Pepe, in a 1 million view tweet, has recently alleged that a “very high level intel source” from Asia, but not Russia or China, has informed him that Israel’s initial plan to respond to Iran was to detonate a nuclear bomb over Iran to cause an EMP which would wipe out the electronics of the whole country. They sent an F-35 with its nuclear cargo flying towards Iran, but once it left Jordanian airspace, Russia proceeded to shoot down the F-35. Now, every country involved is maintaining silence about this, and Israel’s lackluster response later on was essentially them scrambling to put something together once Plan A failed.

Scott Ritter has responded:

Israel would never take such a precipitous action. Not only would it provide public acknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons capability, thereby putting Israel in open violation of existing agreements between it and the U.S., it would also put Israel in violation of the 1968 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the deployment and/or use of nuclear weapons in space and the Biden administration’s recent admonishments in this regard. Moreover, the scenario describes makes no sense in terms of the characterization of the weapons involved, both in terms of the alleged Russian-Israeli engagement, and what Israel would hope happens regarding EMP. This is, in every way shape and form nonsensical reporting.

I think if you’re trying to assert that Israel wouldn’t do something just because of a little minor nuisance to them like “laws”, then that’s a pretty weak argument. Not totally without merit, there are rational players still in the Israeli state somewhere or they’d be a few months deep into a losing war with Hezbollah by now, but a weak argument nonetheless.

A very strange and hyperreactionary Twitter user who I very occasionally check up on to see how far they’ve gone off the deep end in the last few months, but who is unfortunately pretty knowledgeable about military matters (story of our goddamn lives in this megathread; Twitter-popular communist military nerd when?), has given a set of stronger reasons why this didn’t happen, and therefore what we would expect if Israel did indeed ever plan to attack Iran in a massive war scenario.

1. Things have a chance of failing, especially when you’re talking about the F-35. It is extremely unlikely that Israel would send a single plane to launch a single bomb for a mission which, if it were to fuck up and fail in some way, may well cause the destruction of their entire nation under a rain of missiles. If Israel were to attack Iran like this, we would see multiple planes carrying multiple nukes flying at Iran to ensure that at least one of them managed to do the task.

2. This plane would need support. You would need an escort, including other planes like AWACS. You would also need to refuel. There was a US refueling plane flying in southern Iraq on that day, as the pro-Pepe people claim - but there’s one there every day.

3. If you were Israel, you would want to misdirect and cause chaos in Iran and the surrounding area to distract them and thus prevent them from taking countermeasures, like disconnecting vulnerable points in an EMP blast in their underground bases (which are, conveniently, at least partially shielded from EMPs). A drone attack consisting of a few drones would not be the required chaos. If anything, it would direct Iranian attention towards the sky. A terrorist attack by “ISIS” in a few Iranian cities at once would have been more effective.

4. The US would know what Israel was doing, because Israel cannot act purely alone (it needs US refueling etc). Either it would force Israel to stand down (and thus the hypothetical nuke-laiden F-35 would never have flown at all), or the US would have decided to go along with it and help Israel by engaging Iraq and Syria and distracting Russia. This did not happen. The US also would have been able to detect a Russian plane taking off from an airbase to intercept the F-35 and would have either forced Israel to abort, or engage the Russian plane somehow.

5. An EMP is generated by detonating a high-yield (1-10 megaton) thermonuclear bomb at high altitudes (at least 60 kilometers, but as high as 500 km). For complicated reasons, the effectiveness of EMPs depends on where you are on the planet due to variability in magnetic field strength. Magnetic field strength is higher at the poles (though there’s a lot of variability; there’s a less intense zone over the South Atlantic and a more intense zone over Australia despite being at about the same latitude for example). Russia and the United States are therefore, coincidentally, among the two most vulnerable countries to EMPs when just talking about magnetic field strength. Iran is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum

Because of the lack of real testing into EMPs for obvious reasons, it is unknown precisely how far up or how big the bomb would have to be to cover Iran. The EMP would also decay with distance - this means that many military sites close to the borders would be less affected if you got it a little too small, thus ensuring a massive response from Iran which would destroy Israel too. Whereas if you got it a little too big, you could easily hit many other countries (in the Middle East - the supply of much of the planet’s oil!) and perhaps even Russia itself, which would possibly cause Russia to respond to Israel rapidly.

6. Israel would probably deliver a nuclear payload with a Blue Sparrow missile. Assuming a 700 kg warhead capable of delivering 2 megatons, which is a reasonable guess as to the bomb size and yield you’d need to disable Iran assuming certain factors, it could just barely fit inside the missile. But no warhead of this magnitude with that relatively low weight has been reported outside of the now-discontinued Russian Topol-M. The most common nuke yield in the US arsenal is at about 500 kilotons, and the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the US is the B83, at 1.2 megatons with a weight of over 1000 kilograms. So Israel would need to have done some pretty intense nuclear science to create a warhead that is both twice as strong and half as large as the most powerful US nuke. Not impossible, but there’s no reason to believe it.

