US official warns Israel could 'be destroyed' or use nuclear weapons against Iran

0:00that Israel is getting hit harder than they've ever been hit before in their history. And we're only two weeks into this. If this war continues for weeks or months, then Israel could just be destroyed in very large parts of it. And then you have to worry about Israel escalating the war by contemplating using a nuclear weapon, which would truly be catastrophic. There are many things that are deeply hypocritical about the U.S. Israeli war against Iran. One of the biggest is the issue of nuclear weapons. The U.S. and Israel claim that Iran is a threat to the world because supposedly it is developing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, there is only one country that actually has nuclear weapons in the Middle East or a better term for the region is West Asia. And you know what that country is? Israel. Now technically, this is supposedly a secret nuclear program, but everyone knows that Israel

1:01has nuclear weapons. Even the UK parliament admitted this in a research briefing. I'm reading here from the British House of Commons, quote, it is universally acknowledged that Israel has a nuclear weapons capability, which it developed outside the framework of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, NPT. Israel is estimated to have a nuclear stockpile of approximately 90 warheads, end quote. It is important to emphasize as the UK parliament admitted that Israel is violating the NPT, the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Israel is a rogue state. And back in 2010, Reuters, the very mainstream Western media outlet noted that Israel rejected a call by 189 countries, basically all of the countries on earth demanding that Israel join the NPT and this rogue state refused to do so.

2:04And there have been many calls by the international community over decades for the elimination of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, in West Asia. In 2022, there is a UN General Assembly vote on a resolution that warned of the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and called for the region to become a zone free of nuclear weapons. Of course, Israel is the only country with nuclear weapons. And the vote was five countries against the world, 152 out of the 193 UN member states voted in support of this resolution. It was the US, Israel and Canada, along with these tiny Pacific micro states, Micronesia and Palau. These countries voted against the world. And it's important to note that Iran supported this resolution. Iran does not want nuclear weapons in the region. It is not Iran that has been violating international agreements on nuclear weapons.

3:05It has been Israel with the support of the US. And this is why the important organization, the Bolitan of the Atomic Scientists, published an article in 2025 saying, the US government's hypocrisy about Israel's nuclear weapons must stop. And even atop official the World Health Organization warned this March, 2026 of the very real possibility of nuclear war, of a nuclear catastrophe. But it's not just that a US government official, who is a top advisor to Donald Trump, has come out openly and warned that Israel could potentially be destroyed in this war against Iran, given Tehran is retaliating as it's allowed to do under international law. And this US government official warned that Israel could become so desperate that it uses its nuclear weapons against Iran. Again, this is a Trump advisor. It's not just my personal opinion.

4:07This was said by David Sachs, who is officially the White House AI and cryptozar. This is a very powerful billionaire oligarch from Silicon Valley, who helps Trump design his policies on technology. And in addition to being a Trump advisor, David Sachs is also a co-host of the popular all-in podcast. This is run by billionaire venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, who are right wing and very pro Trump. I need to emphasize, these guys are not critical of the US government. They support Trump. And yet they published an episode of their podcast on the 14th of March, warning that Iran is doing very significant damage to Israel in this war. Listen to this very revealing clip here. You also have to, I think, consider the impacts on Israel. I mean, it's hard to know exactly how much damage Israel is taking right now. There's a social media blackout. But what you're starting to hear trickle out is that Israel is getting hit harder than

5:09they've ever been hit before in their history. And we're only two weeks into this. If this war continues for weeks or months, then Israel could just be destroyed in very large parts of it. Now, I think Israel is a harder target than the Gulf states. Their infrastructure is more hardened, also, they're further away. The Gulf states are vulnerable to drones and shoreage missiles, whereas Israel is mainly vulnerable to long-range missiles. Nonetheless, at some point, their air defenses could become exhausted if it hasn't happened already. And Israel could get seriously destroyed. And then you have to worry about Israel escalating the war by contemplating using a nuclear weapon, which would truly be catastrophic. So there's a lot of scenarios here, a lot of really frightening scenarios about where escalation could lead. So I do tend to think that this is a good time to declare victory. Now David Saks is by no means the only person who is warning about the possibility of Israel

6:10using nuclear weapons. But again, what is so important about this clip here is who this guy is. He's not just a random geopolitical analyst. This guy is a top advisor to the Trump administration. He is also an extremely influential venture capitalist from Silicon Valley. David Saks is a billionaire oligarch. In 2021, he bought a Hollywood Hills mansion for $23 million. He's part of the financial oligarchy in the United States. David Saks is also part of what Fortune magazine dubbed the PayPal Mafia. This is a small handful of right wing capitalist oligarchs from Silicon Valley, who were involved with PayPal in its early days. And it not only includes David Saks, but also the far right billionaire Peter Teal, who is a major donor to Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk, the world's richest oligarch.

7:10Moreover, David Saks has been a key part of some of the Trump administration's anti-China policies. He's a key figure in the Pax Silica initiative that was launched by the U.S. government in order to try to create a new supply chain to cut China out of the global supply chain as part of the new Cold War against China. And David Saks also supports Israel. He's not a critic of Israel. In fact, what's so funny is back in June, 2025, when the U.S. and Israel launched another war of aggression against Iran that was known as the 12 day war, David Saks was praising Trump publicly and he said, quote, President Trump has done the impossible. He eliminated Iran's nuclear threat. He negotiated an Israel Iran ceasefire. No one could do more, end quote. And then in another tweet from last June, David Saks said, quote, by large majorities,

8:13the American people don't want Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. They also don't want another forever war in the Middle East. President Trump threaded this needle perfectly, end quote. That wasn't even a year ago. And now we see that Trump has started a full on war against Iran and there is no clear way out. Meanwhile, there are more and more signs that this war is going to continue, much more than just a few days or a few weeks. The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon, which was now renamed the Department of War, is requesting an additional $200 billion in order to wage this war against Iran. Moreover, Pentagon officials told CBS News, which is now very close to the Trump administration. It was bought up by the family of the billionaire Al-Agarc Larry Ellison, who's a right wing pro-Trump billionaire Al-Agarc. And Pentagon officials told CBS News that the U.S. military is making heavy preparations

9:18for ground troops to potentially send U.S. soldiers to fight this war in Iran. And David Saks knows this war is very unpopular among the American people, especially just a few months before midterm elections in November, with oil prices skyrocketing and therefore gasoline prices going way up, which is going to fuel inflation and economic problems just a few months before an election. And this is why in that episode of his all-in podcast, David Saks said that Trump should simply declare victory. So I do tend to think that this is a good time to declare victory. Although even if Trump wanted to, I don't think he could at this point because Iran is defending itself and Iran wants to establish deterrence. It doesn't want the U.S. and Israel to bomb it every single year and kill all of its leadership, which is exactly what the U.S. and Israel have been doing.

10:20Iran needs to establish deterrence and in order to do so, it has to defend itself. And this is also why in that video clip, this top Trump advisor warned that Israel could potentially be destroyed or at least major parts of Israel could be destroyed in this war because Iran actually has the ability to defend itself, unlike the Palestinian people who do not have a formal standing army. Iran is a massive country, it has more than 90 million people and it has a very significant military and U.S. officials have admitted in a report in Semaphore that Israel is actually running low on the interceptors that it needs for its missile defense system. And this has been an intentional part of Iran's strategy. At the beginning of this war, after the U.S. and Israel launched this illegal war of aggression in violation of international law by carrying out surprise attacks on the

11:2028th of February. For the first few days, Iran was only using old cheap missiles and very low cost drones in order to deplete the interceptors used not only by Israel, but also by the Persian Gulf monarchies, which are backed by the U.S. and the U.S. is using their territory to attack Iran. So therefore, they are complicit in this war. And Bloomberg pointed out that Iran only spends on average about $20,000 to make these kamikaze drones, whereas Israel and the Gulf regimes are spending millions of dollars on each of the interceptor missiles they're using in these air defense systems to shoot down these cheap Iranian drones and old missiles. The math obviously is not going to work over a longer period of time. Furthermore, it's not just an issue of money, I mean, we know that the U.S. government spends trillions and trillions of dollars on war and prints all of this money.

