntarily enter into agreements that limit their sovereignty, such as international treaties or alliances.

The interesting entry here is the concept of sovereign equality. Size doesn’t matter. As I mentioned in previous blogs, this blog will be posted while I am in Europe. As part of the trip, we will visit the country of Montenegro, which used to be part of Yugoslavia. I asked AI to provide us with a “list of sovereign states smaller than Montenegro that are members of the UN”:

The following UN member states have smaller populations than Montenegro (627,859 in 2021): Monaco (36,686), San Marino (35,436), Liechtenstein (41,232), Malta (526,748), and Vatican City (764).

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

• Monaco:

With a population of 36,686 in 2021, Monaco is a city-state located in Western Europe.

• San Marino:

With a population of 35,436 in 2021, San Marino is a microstate located in Italy.

• Liechtenstein:

With a population of 41,232 in 2021, Liechtenstein is a microstate located in Western Europe.

• Malta:

With a population of 526,748 in 2021, Malta is an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea.

• Vatican City:

With a population of 764 in 2023-2024, Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by size and is located in Italy.

All these countries have the same degree of sovereignty as China (1.4 billion people), India (1.4 billion people), and the US (340 million people). Power, in terms of people, economy, and development, is a better enforcer of influence (but not by law).