Pepe, in a 1 million view tweet, has recently alleged that a "very high level intel source" from Asia, but not Russia or China, has informed him that Israel's initial plan to respond to Iran was to detonate a nuclear bomb over Iran to cause an EMP which would wipe out the electronics of the whole country. They sent an F-35 with its nuclear cargo flying towards Iran, but once it left Jordanian airspace, Russia proceeded to shoot down the F-35. Now, every country involved is maintaining silence about this, and Israel's lackluster response later on was essentially them scrambling to put something together once Plan A failed.

Scott Ritter has responded:

Israel would never take such a precipitous action. Not only would it provide public acknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons capability, thereby putting Israel in open violation of existing agreements between it and the U.S., it would also put Israel in violation of the 1968 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the deployment and/or use of nuclear weapons in space and the Biden administration’s recent admonishments in this regard. Moreover, the scenario describes makes no sense in terms of the characterization of the weapons involved, both in terms of the alleged Russian-Israeli engagement, and what Israel would hope happens regarding EMP. This is, in every way shape and form nonsensical reporting.

I think if you're trying to assert that Israel wouldn't do something just because of a little minor nuisance to them like "laws", then that's a pretty weak argument. Not totally without merit, there are rational players still in the Israeli state somewhere or they'd be a few months deep into a losing war with Hezbollah by now, but a weak argument nonetheless.

A very strange and hyperreactionary Twitter user who I very occasionally check up on to see how far they've gone off the deep end in the last few months, but who is unfortunately pretty knowledgeable about military matters (story of our goddamn lives in this megathread; Twitter-popular communist military nerd when?), has given a set of stronger reasons why this didn't happen, and therefore what we would expect if Israel did indeed ever plan to attack Iran in a massive war scenario.

1. Things have a chance of failing, especially when you're talking about the F-35. It is extremely unlikely that Israel would send a single plane to launch a single bomb for a mission which, if it were to fuck up and fail in some way, may well cause the destruction of their entire nation under a rain of missiles. If Israel were to attack Iran like this, we would see multiple planes carrying multiple nukes flying at Iran to ensure that at least one of them managed to do the task.

2. This plane would need support. You would need an escort, including other planes like AWACS. You would also need to refuel. There was a US refueling plane flying in southern Iraq on that day, as the pro-Pepe people claim - but there's one there every day.

3. If you were Israel, you would want to misdirect and cause chaos in Iran and the surrounding area to distract them and thus prevent them from taking countermeasures, like disconnecting vulnerable points in an EMP blast in their underground bases (which are, conveniently, at least partially shielded from EMPs). A drone attack consisting of a few drones would not be the required chaos. If anything, it would direct Iranian attention towards the sky. A terrorist attack by "ISIS" in a few Iranian cities at once would have been more effective.

4. The US would know what Israel was doing, because Israel cannot act purely alone (it needs US refueling etc). Either it would force Israel to stand down (and thus the hypothetical nuke-laiden F-35 would never have flown at all), or the US would have decided to go along with it and help Israel by engaging Iraq and Syria and distracting Russia. This did not happen. The US also would have been able to detect a Russian plane taking off from an airbase to intercept the F-35 and would have either forced Israel to abort, or engage the Russian plane somehow.

5. An EMP is generated by detonating a high-yield (1-10 megaton) thermonuclear bomb at high altitudes (at least 60 kilometers, but as high as 500 km). For complicated reasons, the effectiveness of EMPs depends on where you are on the planet due to variability in magnetic field strength. Magnetic field strength is higher at the poles (though there's a lot of variability; there's a less intense zone over the South Atlantic and a more intense zone over Australia despite being at about the same latitude for example). Russia and the United States are therefore, coincidentally, among the two most vulnerable countries to EMPs when just talking about magnetic field strength. Iran is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum

Because of the lack of real testing into EMPs for obvious reasons, it is unknown precisely how far up or how big the bomb would have to be to cover Iran. The EMP would also decay with distance - this means that many military sites close to the borders would be less affected if you got it a little too small, thus ensuring a massive response from Iran which would destroy Israel too. Whereas if you got it a little too big, you could easily hit many other countries (in the Middle East - the supply of much of the planet's oil!) and perhaps even Russia itself, which would possibly cause Russia to respond to Israel rapidly.

6. Israel would probably deliver a nuclear payload with a Blue Sparrow missile. Assuming a 700 kg warhead capable of delivering 2 megatons, which is a reasonable guess as to the bomb size and yield you'd need to disable Iran assuming certain factors, it could just barely fit inside the missile. But no warhead of this magnitude with that relatively low weight has been reported outside of the now-discontinued Russian Topol-M. The most common nuke yield in the US arsenal is at about 500 kilotons, and the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the US is the B83, at 1.2 megatons with a weight of over 1000 kilograms. So Israel would need to have done some pretty intense nuclear science to create a warhead that is both twice as strong and half as large as the most powerful US nuke. Not impossible, but there's no reason to believe it.

Scott himself has just responded further to Pepe with about the same arguments as to why Israel couldn't perform this attack.