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How the Iran War undermines the nuclear nonproliferation regime
Participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Countries in red or orange are non-members.When President Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018, he cracked the brittle foundation of the global nonproliferation regime based on the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This was not seen clearly at the time, so its implications could not be fully addressed. Now the ramifications are becoming clearer: The war on Iran raises doubt that the NPT can be a central pillar of international security. If not, will more countries seek nuclear weapons, including US allies or friends? And will China and Russia be emboldened to follow the US-Israeli example to forcibly try to stop them? The US and Israeli leaders who pushed withdrawal from the JCPOA, including President Trump, did not know or care much about the NPT. Israel saw the Iranian nuclear program as an ipso facto direct threat, not as something that could be managed through the treaty’s core bargains. Those bargains posited that states that already had nuclear weapons as of 1967—the United States and Russia, most importantly—would reward states that forego such weapons. The non-nuclear-weapon states would gain security, cooperation in civil nuclear energy development, and progress toward the equity of global nuclear disarmament. Iran’s relationship with the NPT has always been somewhat tortured. After the CIA helped overthrow the Mossadegh government in 1953, the Shah’s regime became the United States’ leading ally in the Persian Gulf. Iran duly signed the NPT, but the Shah also had ambitions for a big nuclear energy program that made little economic sense at the time. Then came the revolution in 1978 and the hostage crisis in 1979, followed by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980. That war lasted until 1988 and killed at least 500,000 total, with many more wounded.[1] The United States, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom helped Saddam. America assisted in targeting chemical weapons on Iranian cities.[2] It was then, according to later IAEA investigations, that Iranian leaders secretly initiated work on uranium enrichment to produce an option to make nuclear weapons if Iran ever again faced a threat of massive aggression. The US, Soviet, British, and French collusion with Iraq in the war violated the spirt of the NPT security bargain, as did Iran’s hedging pursuit of weapon capability. The covert nature of Iran’s subsequent work violated the c...
Options for the United States to Resolve the Iran Nuclear Challenge
The first step may require military options such as additional strikes on nuclear facilities to further bury the remaining stockpile, requiring extensive digging to access. The United States would be able to observe if Iran tried to retrieve the material.
Iran nuclear facility likely out of range of U.S. weapons
This satellite photo from Planet Labs PBC shows Iran's Natanz nuclear site near Natanz, Iran, on April 14, 2023. A new underground facility at the Natanz enrichment site may put centrifuges beyond the range of a massive so-called "bunker buster" bomb earlier developed by the U.S. military, according experts and satellite photos analyzed by ...
Negotiations with Iran - by Nick Anderson - Pen Strokes
Multiple arms control specialists, the International Atomic Energy Agency and nonproliferation groups have all concluded that Iran accelerated its nuclear program only after Trump abandoned the agreement. That is the maddening irony of this war. Trump is now threatening military action to stop a nuclear crisis that his own recklessness helped ...
