America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not just bunker-busting. It was ground-breaking – an audacious departure from decades of U.S. policy on how to prevent more countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.
And as the broad international consensus to limit nuclear arms shows signs of erosion, President Donald Trump’s decision to use America’s military muscle against Iran has posed a high-stakes question.
Will it prompt Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to forswear building a nuclear weapon, given the danger that a further U.S. strike would pose to his country and his regime?
Why We Wrote This
Donald Trump is the first US president to use military force to deter a nuclear-threshold state from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Will it work, or could it backfire?
Or will he draw the opposite conclusion: that only possession of a nuclear weapon would reliably dissuade the United States – or indeed Israel – from attacking Iran again?
There is also a deeper, longer-range question facing the Trump administration, even if the ayatollah chooses option number one.
It is a question that bunker bombs cannot answer: How can the United States, along with nuclear-armed rivals Russia and China and the broader international community, head off a new nuclear arms race by using the existing, nonmilitary toolbox for keeping nukes in check?
For the major nuclear powers, that has long meant negotiated arms-control agreements, the last of which, between Washington and Moscow, will expire early next year.
For would-be nuclear powers, it has involved a mix of political persuasion, political pressure, economic sanctions and an inspection regime set up with strong U.S. leadership under the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT.
As recently declassified documents illustrate, Washington and key allies have used these tools to try to stop a number of countries from getting their hands on nuclear weapons – successfully in the case of South Korea and Taiwan, but failing in the subcontinental rivals India and Pakistan.
The focus now is on Iran, the newest and most potentially destabilizing of nuclear-threshold countries, and on the conundrum facing Ayatollah Khamenei.
The argument that he should retreat, in the wake of a U.S. attack that he could not have expected, is powerful.
For many years, American presidents of both parties have pointedly left open the possibility that Washington might use military force to prevent hostile, or rogue, regimes from going nuclear. Their refrain has been that “all options” remained on the table.
But none carried through on that threat until last month. The only country to take such preemptive action against would-be nuclear states was Israel – in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.
The sole occasion on which the U.S. seriously contemplated such a strike was in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton hoped to nip North Korea’s nuclear weapon program in the bud. In the end, he chose the political route instead, alarmed by the potential for a devastating conventional North Korean counterstrike on South Korea.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/File
Mr. Trump himself tried briefly to reopen the diplomatic route with North Korea in his first term, ultimately without success.
And it is North Korea – which has now built not one, but around 50 nuclear weapons – to which Ayatollah Khomeini’s mind may turn.
For while Iran’s supreme leader apparently remains secluded in an underground bunker, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, has been looking supremely self-confident in his immunity to outside pressure or attack – and in his increasingly important role as an ally in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Among the appointments on his calendar last week was the gala opening of North Korea’s first high-end beach resort, gearing up to welcome Russian tourists.
President Trump has repeatedly vowed to prevent Iran from following in North Korea’s nuclear footsteps, and he has been insisting that last month’s U.S. military strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Most nuclear experts, however, believe it is unlikely that the U.S. attack eliminated the program altogether. They also believe that Iran had moved at least some of its highly enriched uranium before the U.S. bombs and missiles struck.
If so, Mr. Trump will hope the Iranians themselves decide that the risk of further attacks is too high to work toward a nuclear weapon.
Even then, Mr. Trump’s challenge now will be to deploy the more familiar – and to him, more frustrating – tools of politics and diplomacy to negotiate an agreement confirming and verifying Iran’s long-term commitment to abandon the nuclear option.
Diplomacy will also be critical if the president is to achieve his wider aim of limiting nuclear weapons worldwide, beginning, he has suggested, with a tripartite agreement involving Moscow and Beijing.
In the current international climate, persuading Russia and China to join such an enterprise could prove daunting.
But the cost of failing to reinvigorate nuclear non-proliferation could be far higher, and not only because more nations in the next few years could seek to develop or acquire nuclear arms.
Nuclear weapons have been used only once – against Japan at the end of World War II. But for the first time since then, there’s a world leader who has openly raised the possibility that he might use them again – Vladimir Putin.
