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Prof. Ted Postol: US–Iran War? Israel’s Fatal Gamble

Dialogue Works Highlights, hosted by Nima R. Alkhorshid | February 16, 2026

This interview with Theodore Postol, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specializing in nuclear weapons technology, missile defense, and national security policy, examines rising tensions between the U.S., Iran, and Israel. Ted Postol argues that Israel crossed from military to urban targets, opening the door to devastating retaliation. He claims Iran’s growing ballistic missile numbers and improving accuracy could bring Israeli cities to a halt, while missile defenses are overstated. The discussion expands to nuclear risks, great-power involvement, and parallels with Ukraine, warning of strategic miscalculation and dangerous escalation.

Transcript: Resistance News

Host: We are somehow concerned about a new war in West Asia between the United States and Iran, which we know would include Israel as well, and which would be devastating for all the parties involved, in my opinion.

When we look at the current situation, the United States is bringing a lot of weapons to the region. The Iranians are not like in the 12-day war; they are prepared. They know the attack is coming. Israelis are prepared. Americans are prepared. Iranians are prepared. How do you see the current situation? And how do you see a confrontation between the two parties?

Ted Postol: Well, at a political level, I must admit I am a little baffled by the whole thing. It is clear that the leader of Israel, Netanyahu, is hellbent on attacking Iran and taking Iran’s military capacity away from it. I should point out that Iran has not instigated any attacks against Israel except in retaliation to attacks made by Israel against Iran. The rhetoric in the West is not very informed, unfortunately. Basically, the situation is being driven mostly by Israel and also by the United States.

It seems—I cannot be sure, since I am not what I would call a deeply knowledgeable political observer—that things did not go well between Netanyahu and Trump in the very recent meeting that just ended. It is clear that Netanyahu wanted the Americans to go against Iran again. It may well happen, given all the weapon systems that are being moved into place. But it does appear that Trump at least did not indicate to Netanyahu that he was just going to go ahead, which again does not necessarily mean he won’t, because this man is so erratic.

The problem really is that the Israelis have really made what I consider an extraordinary strategic blunder. I will talk a little about this so your audience understands what I mean by it. This strategic blunder is basically putting the Iranians in a position where they are justified in attacking Israeli cities.

Prior to the most recent situation, the Iranians were very careful to focus their attacks on Israeli military installations. But the most recent attack by the Israelis—I don’t know why they believe they could do it, but basically an attempt to take off the head of the Iranian government and cause it to collapse—involved a large number of attacks on urban installations. What that did was make it justifiable—and it is justifiable, sad but justifiable, in terms of retaliation—for the Iranians to focus on Israeli cities.

Israel has several big cities, but only a few. It is a small country. As I will show with some of my briefing slides, as Iran’s capacity with ballistic missiles increases—and it is going to increase, and I will explain what I mean by that shortly—as Iran’s ability increases with its ballistic missiles, it is going to become more and more possible for Iran to cause catastrophic disruptions of Israeli urban areas. I mean catastrophic.

It won’t be at the level of what the Israelis have done to Gaza, but it will in some ways begin to approach that kind of damage and disruption. Societies are organized systems. When you do damage to a society, you cannot measure the full extent of the damage by saying, “We destroyed 20 percent of the buildings.” If 20 percent of those buildings are embedded in a structure where they are connected to 75 percent of the other buildings in terms of supplies, relationships, services, etc., you are crippling a society in a major way.

Iran either already has, or soon will have, the ability to do that to Israel. That is not going to be tolerable for the Israelis. I do not know what they can do about it. I guess they could retaliate with nuclear weapons against Iran, but that would be suicidal, because Iran has the capacity to build nuclear weapons and use them.

It is one thing for the Iranians not to go ahead and build nuclear weapons, as they say they are not doing, and as American intelligence seems to agree that it’s not what they’re doing. But they have the capacity. The one way to assure that a country will use nuclear weapons on you, if they have the capacity, is to use nuclear weapons on them.

So it is a dilemma. It is a deep dilemma for Iran, but it is just as deep a dilemma for Israel. Iran is a bigger country. Nuclear weapons are enormously destructive, but you have to use a significant number of them if you are going to destroy urban areas and military assets. The number of military assets and cities in Iran is tremendously larger than what exists in Israel. This is not a good mathematical relationship from the point of view of the Israelis.

They have, in effect, opened the door to a potentially very dangerous confrontation and ladder of escalation of some kind. But the biggest immediate problem is the non-nuclear threat that Iran now has and will predictably grow.

It is not just that they have it now. As the size of Iran’s ballistic missile forces grows—by size, I mean numbers—as the numbers grow and the accuracy improves, it will have increasing meaning. The Russians are now talking about helping the Iranians improve their accuracy technology in ballistic missiles. That seems to be an arrangement the Russians are working on with the Iranians, and that is going to have big significance, as I’ll show you shortly.

