Netanyahu's nuclear threat to Trump
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Netanyahu's nuclear threat to Trump is John Kiriakou's explanation for why the United States bombed Iran in 2026 after decades of refusing to.

The standing request

By Kiriakou's account, every time an Israeli prime minister visited Washington, ordinarily once or twice a year, and seven times in the last year for Benjamin Netanyahu, they asked the United States to bomb Iran. This held regardless of which prime minister and which American president, going back to the 1980s, and every president refused, saying it would be the start of a world war. George H. W. Bush went further and revoked loan guarantees for Israeli housing construction because the Israelis would not stop asking.

The threat

Kiriakou says that friends of his at the White House and in the administration all told him the same thing: Trump agreed to bomb Iran because Netanyahu threatened him, telling him that if the United States did not do it, "we're going to use nuclear weapons against Iran."

Telling the story again in Cyprus in May 2026, Kiriakou dated the standing request precisely, "Beginning in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president", and named the refusals in sequence: Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump in his first term. In that telling the nuclear threat was not new to Trump. Kiriakou says Netanyahu had made it to Obama as well, when Joe Biden was vice president, and that Obama called it: "Go ahead. Go ahead. Use them. You feel that threatened, go ahead and use them. We're not gonna stop you." He puts Netanyahu's visits at eleven trips to the United States in eighteen months before Trump finally agreed, with the same threat relayed, "I'm going to use nuclear weapons", and Trump electing to bomb, in Kiriakou's framing, "to save the Iranian people."

He notes the asymmetry that makes the threat credible: Israel has never admitted to having a nuclear programme, but analysts believe it holds between 80 and 200 warheads, and it is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, while Iran is.

Kiriakou's hedging

Kiriakou attributes the account to friends rather than to documents, and presents it as what he was told rather than as something he witnessed. He pairs it with his standing position that there was no Iranian nuclear weapons programme for the strike to destroy, two national intelligence estimates in ten years found none.

The stated reason: no conventional weapon big enough

Restating the account in October 2025, Kiriakou attributed it to Trump directly: "Donald Trump said that Benjamin Netanyahu said that if the United States didn't bomb the Iranian nuclear sites, the Israelis would use a tactical nuclear weapon, because they didn't have a conventional weapon big enough, powerful enough, to destroy a deep underground site."

His gloss on what was avoided is short: "imagine if they had used a nuclear weapon. That would change the world. The whole world would change if a nuclear weapon were to be deployed against Iran."

See also

- Benjamin Netanyahu
- 2026 Iran war
- Israeli Nuclear Program
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
- Donald Trump