12:23And because the U.S. is the issuer of the global reserve currency, the inflation due to that monetary policy is spread all around the world because the dollar is used everywhere. But regardless, the point is, this is not just an issue of money. It's also an issue of resources and industrial capacity because the U.S. military industrial complex only produces a few hundred of these interceptors every year, just a few hundred. And yet the Israeli regime and the Persian Gulf monarchies are already using up all of their interceptors. So even if the U.S. government flooded these four profit corporations in the military industrial complex with many billions of dollars more worth of contracts, which the Trump administration is currently doing, despite that, there are so many bottlenecks in the supply chain and the U.S. economy has been deindustrialized over decades. So the U.S. does not have the ability to produce enough interceptors needed for the air

13:29defense systems in Israel and the Gulf regimes. And this is why there have been reports of significant damage in Israel due to Iran's response in self-defense. The Israeli analyst, Shail Ben Ifrahim, wrote on Twitter on the 20th of March, he said, quote, Israel has been pummeled all night. My WhatsApp groups are filled with people having breakdowns. In Jerusalem, four alerts were heard in a 90 minute span. Iran has been able to increase the number of launches daily, end quote. But those are only posts on social media. The problem is the mainstream corporate media has not covered this issue because there is extreme censorship going on in Israel. The Israeli regime tightly controls the media and does not allow any media outlets or even average people to report on the damage that Iran is doing in self-defense.

14:30For instance, the Israeli left-wing media outlet, 972 magazine, which is an alternative independent media outlet, published an important article titled, our coverage is not truthful how Israel is censoring reporting on the war. Moreover, Forbes published an article titled, how posting Iran war info can get you arrested in the UAE, Israel and more. It noted that dozens of people have been arrested on charges of harming national security after they shared photos and videos pertaining to attacks from Iran. Forbes noted that 20 people were arrested in Dubai because they posted footage of the attacks and the UAE is very concerned about the damage that this war is doing to its tourism industry and its reputation, its international image as supposedly the safe country. But it's not just the UAE that's arresting people. Also Qatar and Kuwait have arrested people for social media posts and by the way, and

15:33many of these regimes, criticism of state institutions is banned. Forbes points out, these are some of the worst dictatorships on earth. They are monarchies and yet they're the closest US allies in the region, which shows that the US government does not care one bit about so-called democracy or human rights. That's all propaganda. But Forbes pointed out that in addition to the UAE Bahrain Qatar and Kuwait arresting people for posting this information online, Israel is also censoring people and Forbes admitted that multiple people in Israel have been arrested for posting information on social media about the missile impact sites. So this is why that top advisor to Donald Trump, David Sachs, who supports Israel and he supports Trump and yet even he is now warning that this war of aggression against Iran could potentially lead to the destruction of Israel.

16:36And by the way, in that same podcast episode, he also warned that this war could lead to the destruction of the Gulf regimes. And he admitted that in this war, the US and Israel bombed an Iranian desolination plant. Now what exactly is that for people who don't know? The countries in this region in West Asia have a lot of deserts and they have low supplies of fresh water. Therefore they use technology in these desolination plants or desal plants to remove the salt from salt water so people can drink it. This is the only way that life is possible in this region. Otherwise you could not have millions of people living here in these big cities. So listen to this clip here, where again, this is a top advisor to Donald Trump. And he warns that after the US and Israel bombed an Iranian desolination plant, Tehran retaliated itself defense and hit another desolination plant in the region.

