Iran n-bomb? More likely

Observer

2 days ago

Israel and the United States have dealt punishing blows to Iran's nuclear infrastructure. 'Operation Rising Lion' and 'Operation Midnight Hammer' have been portrayed as precision strikes that will stop the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme in its tracks. But whatever the bombings might have achieved tactically, they risk forfeiting strategically, as Iran is now more convinced than ever that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter future aggression and ensure the regime's survival. Iran was once brought to the negotiating table through a carefully calibrated mix of pressure and incentives. Despite its imperfections, that approach worked. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was agreed, with Iran agreeing to limit its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief and other concessions. But — at Israel's urging and despite Iran's apparent compliance — Donald Trump abandoned the JCPOA during his first term as president, destroying whatever mutual trust had been built over the course of 20 months of painstaking diplomacy.
Now, despite pursuing new nuclear negotiations with Iran, the US has joined Israel in abandoning strategic patience in favor of spasmodic force. Some argue that Iran invited the attacks by deceiving the international community, stoking regional conflicts, and enriching uranium to levels well beyond those needed for any civilian application. These are legitimate complaints.
Even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a report released just before Israel's campaign began, raised concerns about Iran's compliance with its international obligations. Indeed, an analysis of this report by the Institute for Science and International Security argued that 'Iran can convert its current stock of 60 per cent enriched uranium into 233 kg of [weapon-grade uranium] in three weeks at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), enough for 9 nuclear weapons.' That conclusion may well have lit a fire under the Trump administration.
But the IAEA also concluded that it had 'no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme' in Iran, while underscoring the urgency of reaching a nuclear deal. 'Iran,' the agency warned, 'is the only non-nuclear-weapon state in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60 per cent' — just a short technical step away from the 90 per cent purity needed for weapons-grade material.
Even so, US and Israeli decision-makers green-lit attacks on Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — facilities that are subject to IAEA safeguards and monitored under Iran's Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments. With that, they unravelled the legal and verification framework that exists precisely to prevent weaponisation.
Beyond undermining the authority of the IAEA and its inspection regime, the attacks violated the NPT's principle of peaceful nuclear use (Article IV) and breached international law, including the United Nations Charter. The US, a nuclear superpower with a record of catastrophic wars aimed at regime change, and Israel, a clandestine nuclear-armed state that refuses to sign the NPT, have thus sent an unmistakable message: only the weak follow rules, and only the strong are safe. In fact, as long as you have nuclear weapons, you can violate international law at will.
This is true not only for major powers, but also for smaller states. Pakistan, for example, nurtures cross-border terrorism and exports proxy war with impunity, threatening nuclear retaliation for anyone who crosses it. This poses a more acute threat to regional peace than Iran's hypothetical bomb, but the US remains silent.
This hypocrisy is deeply rooted. It was the US, after all, that aided and abetted Pakistan's covert pursuit of the bomb. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, successive US administrations ignored mounting evidence that Pakistan was secretly enriching uranium and building nuclear weapons – and continued funneling billions of dollars in aid to the country. The result is a fragile state armed with an 'Islamic bomb.' Today, with diplomacy derailed, inspections discredited, coercion normalised, and double standards embraced, what tools remain to convince Iran that remaining non-nuclear is wise and strategically viable? After years of debate over the value of a nuclear deterrent — with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issuing religious edicts against nuclear weapons — Iranian decision-makers are almost certain to decide that there is no other way to keep the country safe from attack.
Iran now has every incentive to exit — or at least limit — the IAEA framework and race toward nuclear breakout. Just as Saddam Hussein took his nuclear programme underground following Israel's 1981 bombing of Iraq's IAEA-monitored Osirak reactor, Iran is likely to reject transparency and oversight in favor of secrecy and ambiguity. That would not be some dramatic act of defiance, but rather a rational response to a serious — even existential — threat.
And it is not just Iran. If powerful states can bomb safeguarded nuclear facilities with impunity, why should any country put its faith in the global nonproliferation regime? Any government that wants to avoid the fate of Saddam's Iraq or Muammar el Qaddafi's Libya (or, for that matter, democratic Ukraine), will seek to acquire the bomb – or at least come close enough to keep adversaries guessing.
The only viable path to nonproliferation is and always will be diplomacy, not destruction. Military strikes might slow down a nuclear programme, but they cannot impose long-term restraint — especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. In the end, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer may be remembered not as preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear breakout, but as catalysts for it.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
By Brahma Chellaney
A Professor Emeritus of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin