Bombing Iran toward the bomb

The most grotesque possibility in the war to prevent an Iranian bomb is that the war itself may manufacture the bomb.

Washington has spent years declaring that Iran must never conclude nuclear weapons are necessary for survival.

It has now furnished Tehran with the most persuasive argument for exactly that conclusion: remain non-nuclear, remain inspected, remain inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty — and get bombed anyway

There is still no verified evidence that Iran has made the political decision to build a nuclear weapon. That fact matters. The distinction between having the technical capacity to approach weaponisation and deciding to produce a bomb is not diplomatic hair-splitting. It is the entire distinction between threshold capability and proliferation.

But strategy is not theology. Doctrines change when conditions do.

Iran now confronts the nuclear question after repeated attacks on its facilities, the erosion of international inspections, direct military confrontation with the United States, and an ever more explicit Western determination to keep the country permanently vulnerable. Before inspectors lost continuity of knowledge, Iran held roughly 441 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent — not weapons-grade, but alarmingly close to the final enrichment stage.

And so preventive war has produced its own little masterpiece of absurdity: bomb the nuclear facilities, degrade the inspection regime, lose visibility over the enriched stockpile, then announce that one has improved nuclear security.

Apparently, in the new theology of non-proliferation, fewer inspectors mean greater transparency.

The political danger is worse. Iranian parliamentarians have already proposed withdrawal from the NPT. Leaving the treaty would not itself mean building a bomb. But strategically, the distinction would become almost academic.

If Iran exits the treaty, restricts inspectors and moves toward 90 percent enrichment, every adversary will assume weaponisation is imminent whether Tehran declares it or not.

And why, Iranian strategists will ask, remain inside a treaty that offers neither protection nor reciprocity?

The NPT was sold as a bargain: non-nuclear states forgo the bomb; nuclear powers move toward disarmament; peaceful nuclear technology remains legitimate under safeguards. In practice, the arrangement has often looked rather more feudal. Some states possess nuclear weapons and receive strategic deference. Others renounce them and discover that sovereignty remains conditional.

Tehran does not require a RAND report to understand the contrast. It has Libya and North Korea.

Libya abandoned its embryonic strategic programs, opened itself to inspection, sought accommodation with the West — and eight years later NATO helped destroy the Libyan state and Muammar Gaddafi ended up dead.

North Korea chose the opposite route. It left the NPT, built nuclear weapons, tested them and endured sanctions, isolation and threats. What it has not endured is an American regime-change invasion.

One may detest Pyongyang’s arsenal while possessing enough intellectual honesty to grasp the lesson. Gaddafi surrendered his deterrent and died. The Kim dynasty built one and negotiates.

International relations occasionally offers nuance. This is not one of those occasions.

The real danger, then, is not that Iran secretly wanted the bomb all along. That story is politically convenient because it transforms Western policy from a cause into a spectator.

The more unsettling possibility is that Iran’s strategic preference is changing because its strategic environment has changed.

States do not possess eternal doctrines. They possess threat perceptions.

Iran has long insisted that nuclear weapons are religiously forbidden and militarily unnecessary. But the claim that they are unnecessary presupposes that national survival can be secured without them. Destroy that assumption and eventually you destroy the doctrine built upon it.

Tehran need not even test a weapon to transform the balance. It could enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, master the remaining technical steps and establish threshold deterrence: the capacity to assemble a bomb rapidly while preserving formal ambiguity.

That would be extraordinarily dangerous. Saudi Arabia could accelerate nuclear hedging. Türkiye and Egypt would reassess their options. Israel could conclude that the final window for preventive attack was closing. Iran, fearing precisely such an attack, could accelerate further.

Thus begins the exquisite insanity of nuclear insecurity: everyone rushes toward catastrophe because everyone claims to be preventing everyone else from arriving first.

Washington should understand the contradiction.

Instead, it is in danger of transforming nuclear restraint into strategic stupidity. If treaties do not prevent attack, inspections do
not reduce hostility, sanctions survive concessions and negotiations amount to elegantly worded surrender demands, the non-proliferation regime begins teaching the most destructive lesson imaginable:

The bomb works.

That is not non-proliferation.

It is advertising.

A serious settlement remains possible: intrusive verification, enforceable enrichment limits, accounting for existing stockpiles, recognition of peaceful nuclear rights and credible guarantees against forcible regime change. None of this requires trusting Iran. Arms control exists precisely because trusting adversaries is a charming hobby but an idiotic security doctrine.

Verification is the alternative to trust.

Bombardment is the alternative to verification.

Iran would, of course, bear responsibility for any decision to build a nuclear weapon. But responsibility and causation are not synonyms.

If another major escalation convinces Tehran that only nuclear deterrence can guarantee survival, Washington will have achieved what decades of Iranian hardliners could not: it will have transformed the bomb from a forbidden weapon into a rational insurance policy.

And then the final absurdity will arrive.

The architects of escalation will point to the consequence of their own policy as proof that the policy was necessary all along.

Bomb Iran because it might seek the bomb.

Drive Iran toward the bomb.

Then declare that Iran’s movement toward the bomb vindicated the bombing.

Empire has produced many circular arguments.

Few are quite this radioactive.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.