17:39And if this continues to escalate, it could literally make these Persian Gulf regimes uninhabitable. It would be impossible for people to live there. The region is very dependent on desolination plants. I think something like 70% of Riyadh gets their water from desolination. I think it's something like 100 million people on the Arabian Peninsula that get their water from desol. I mean, it's basically a desert, right? And those desol plants were soft targets. You already saw there was, I think there was one desol plant and Iran that got hit and then it caused Iran again to for tat to hit a desol plant. I think it was in Kuwait. Kuwait off about that, but in any event, if you see that type of destruction continue, you could literally render the Gulf almost uninhabitable. I mean, you're not going to have enough water for 100 million people. And human beings just cannot survive very long without water. So that would be a truly catastrophic scenario and we're talking about destroying the Gulf states economically and then also from a humanitarian perspective.

18:41And even though the United States is a much more powerful country than Iran, they essentially have a dead man switch over the economic fate of the Gulf states and even potentially beyond that, you know, the habitability of some of these countries. What this demonstrates is that the US Empire is actually endangering its so-called allies in West Asia. The US Empire has two dozen military bases in almost all of the countries in the region except for Iran, of course. These bases have been surrounding Iran for decades, preparing for war on Iran. Of course, Trump is the madman who actually pulled the trigger, but US administrations have been talking about war on Iran for decades. However, we now see that Tehran has been retaliating and hitting these US military bases in the region, which it has a right to do under international law because Iran can't hit the US on the other side of the world across the Atlantic Ocean.

19:42So instead, Iran has to target US assets in the region, and this is why many of these Persian Gulf monarchies are freaking out because it's causing crises in their own countries. And the US government really doesn't care. We see how the US Empire treats its so-called allies as vassals, as cannon fodder, just as the US Empire, by the way, has treated Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a proxy war against Russia. And this is why the late imperial strategist Henry Kissinger famously quipped that, quote, it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal, end quote. And now we see that the Persian Gulf monarchies are learning this the hard way. Now with all of that said, I want to discuss one more issue before I conclude today, which is an important question people are now debating whether or not Iran will pursue nuclear weapons because previously the longtime supreme leader Ali Khamenei was very much opposed

20:50to nuclear weapons on religious and ideological grounds. If you look at his official statements from his website, you could see that he said that quote, the nuclear threat is a major concern and worry for the contemporary human being. To reduce the shadow of the nuclear threat from the life of human beings, the lives of people on earth are still threatened by nuclear weapons. Imam Khamenei as the religious and political leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has strongly and repeatedly announced that building and using nuclear weapons is a sin and therefore is banned from a religious and Islamic point of view. End quote. However, Ali Khamenei is now dead. The US and Israel killed him on the first day that they launched this war of aggression on the 28th of February and then several days later, Iran's religious authorities elected a new supreme leader who is the son of Ali Khamenei. His name is Mojtaba Khamenei and Mojtaba is seen as a more militant figure.

21:52If you only ingested Western propaganda, you'd probably be surprised to hear this, but in the context of Iranian politics, Ali Khamenei was a relatively moderate figure and he was ideologically opposed to nuclear weapons. He issued a fatwa, a religious order against nukes. This is why Iran repeatedly voted at the UN General Assembly against the existence of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, in West Asia. Now was not just a cynical vote for political reasons, Iran actually was against the existence of nuclear weapons, not only for political and diplomatic reasons, but also for religious reasons. However, as the US and Israel were threatening Iran more and more and attacking Iran in recent years, Iranian military leaders understood that this became an issue of national security. It's not enough to just have ideological principles. They wanted to actually protect the state from collapse because they knew that the US

