Strike, Retaliate and Escalate. President Donald Trump did more than authorise an assault; he cast it as inevitable. After joint U.S.–Israeli strikes and the targeted killing of Ali Khamenei, Tehran responded in the only currency left to it: missiles and drones.
Only weeks earlier, nuclear negotiations, nudged along by Oman, were faltering in Geneva. The script was familiar. Deadlines. Red lines. Grave warnings about “consequences.” Then diplomacy’s slow grind yielded to the blunt compression of force. Negotiation assumes time. Bombs erase it.
Hovering over the wreckage is a question few officials will voice plainly: would Washington and Tel Aviv have struck if Iran already possessed a nuclear weapon?
For years, much of the Western establishment argued that preventing a nuclear-armed Iran was not merely strategic but civilisational. The fear wasn’t only proliferation; it was ideology – the prospect of a theocracy armed with the world’s most destructive weapon. Sanctions were justified. Covert sabotage was rationalised. Diplomatic pressure was sustained. All in service of prevention.
History, however, complicates clean arguments.
Since 1945, nuclear-armed states have glared at each other, threatened each other, and armed proxies against each other, but they have stopped short of full-scale conventional war against fellow nuclear powers. The Cold War came terrifyingly close, more than once. Yet Washington and Moscow never crossed that final line. Even rivals like India and Pakistan, despite crises and cross-border strikes, have avoided all-out war since both went nuclear. Mutually assured destruction – grotesque, immoral, unthinkable – imposed a kind of order.
Chilling stability. But stability nonetheless.
Had Iran possessed a credible, survivable nuclear deterrent – warheads able to withstand a first strike, delivery systems that worked, a command structure that could not be cleanly severed would coordinated attacks have seemed prudent? Or even imaginable? The risks would have been incalculable. Even “limited” strikes might have spiralled beyond control.
The uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons deter not because they are just, but because they are devastating.
The more nuclear weapons are seen as guarantors of sovereignty, the harder it becomes to persuade states to forgo them
That truth sits uneasily beside the ideals enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The prohibition on the use of force. The aspiration to shield civilians from the very devastation now unfolding across the Gulf. Law presumes restraint. Strategy often presumes worst-case scenarios. When major powers perceive existential threats or define them that way, legal norms tend to bend.
And others are watching.
The global non-proliferation regime, anchored in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, rests on a bargain. Non-nuclear states abstain. Nuclear states promise eventual disarmament and peaceful cooperation. It is a deal built on credibility. When that credibility frays, so does the arrangement.
The signal today is awkward at best, corrosive at worst. It suggests that in a world of uneven rule enforcement and sharp rivalries, nuclear capability functions as ultimate insurance. Not moral insurance. Not legal insurance. Survival insurance.
Does that mean everyone should sprint for the bomb? Of course not. A world of 20 or 30 nuclear powers would not be orderly; it would be brittle, prone to miscalculation, theft, accident, or unauthorised launch. Risks would multiply geometrically.
But perception shapes policy. If governments conclude that conventional strength, diplomacy, and international law cannot reliably prevent regime-threatening force, the incentive structure shifts. Nuclear deterrence begins to look less like ambition and more like prudence.
That is the paradox. The more nuclear weapons are seen as guarantors of sovereignty, the harder it becomes to persuade states to forgo them. The more selective the application of rules appears, the more hedging becomes rational.
There is also a moral contortion at the heart of deterrence. Nuclear weapons promise peace through the threat of annihilation. They secure populations by placing entire populations at risk. Their “success” depends on a credible willingness to inflict mass civilian death. To call that stability is to accept a deeply unsettling definition of peace.
And yet the empirical record resists dismissal. Deterrence has constrained state behaviour in ways that resolutions sometimes have not. That does not sanctify it. It underscores its effectiveness, up to a point.
The danger now is not only escalation between Iran and its adversaries. It is the lesson others may internalise. If the takeaway is that only nuclear weapons prevent decapitation strikes or externally driven regime collapse, proliferation pressures will not remain confined to one region. Once that logic takes hold, reversing it becomes exceedingly difficult.
There is, in theory, another path. Serious recommitment to arms control. Revived disarmament talks. Standards applied consistently to allies and adversaries alike. Security is defined less by permanent doomsday arsenals and more by mutual restraint.
It sounds naïve amid missile barrages. Perhaps it is. But the alternative is clearer by the day: a world in which survival depends ever more on the capacity for mass destruction.
The assault on Iran raises a question that extends beyond any single regime. It touches the architecture of global security itself. If nuclear weapons come to be seen as the only reliable deterrent against regime-threatening force, the non-proliferation project will gradually erode.
For now, the lesson many capitals appear to be absorbing is not about the force of law, or the patience of diplomacy. It is about the force of fear.