China could choose to do that as well, because they have advanced missile guidance and control technology. Iran is only a small step away from improving its accuracy significantly. It already has tremendous technical capabilities, but it could get a good boost from either Russia or China. The increase in accuracy does not have to be enormous.

The evidence suggests that the accuracy of most of Iran’s ballistic missiles, as measured from the 12-day war, is probably around one thousand meters—a kilometer. When you have one-kilometer accuracy, getting to 500 meters is not a gigantic step. Getting to 100 meters would be a lot, but getting to 500 meters is not a lot in terms of improvements and technology.

Iran is poised to be able to do that, especially with Russian help. As this confrontation continues over time, Iran will have more missiles, because it is clear they understand these missiles are a unique tool to threaten and stand off Israel. As the guidance and control systems improve and accuracy increases, the effectiveness of those missiles for disrupting, possibly even closing down, the function of civil society in Israel will increase dramatically.

The clock is not on Israel’s side. This strategic blunder—among many strategic blunders—has put Israel in a very bad situation that can only get worse over time, and significantly worse.

So why don’t we start with slide two? I have a couple of simple slides.

The point I made earlier is that the attack on Tehran was a gigantic strategic blunder. In slide three, the reason for it is that it crossed the line from attacks on purely military targets to attacks on cities.

If we go to slide four, all we are saying is that Israel only has a small number of cities. The combination of large numbers of ballistic missiles and improved accuracy will, over time, give Iran an extraordinary and growing strategic lever against Israel.

Two factors will increase this capability to leverage against Israeli society. The first is obvious: the number of missiles will grow. The second is less obvious: the improved accuracy of those missiles.

Slide 6 [the 5 first slides only contain text that was read out loud]

Slide six is a conceptual slide. Small problems in shutting down the rocket motor—when you are trying to place the rocket at a certain speed before the motor shuts down—create small differences in the angle at which the rocket is flying when the motor shuts down. Those small differences must be reduced if you want to increase the accuracy of the missile.

At the far end of the trajectory, errors are also introduced by the atmosphere. The missile may wobble a bit. But those kinds of errors can be reduced tremendously. The evidence suggests that the Iranians already know how to do that.

So, to significantly improve their accuracy—from about 1,000 meters to 500 meters—they mainly need to do better at shutting down the rocket motor at the right time and ensuring that the orientation of the missile at shutdown is accurate enough. They will likely get help with that from the Russians, if not from the Chinese.

 

If we look at the situation, what we know —we go to slide seven— is that we have an estimate of the accuracy of these ballistic missiles from the attack on the Nevatim Air Base during the October war in 2024. They obviously wanted to damage the base. The distribution of warheads shows what their accuracy capabilities were at that time. One of the warheads actually hit a building and probably destroyed an F-35 inside. There is a lot of discussion about that. These are probabilistic events.

The distribution shown is how you estimate the accuracy of Iran’s ballistic missiles at that time. That does not mean it cannot improve. It will improve, and that has meaning in a different situation from the one people tend to focus on.

The possibility that the accuracy of Iran’s ballistic missiles will become so high that they can selectively target aircraft and shelters and things like that is very low in the near future. The technologies involved are extremely advanced and will be very difficult to implement, even for an advanced country like Iran. These technologies are very difficult to master for ballistic missiles.

Iran’s cruise missiles, however—I’m not talking about their drones—have demonstrated tremendous accuracy. In the attack on the Saudi Arabian oil fields, we saw evidence that Iranian cruise missiles have the ability to lock on to an object of a certain shape and home toward the center of that object. I could show that evidence in another discussion. So cruise missiles are extremely accurate, but ballistic missiles are a long way from there.

To understand what kind of damage ballistic missiles could do to an urban area, we need to understand what damage an explosion might cause.

Slide eight shows the ranges at which certain levels of blast overpressure from a general-purpose bomb would occur. These are very general qualitative curves. For example, a 1,000-kilogram warhead, at about 100 meters you might get around two pounds per square inch. It could be 120 meters or 130, but approximately 100 meters. At 50 meters, you might get about five pounds per square inch. At around 15 meters, you might get over 40 pounds per square inch, which is enough to knock down a concrete and steel wall.

Let us look at slide nine to get a sense of what damage might look like.

This is an image from Gaza. We are looking through a hole in the wall of a building. That hole was probably produced by the blast wave from a roughly 500- or 1,000-kilogram bomb that landed 50 to 100 meters away. It depends on the strength of the wall, but this is the kind of damage you can expect at that distance.

At the far end of the image, you can see what a direct hit looks like on a significant structure, concrete and steel, reinforced structure. The structure slightly forward of it was damaged not by a direct hit, but by secondary shock waves, perhaps from a bomb or bombs that landed 30 or 40 meters away.

