Panic spread late Sunday as a prominent conservative figure with deep ties to the Donald Trump administration warned that the president was just days away from deciding whether to use nuclear weapons in his deeply unpopular war against Iran.
That conservative figure was Tucker Carlson, formerly a staunch ally of Trump who has since broken with the president over the U.S. war against Iran. Sunday night, Carlson issued a warning that Trump, under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may be “within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran,” citing an “informed observer” and other inside connections.
“We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months,” Carlson warned in a statement published on social media that had been viewed more than 34 million times as of Monday morning.
“Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called ‘battlefield nukes’ easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it.”
“Now I can’t sleep,” reacted Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, in a social media post on X Sunday night.
Citing “close observers,” Carlson claimed that Trump was “likely” to decide “by next weekend” whether to authorize a nuclear attack, with a “cornered and desperate” Netanyahu, fresh off a rebuke from Israeli voters, aggressively pushing to escalate the U.S. war against Iran in an effort to cling to power.
“Tucker is extremely well sourced in the Trump administration and shouldn’t be ignored if this is what he’s being told,” warned journalist Ryan Grim, founder of Drop Site News.
The target of the U.S. nuclear strike allegedly under consideration would be Pickaxe Mountain, an Iranian site frequently mentioned by Trump that Israeli intelligence has claimed is being used by Tehran to restart its nuclear program.
“Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickaxe Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people,” Carlson warned. “And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed… After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.”
Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene argued that such a strike would constitute “crimes against humanity,” and geopolitical analyst Brett Erickson warned that it would “lead to global economic devastation.”
Defense journalist Tyler Rogoway, editor-in-chief of The War Zone, argued that, were Trump to authorize the use of nuclear weapons, it would be the United States’ greatest foreign policy error in history.
“If a nuclear weapon were used on Pickaxe Mountain in Iran by the US or Israel or an empty field in Ukraine by Russia etc, it doesn’t matter, it would open up Pandora’s box and would make the U.S. and the world dramatically less safe,” Rogoway warned.
“This isn’t even a question of how big of a disaster the use, in any manner, of a nuclear weapon would be. It would represent the largest foreign policy error ever by the United States if we were involved. We can only hope this claim isn’t accurate in any way.”