Scott himself has just responded further to Pepe with about the same arguments as to why Israel couldn’t perform this attack.

I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the American military’s misdeeds and worse, especially during the Vietnam War, but it’s time now to applaud the brilliance of the Pentagon planning staff and the operational officers who did what America assured Iran’s religious and military leadership it could do: allow Iran to respond to yet another Israeli assassination by flinging more than three hundred drones and missiles toward Israeli targets that as many as possible would be shot out of the sky before hitting ground there. It was a huge gamble, and it paid off.

The Pentagon was essentially resisting—a word I choose to use—the foreign policy of the Biden White House and NATO by secretly approaching one of Iran’s closest allies—Russia—and persuading a senior general there to reassure Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s 84-year-old supreme leader, that America had the know-how to make the strategy succeed.

Imagine it: two of the Biden administration’s most entrenched enemies—Russia and Iran—trusting and working with the Pentagon and its leadership to prevent a deadly retaliation for yet another Israeli assassination of an Iranian general and six other Iranians in Damascus.

I am not allowed to name the American senior military officers and advisers who made the unusual faux missile attack happen. But it’s important to say that President Joe Biden, whose foreign policy team was not involved in the process, accepted the high-risk plan and publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career and personal freedom depend on keeping the war in Gaza going, and the rest of the Israeli leadership not to respond to Iran. That they might launch a counterattack remains a possibility, of course, according to press reports in Israel.

“The Pentagon planning staffs were asked to come up with a military solution to a political problem,” one involved official told me. “Otherwise the Ayatollah would attack and Bibi would do ‘his thing’ in response. We had to get involved now, and not later. And so we thought about where we are and where we wanted to be. And we got to be involved now, and not later. That meant we had to control the Iranian response.”

The obvious fear was that Netanyahu’s response to a successful drone and missile attack would be, as in Gaza, overwhelming. A major Israeli retaliation could easily lead to an unwanted war in the Middle East.

The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.

The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.

Out of these conversations evolved the ingenious plan: Why not get the air forces of our allies in Europe and the Middle East to agree to work together, under American leadership, and, with Iran’s approval, take advantage of the rapid progress in anti-missile and anti-drone defenses to let the Ayatollah fire off this missiles and have his revenge, while understanding the that air forces of America, Europe, and the Middle East would track and destroy them all?

During the secret planning, the official said, America’s allies were told: “We are going to share all the information about the fired Iranian drones and missiles we collect.” There was a tough session with a senior Israeli official who was informed, the American official said, that Israel had two options: one,”win easy” and let the American coalition destroy the missiles; or two, “lose the hard way” and respond with violence to the failed attack. “If you chose the hard way,” the Israeli was told, “you’re on your own.”

Throughout the process, Pentagon leaders were assembling their plan without formally consulting President Biden or anyone in the White House. “The White House only knew that the Iranians” wanted to respond in kind to the Israelis, the official said. At that early point in the military planning, he added, “the White House had no need to know more.”

It was believed that there would never be formal approval for such a radical strategy, although Biden, to his credit, when later told that the Ayatollah had agreed to mute his revenge, publicly joined in urging the Israelis not to respond to the failed Iranian missile attack.

The drones and missiles fired off by Iran were easy targets. An American fleet of Navy attack planes were augmented by fighters from Jordan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, whose access to nearby air bases enabled them to get refueled and stay on the defense and in the air for hours. The Iranian leadership conveniently fired off its missiles and drones over a nine-hour period, adding to the success of the missile and drone hunters: the long interval gave some of the fighters a chance to refuel. Two American AWACs—specially equipped E-3 sentry planes—that had the most advanced warning and tracking systems were on station to help guide the missile-hunting aircraft to their targets. (The US Navy utilized its own versions of the AWACs: E-2 Hawkeyes). The American-led operation was a total success, with only a few weapons penetrating Israel’s borders. The only known casualty was a seven-year old Bedouin girl. She was struck and severely injured by shrapnel that fell through the roof of their home in the Negev desert, near Israel’s important Nevatim air base, where advanced aircraft are stationed that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons. It is thirty kilometers northwest of Dimona, the Israel nuclear reactor that has been churning out nuclear bombs for more than five decades.

I was told by a knowledgeable Israeli that officials at the airfield were explicitly advised, presumably by Iran, that the missiles that fell near or at the airfield were not meant for the reactor at Dimona. The Israeli military officially released photographs of the damage to the grounds at the air base.

The operation “had to have a zero scenario,” the American official told me, in terms of insuring that an Iranian ballistic missile did not escape the international armada and strike a major city in Israel. But, he added, “the guys who fly have a lot of faith and believe they can do anything with the AWACs. There was no margin of error.

“It was gutsy.”