Abstract

Israeli-Iranian military clash of June 2025s is a seismic shift in modern warfare nuclear politics and global norms. A high-risk precision strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure started out as a special kind of high-risk military strike but has morphed into a new type of warfare that strategists are calling a “threshold war” a new category of war in which a nuclear-capable state takes open military action to prevent another from becoming nuclear-capable. Unlike Cold War deterrence this model is preemptive destabilizing and extremely dangerous to the point of being highly escalation-prone. This is not just a conventional war but an event with important implications for international nuclear nonproliferation strategic stability and the validity of preemptive doctrine.