The point is that there is a lot of damage beyond the point where a bomb hits.

On the left side, we see a building where the exterior walls have largely been knocked out, while the roof and floors appear intact. That was probably done by a blast 40 or 50 meters away, and the walls just collapsed or were blown inward. That is significant damage from bombs that did not directly hit the target.

On the next slide, we see the interior of an apartment in Israel. This apartment was probably 100 to 150 meters away from a 500- to 1,000-kilogram ballistic missile explosion. At that distance—perhaps 50 to 100 meters—there is substantial general damage. The exterior window is blown out, and there is general disruption inside. If the blast had been at half that distance, the exterior wall could have been blown out.

Slide 11 shows damage from a bomb that probably landed 50 or 60 meters away. The walls were shattered, and the interiors were badly damaged. There is evidence of fires in the building, which often occur in such events. There is usually no one around to fight the fires because people are injured or evacuating, and tremendous damage results.

Now that we have a sense of what the damage looks like, let us go to slide 12.

This is a simulated missile impact diagram. In the upper left corner, there is a key explaining the circles. The outer yellow circle represents about two pounds per square inch—damage similar to the apartment we saw earlier, where there was general internal damage without the walls being knocked down.

The five-psi contour shows the range at which a bomb landing nearby would severely damage the exterior walls of a building. It might not knock them down completely, but it would cause serious structural damage.

The 40-psi contour, shown in red, represents the range at which the structure itself would likely collapse or suffer severe structural damage.

This simulation shows 100 missiles with 1,000-meter accuracy, assuming a one-ton warhead. A 500-kilogram warhead would produce similar general conclusions.

If you were firing at Tel Aviv—and we know the Iranians were—a significant number of warheads would land in the downtown area, which we know occurred. There was considerable damage in downtown Tel Aviv, although the Israelis tried to mask it all. But if you went and talked to somebody who was in downtown Tel Aviv, they’d tell you there was bomb damage all over the place, you know. Very very damaging. Real problem. The Israelis tried to downplay it, but there was certainly a lot of reaction from the Israeli population.

And in fact I believe — I conjecture, I don’t know — that a lot of the discussion about running out of missile interceptors, or interceptors not working perfectly, is just a smokescreen. The defense interceptors were not working very well to begin with. These missiles basically came in unopposed, to a first approximation. There may have been some intercepts, but the number was very low—perhaps around five percent. I would be very surprised if it is as much as one in ten. I would be very surprised if it is that high.

There is a mythology that the Israelis have been trying to promulgate, which they cannot hide from their population because the Iranians showed their population what could happen. There is a big set of lies being promulgated to the Israeli people and to other organizations—that the defenses are simply running out of interceptors, that there are minor problems with intercept rates, and similar claims. In fact, these systems have never been effective at all.

Most of what the Iranians fired came through. When you have 1,000-meter precision, many warheads will simply fall into the Mediterranean, for example. That is what happens when you have a weapon that is not very accurate. Now what happens when 100 missiles have 500-meter accuracy rather than 1,000-meter accuracy, as shown in the next slide.

Things look a lot worse. A lot worse. You can see that the downtown Tel Aviv area gets at least twice the density of impacts. That is not a good sign if you are Israeli.

This simulation is for 100 missiles. Iran does not have to restrict itself to that number. Over time, Iran will not only improve its accuracy but also increase the number of missiles it can launch.

Let us look, in the next few slides, at what a 500-missile attack with 500-meter accuracy could look like.

You see two roughly orange circles. One marks 1,000 meters of distance; the other marks 2,000 meters. A very large percentage of the warheads land within the urban built-up area of Tel Aviv.

Slide 16 is a close-up. You can see the buildings and the density of impacts, to try and understand what it means. The red circles show areas where the blast intensity would be enough to knock down the buildings or large parts of them. That would be severe damage.

The blue lines show areas where extensive general damage would occur: interior apartment walls knocked out, fires initiated in many buildings, people injured by flying debris, evacuation under chaotic conditions, and widespread fires.

The yellow lines indicate areas of more general damage—broken windows and more in streets and buildings.

This entire area is covered with general damage and severe damage. It is just one arbitrarily selected area.

Slide 17 shows what the whole city looks like, in this case with 500-meter accuracy missiles: the density of impacts is so great that it blocks out the city. Each red dot represents severe damage to concrete and steel buildings—big, strongly built structures—along with widespread secondary damage to surrounding buildings and interiors.

After an attack like this, Tel Aviv is no longer a functioning city. Haifa is no longer a functioning city. Beersheba is no longer a functioning city. These cities could be shut down completely by a few thousand ballistic missiles with 500-meter accuracy, which you can be sure that in the next let’s say five years, Iran will have. Because Israel cannot stop them from building ballistic missiles. They will have, I think, the outreach from Russia and China, you know, they’ll be plenty of materials available, made available to Iran to continue manufacturing these ballistic missiles. And the technology for improving their accuracy is well in hand, as Iran is a sophisticated country with advanced engineering capabilities. All it needs is a little help from Russia or China or both to refine these missiles to 500-meter accuracy.

So we’re talking about a very big strategic problem that the Israelis have brought upon themselves by this aggressive behavior.

So let me go to slide 21, because I made a point about lying to the Israeli people. This is a slide from 1991. I think this may have occurred in Saudi Arabia, where Patriots were used to defend Saudi Arabia.

A spectacular photograph. Most people misunderstood it. And in fact, the Raytheon Corporation took a great… Let’s just look at what it says: “When a system does everything in combat it was designed to do and more, that’s proof of performance.” This was in Aviation Week & Space Technology, and it ran two pages. Two pages. A total lie by Raytheon, the company that is still building Patriots and claiming they work when they don’t.

This time-lapse photo—let’s stop for a second and understand how it works. The camera is focused on the skyline, and the aperture is open. It does not open and close like a regular photograph; it is just open. When a Patriot interceptor is launched, it has a rocket motor that burns. The rocket motor looks like a point of light, and that point of light traces a line on the film because this is a time exposure.

You see the line in both cases disappears because the Patriot burns out. It finishes its powered flight, then flies like a bullet and maneuvers by changing its orientation in the atmosphere.

Now you see those two dots in the sky. Those two dots are the explosions of the Patriot warheads. They have nothing to do with intercepting a Scud.

We found this engagement on a video camera and analyzed it frame by frame. One Scud came in. They missed it with both explosions. If they had hit the Scud, it should have appeared as a track on the black photo. The Scud was bright enough that you should have seen it as a track. Somebody took that track and blacked it out. So this was consciously a fraudulent photo.

This is what the Israelis tell their own people. This is what American contractors tell the Saudis, the Poles, the Ukrainians, and whoever else is foolish enough to spend money on their system for anti-missile.

It is a very effective system against aircraft, I want to be clear. You do not want to fly against Patriots if you are in an airplane. But as a ballistic missile defense, it is worthless, as we know from Ukraine as well.

What we have here is an example of layers upon layers upon layers of fraud that have been foisted off on the populations of different countries, and on the American taxpayer, who has bought most of these Patriots for other countries, including Israel and Ukraine.

What we have is nothing but a fraud against the American taxpayer, the Israeli public, and the Ukrainian population.

Ukraine is a horrific situation because we, the Americans have put the Ukrainians in a position where their country has been destroyed and will continue to be destroyed if it does not negotiate with what is left of it and with the Russians.

You can still find articles in The New York Times, the paper that is supposed to be the paper of record. Just the other day there was an article —I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s so serious— about how Prosk in Donbass had just fallen. Prosk fell two or three months ago. The New York Times is now reporting it? This is a crime.

You have unbelievably courageous Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their country, for what they believe is the survival of their country, and they are dying at a tremendous rate for nothing. This can all be stopped by carrying out a realistic negotiation.

But the political administration in Ukraine—my best analogy is Hitler letting all these Germans die as the Russians closed in on Berlin when the best thing to do would have been to surrender. The war was over. Why cause all these people to die? They were even executing their own people in the streets for not fighting.

It is this kind of fascism, and it is fascism, that is contributing to the complete destruction of Ukraine. I mean complete, because all of these dying soldiers are altering the demography of Ukraine for the next 20 years. There will be an incredible dip in the birth rate. There already is. Ukraine could potentially even disappear as a culture. I do not think it will, but it could.

All these extremists—banderites, white supremacists—who think they are saving Ukrainian ethnicity are destroying it.

We have all this complexity going on in the world in front of us, and the cynical political leadership of NATO and the United States as well is resulting in extraordinary loss of life. I am beside myself when I think about the loss of life in Ukraine for no reason.

Just negotiate. Stop trying to make yourself an existential enemy of the Russians. Just live beside them and stop this unbelievable slaughter, because the Russians are going to stop it anyway. They can stop it by reaching an understanding, or they can stop it by basically completely destroying Ukraine as a viable state, which I think is what will occur, unfortunately.

Sorry to jump around, but from the point of view of a technologist like myself, who is most deeply concerned with violence in the world and its negative consequences, I look at this with despair.

This talk is simple in some sense. The diagrams took a long time to put together. I did not just make them up. I wanted to make them understandable so you could visualize what 500-meter CEP means. When you see it laid out on a map, you begin to understand what the consequences are. We are visual animals. Our ability to learn is based on visual capabilities, and abstractions come after that.

That is what I have to share on this issue.

February 18, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Video | Iran, Israel, Zionism