22:56and Israel were trying to destroy the Iranian state. This is why, back in 2025, even when Ali Khamenei was still alive, there was an extraordinary intervention by Iranian military commanders who publicly actually pushed back against the Ayatollah Khamenei and said that he should revoke his religious ruling, his fatwa against nuclear weapons, and said that Iran should actually reconsider its long time opposition to nuclear weapons because it needs a nuclear deterrent to protect itself against US Israeli aggression. And now that Ali Khamenei is dead, now that the US and Israel have killed him, and now that his more militant son, Moshe Allah Khamenei, is the new supreme leader, I think it is now likely that Iran actually is going to pursue the development of nuclear weapons. In fact, you now even have people around the world suggesting that Iran should develop

23:59nuclear weapons. For instance, the Hong Kong newspaper The South China Morning Post published a very interesting article by one of its columnists titled why the world may now need an Iranian nuclear bomb. This columnist wrote that quote, to restore peace and stability in the Middle East, Israel and the US, the real destabilizers of the region, need to be countered, end quote. And if Iran has a nuclear weapon, it has a deterrence against the US like North Korea. This is precisely why the US has never attacked North Korea. So I began this analysis today pointing out that there had been many hypocrisies in the US Israeli war against Iran. But this is actually probably the biggest irony of them all. Previously Iran was not actually trying to get nuclear weapons. It was ideologically and religiously opposed to nuclear weapons, but this war has made

25:00it inevitable that if the Iranian government survives this attempt by the US and Israel to bring about state collapse, if they fail to carry out regime change, it is very likely that Iran is going to develop nuclear weapons. And that could have been prevented. We now have mountains of evidence showing that Iran was willing to negotiate. It was not secretly planning to get a nuclear weapon for all of this time. The Guardian published a very interesting article based on the experience of a British security advisor named Jonathan Powell. This report reveals that Powell attended the talks that were held between the US and Iran in Geneva in order to negotiate the nuclear issue. And this British national security advisor quote, judge the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear program was significant enough to prevent a rush to war.

26:03Powell thought progress had been made in Geneva in late February and that the deal proposed by Iran was surprising end quote. And he was not the only international observer who thought that in fact, Oman's Foreign Minister was mediating these talks between the US and Iran and Oman's Foreign Minister said that Iran wanted to make a deal. Tehran was willing to make many concessions, but the US did not care. Oman's Foreign Minister said that on the 27th of February, one day later, the US and Israel launched this war of aggression. The US did not want a peace deal with Iran. We know this because this was not the first time it happened. This has happened again and again and again. Last year in 2025, when the US launched this surprise war of aggression against Iran, it came at a time when the US again was participating in so-called negotiations with Iran.

27:09And the Wall Street Journal published an article admitting this titled, in twist, US diplomacy served as cover for Israeli surprise attack. And let's not forget that back in 2015, Iran signed the nuclear deal, not only with the US, but with other major countries. This was known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA. It was written into international law and the international atomic energy agency admitted that Iran was abiding by this agreement. Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. That is a lie spread by the US and Israel. In 2018, during his first term as US president, Trump tore up the Iran deal in violation of international law. He withdrew the US unilaterally from this international agreement and then reimposed illegal unilateral sanctions against Iran sabotaging the agreement.

28:09So it was the United States. It was Donald Trump who put us on this path that makes it very likely that Iran actually will develop nuclear weapons. That will be the outcome of this war that will be remembered by historians, you know, decades from now. They will look back and see that Iran previously was not serious about nuclear weapons. And if the Iranian government survives this war of aggression, it is very likely they will pursue nuclear weapons. Although again, there is a possibility that Israel could also use its nuclear weapons against Iran, which would be absolutely insane, but the US is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons against the population and not just once but twice in Japan. So will Israel be the second country that uses nuclear weapons in a war? This is an extremely dangerous situation we're in today and it was entirely avoidable.

29:11It was not necessary in any way. This is a war of choice launched by the US and Israel and they are quite literally threatening the entire world, the safety and security of the world, not just of the region. On that note, I'm going to conclude I am Ben Norton. I am the editor-in-chief of Geopolitical Economy Report. I want to thank everyone for joining me today. Please like and subscribe. Please share this. I will see you all next time.