Breaking the nuclear taboo is John Kiriakou’s account of a rationale for nuclear use that is political rather than military: that the value of a first use lies precisely in its being the first, and in what it would permit afterwards.
The proposition
Asked in Cyprus in May 2026 what he feared most, Kiriakou said he had heard two weeks earlier, from two people speaking independently of one another, that Donald Trump was “actively considering the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Iran.” The reasoning he attributes to Trump inverts the usual logic of deterrence: “not because we need to use a tactical nuclear weapon, but because he believes that nuclear weapons are the final taboo and he wants to break the taboo with a small nuke so that future presidents can feel free to use big nukes.”[1][2]
The same analysis reached him earlier in 2026 through a different channel. He relayed an analyst’s judgment that Trump “views nuclear weapons as the final taboo in warfare,” and wants to break it “so that future presidents have the ability to use nuclear weapons against our enemies” — adding that the United States remains the only country ever to have used one.[3]
Kiriakou has heard the argument made on the Israeli side as well, and in a franker form: that nuclear weapons are the final taboo, and that “part of the Israeli calculation is if they break that taboo, it’ll free up other countries to use nuclear weapons which might not be a bad thing.” His interlocutors were, by his account, adamant on the point; when he asked how using a nuclear weapon could be anything but bad, the reply turned to which states the argument was and was not meant to cover.[4]
The cabinet objection
By the version that reached Kiriakou, the proposal did not survive contact with the rest of the administration: “literally everybody in the cabinet shouted that that was the worst possible thing that any president could do in the history of the republic and he backed off.”[2]
The nuclear codes
Kiriakou reports a second, later account — heard about a week after the first — that Trump asked General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the nuclear codes, and that Caine refused to give them to him. He is careful to record the denial alongside the claim: “General Caine said that’s not true. But there were people who were in the room at the time at a lower level saying no, that was true.”[5]
He breaks off from drawing the obvious conclusion, citing his own position: “now I’m not going to say what we keep saying because I’ve applied for a pardon and I’m hoping for the best.”[5]
The assessment
Kiriakou places the episode in a broader judgment that these are “very very dangerous times right now. The most dangerous times in my lifetime” — measured against a childhood memory of 1968, the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April and Robert Kennedy in June, the demonstrations and riots against the Vietnam War, and Kent State the following year. His expectation is that the country is again approaching an explosion that everyone can see coming and no one feels able to stop, and that “worse is going to mean people are going to die.”[6][7]