The U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran began only hours ago, but there’s already one clear lesson for the rest of the world: If you have a nuclear weapon, you are safe from potential U.S. attack, and if you don’t have a nuclear weapon, you are vulnerable. In 2018, President Trump violated a multilateral nuclear agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran—that was working. Less than a decade later, he has decided with no sound legal or military justification to launch a barrage of military strikes with the apparent aim of toppling the Iranian regime. This is the clearest but by no means only example of a country without a nuclear weapon falling victim to illegal American military attack. The long-term consequences will likely be a large-scale increase in the number of countries that possess nuclear weapons, something that will undermine American and global security for generations to come.
Even before the United States detonated the first nuclear weapon in 1945, it sought to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, recognizing that the more countries that have these capabilities, the more threatened the U.S. and global peace and security would be. That reality led the U.S. over the past 80 years to build up a global system of alliances, treaties, and legal norms that for the most part was successful in preventing the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. There are perhaps 50 countries in the world capable technically of building nuclear weapons, but only nine possess such weapons. They are the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Indeed, more countries started nuclear weapon programs and then eventually gave them up than ever built nuclear weapons. This massive nonproliferation success story is unlikely to survive America’s attacks against Iran, and the future effort to limit proliferation is as cloudy as the true justification of Trump’s bombing of Iran, and what happens after the bombing is over.
Iran is just the latest example of a country without nuclear weapons being targeted by American military force. There are multiple examples where countries tried and failed to build nuclear weapons, such as Iraq, or else voluntarily gave up those capabilities and still fell victim to American military action, such as Libya. This contrasts with a country like North Korea, which illegally acquired nuclear weapons and has successfully avoided American coercion or military action. And while Ukraine never had operational control or possession of Soviet nuclear weapons, Ukraine’s decision in 1994 to cooperate with the West and facilitate the return of Soviet nuclear capabilities to Russia in exchange for Russian, U.S., and British security guarantees eased the way for Russia’s invasion of the nonnuclear country.
A number of global factors, including but not limited to the Trump administration’s disdain for U.S. allies and alliances in general, have fueled concern over the past several years that U.S. friends and allies—long convinced they did not need nuclear weapons of their own—may choose to go nuclear. Countries in Europe and in East Asia are openly discussing whether they need their own nuclear weapons in order to compensate for the loss of credible American security assurances.
As long as the U.S. appeared serious about wanting to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran, the global nonproliferation system stood a chance. Now that it is beyond any doubt that Trump has rejected diplomacy and seeks to forcibly eliminate the regime in Iran, the potential demand for nuclear weapons among U.S. adversaries is also likely to grow.
This is the future that the U.S. has long sought to avoid. President John F. Kennedy predicted in the 1960s that as many as 25 countries might develop nuclear weapons in the coming decades. It was that dangerous reality that led the U.S. and the Soviet Union to negotiate the nuclear nonproliferation treaty allowing peaceful nuclear technology to be shared with states that agreed to remain nonnuclear. One reason the U.S. pursued this path was that every country that builds nuclear weapons is another potential threat to the United States and its allies, every arsenal is a potential target for theft, and every leader of a nuclear weapon state has to get every nuclear weapon decision right every single time.
The U.S. military is incredibly well funded and well trained. It is more than capable of destroying any target that the American president designates for destruction. But we should not mistake tactical success for a strategic win. In attempting to eliminate the alleged regional threat that Iran poses, Trump is inviting an even greater threat to the world. For there is simply no more dangerous world than one filled with nuclear weapons. As they spread, the danger of their use will continue to increase and the demand for the U.S. and others to take military action preemptively to prevent proliferation or to attack nuclear capabilities will also continue to grow. In this future, there will be deadly escalations and miscalculations—and eventually the evisceration of the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.
