By Paul Slovic*, Rose McDermott** | Analysis | May 26, 2026
The most frightening possibility in the ongoing Iran war is not simply that the United States could deepen its involvement. It is that a US president whose own decisions helped create the crisis could come to see nuclear escalation as the clearest path out of humiliation, stalemate, and existential loss.
That risk should not be dismissed as fanciful.
Early in the war, Axios reported that the Pentagon was developing options for a “final blow” against Iran that could include a massive bombing campaign, the use of ground forces, and even deep operations to open the Strait of Hormuz and possibly secure highly enriched uranium buried deeply underground. The same report said some officials believed a crushing show of force might create leverage in talks or simply give President Donald Trump something with which to declare victory. The scenario under discussion is not a narrow raid but a wider escalatory pathway in which troop exposure, political embarrassment, and the desire for a dramatic concluding act could converge. That is precisely the type of setting in which nuclear danger can grow.
Recent events underscore the urgency of this concern. In late March and early April 2026, President Trump threatened strikes against Iranian energy and nuclear infrastructure if Tehran did not accept US terms, at one point warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Later that month, he posted an AI-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle under the words “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” while again pressing Iran to “get smart soon” in negotiations.
These threats illustrate how readily catastrophic violence can be recast as justified leverage, necessary for demonstrating resolve, or framed as a moral necessity rather than as an unthinkable humanitarian disaster.
Putin in Ukraine, Trump in Iran. The parallel to an earlier analysis of Vladimir Putin, threatening to use his nuclear weapons in Ukraine, is uncomfortable but real. As we have argued in Foreign Affairs, the central question is not whether a struggling Putin is rational in some abstract sense, but how known psychological forces could shape his perception of losses, humiliation, and escape routes.
Nuclear escalation becomes more likely when a leader feels backed into a corner, when military efforts are failing, and when the line between preserving personal power and preserving the state begins to blur.
The same pattern could arise for Trump in Iran: Nuclear escalation becomes more likely when a leader’s personal standing becomes fused with a nuclear objective—when retreat begins to look like humiliation. Trump has recently framed the Iran conflict in such absolute terms. Asked about Americans’ financial hardship amid rising prices, he said, “The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran: They can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
Yet the military picture appears far less decisive than that rhetoric suggests. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi reportedly said that much of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium may remain buried in surviving tunnels at Isfahan, despite Trump’s earlier claims that US strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. The Strait of Hormuz has become a continuing strategic and economic crisis; Iran’s missile and nuclear assets, as well as its geographic control of oil transport, remain central to its bargaining position; and US forces have already suffered casualties. In such conditions, Trump may see further escalation not as reckless, but as necessary to rescue a failing policy, protect his image of dominance, and reclaim the appearance of control and alleged victory.
This, of course, does not mean Trump will use nuclear weapons. But it shows that the pathway of nuclear escape deserves sober attention now, before events narrow choices.
Psychology of bad choices. The danger is not only deliberate evil but the ordinary psychology of bad trade-offs under stress. Research with an Iran war scenario eerily similar to the one Trump may create shows[1] that support for nuclear strikes can rise when projected US troop casualties rise. This research also shows that psychic numbing weakens sensitivity to mass suffering, that comparative framing can make one horrific option look relatively better than others and therefore more acceptable, and that punitive dispositions are associated with greater support for nuclear use. These findings identify the psychological levers that can distort our leaders’ judgments in a crisis.
In Iran, the most prominent value could quickly become not prudence but rescue: rescue of troops, rescue of prestige, rescue of bargaining leverage, and rescue of a wounded political image. Once those values dominate a decision-maker’s attention, long-term consequences can recede from view. The “prominence effect” pushes decision-makers to focus on what is immediate, emotionally vivid, and easiest to defend: winning now, ending the fight now, and avoiding further US losses now. Far harder to hold in view are the consequences that are more diffuse but far more important: civilian slaughter, regional chaos, shattered nuclear non-use norms, great-power reactions, miscalculation by adversaries, and the opening of a Pandora’s Box that cannot easily be closed.
If a conventional ground invasion or uranium-seizure mission were engaged and resulted in substantial US casualties, the pressure to “do whatever it takes” would intensify. Tactical nuclear use could then be framed—deceptively—as a lesser evil: Nuclear weapons could be perceived by US officials as a way to break Iran’s will, save American lives, avoid a prolonged quagmire, and reclaim the initiative.
The moral language writes itself: The limited strike would be called decisive, necessary, and regrettable, but still called humane compared with the alternative of using an even more powerful nuclear bomb. That is the logic of virtuous violence. Violence comes to feel not merely expedient but righteous because it is cast as protecting one’s own side, restoring order, and ending chaos. In doing so, however, it denies the humanity of those being attacked.
Psychic numbing compounds the danger. A president or advisor may remain exquisitely sensitive to the prospect of dozens or hundreds of American deaths while becoming emotionally detached from the vastly larger foreign death toll that nuclear use would inflict. In a crisis, that asymmetry can make nuclear use appear emotionally tolerable long before it becomes morally or strategically defensible.
There is another danger: self-deception.
A leader surrounded by flattering advisors, curated battlefield imagery, and claims of imminent victory can mistake visible destruction for strategic success. The problem is not only the failure to understand the adversary’s mind. It is a failure to understand the deceptions of one’s own mind. In such an environment, spectacle and domination can displace reality, making escalation feel clarifying even when it is catastrophic.
Against that backdrop, declaring victory and walking away may look unserious to hawks, but from the standpoint of nuclear risk, it is a far safer off-ramp. A political climbdown may humiliate one person, but nuclear escalation threatens an entire civilization.
The military, while bound by civilian control, can insist on similar full-spectrum analysis, surface non-nuclear alternatives, and the serious consideration of second- and third-order consequences. It can refuse to let war be reduced to a spectacle.
History offers a warning. Senior officials and members of Congress have previously expressed concern about the possibility of impulsive nuclear decisions. In 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the first congressional hearing since 1976 on presidential nuclear launch authority, amid concerns that President Trump’s temperament exposed dangerous weaknesses in a system that gives one person the sole authority to order nuclear use. Later, The New Yorker and then The Atlantic reported figures such as John Kelly, James Mattis, Joseph Dunford, and Mark Milley as trying to keep a president’s most dangerous impulses in check, including during the nuclear confrontation with North Korea. In the days following the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had spoken with General Milley about precautions to prevent an “unstable president” from initiating hostilities or ordering a nuclear strike. Whether or not those fears were warranted in specific cases, the broader lesson is clear: Institutional safeguards matter most when leadership is under stress.
The war in Iran brings an important opportunity to alert responsible military and civilian leaders to the enhanced level of nuclear risk posed by a president who exhibits many of the psychological characteristics that research based on a war with Iran demonstrates are trigger points for unwise and indefensible use of nuclear weapons to end a conflict that is posing a form of existential risk to himself and to any American military troops he may put in harm’s way. This rare confluence of research and reality is validated by historical resonance with related mass killing in warfare in Japan in 1945, and elsewhere.
The war is also a teachable moment regarding the need to reform the policies and procedures through which nuclear weapons are (mis-)managed. Among many implications, there is the need to provide education, training, guidance, and legal oversight to the president, who has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons with as little justification as his own sense of vengeance and morality.
The point is not that nuclear use is inevitable, but that a recognizable risk pattern is emerging. A war going badly, a leader averse to humiliation, looming troop losses, punitive instincts, psychic numbing, and sole authority together create danger. By the time nuclear use feels thinkable, the failure will already have occurred. The task now is to ensure that moment never arrives.
Daniel Post’s contributions to the research underlying this article are gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
[1] Slovic, P., Peterson, M., McDermott, R., Post, D. R., & Västfjäll, D. When our minds go nuclear: Rethinking nuclear strategy through the psychology of risk and decision making. Texas National Security Review. In Press. The preprint manuscript is available upon request to the authors.
*Paul Slovic is a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. He is a past President of … Read More
**Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a fellow in the American …Read More
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.