Nuclear Proliferation Stands To Make A Comeback Now, Starting With Iran
And then maybe Sweden, or Poland, or who the hell knows
During the 1980s, New Zealand-American strategic relations took a nose dive over nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed US Navy vessels. In what they saw as an assertion of national independence, New Zealand voters chose to create a “Nuclear Free Zone” in their territorial waters. The split started in 1985 when the USS Buchanan (DDG-14) refused to declare whether it had any nuclear weapons on board.
Some years thereafter, a US Navy carrier veteran told me the following story. According to this source, the Navy was pressed to come up with a better plan in case they ever encountered another “nuclear free zone,” and came up with a cunning idea. If they just took the nuclear weapons apart, disassembling them into three sections — the warhead, the trigger, and the delivery vehicle — then they could “declare” that any nuclear-armed ship was “nuclear free.” A fossil fuel-powered destroyer or cruiser carrying a handfull of nuclear weapons might then be able to access the denied area.
Like all excellent Cold War tales that I cannot verify through historiography, I offer this story to the reader with a grain of salt. I offer it to the reader because according to Iran, they have basically done the same thing with their own nuclear program. Now that Team Joe Biden is patting themselves on the back for supposedly deescalating the crisis in the Middle East, and touting a renewed nuclear deal with Iran, Tehran stands to join the nuclear club instead, just to embarrass the Great Satan.
Ali Akbar Salehi, former chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told an Iranian state TV program on 11 February that "we have all the [pieces] of nuclear science and technology” to build a nuclear bomb. Or several of them. Or dozens of them. Or perhaps hundreds of them.
Salehi actually compared a nuclear weapons program to an automobile made of many parts that are produced separately, often in different locations. “What does a car need? It needs a chassis, it needs an engine, it needs a steering wheel, it needs a gearbox. Have you made a gearbox? I say yes. An engine? But each one is for its own purpose.”
"We have it in our hands," he added. A bit more from Voice of America:
Since 2022, Iranian officials have spoken openly about something long denied by Tehran as it enriches uranium at its closest-ever levels to weapons-grade material: The Islamic Republic is ready to build an atomic weapon at will. That includes Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who told Al Jazeera that Tehran has the ability to build nuclear weapons but does not intend to do so.
Two years ago, Tehran did not intend to assemble any nuclear weapons, even though they could. This week, in the wake of Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel with drones and missiles, “Ahmad Haghtalab, the commander of the IRGC unit responsible for safeguarding Iran’s nuclear sites, said that Israeli threats against Iran’s nuclear facilities could prompt a review and potential shift in Iran’s declared nuclear policies,” according to Al Arabiya.
Israeli threats “against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to revise and deviate from the declared nuclear policies and considerations,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Haghtalab as saying.
In other words, the “failed” or “foiled” attack on Israel with a reported 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles has been a learning experience for the regime in Tehran, which still has nuclear options waiting in the wings.
Consider the following overly-simplified math: if Tehran is capable of launching a volley of 500 missiles and drones, all tipped with nuclear warheads, and Israel mantains that impressive 98 percent intercept rate, then about ten nuclear-armed missiles or drones would still get through.
Furthermore, every dollar Iran spends in order to penetrate the screen put up by Israel, their neighbors, the US, UK, and France will typically cost $20 to counter with new defensive weaponry. This is all classic Cold War nuclear calculus, and perhaps the reader can now see the way for Iran’s revolutionary regime to ‘flip the script,’ as the kids say.
Meanwhile, Israel seems to have retaliated for the weekend attack with a demonstration attack near Isfahan. That is, the response was intended not as a real threat to the regime in Iran, but a demonstration that they can hit back at Iran’s nuclear sites, and by implication, use their not-so-secret nuclear arsenal to do it.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) was the fancy Cold War term for American and Soviet deterrence. The idea was that no one could possibly win a nuclear war, so no one would ever start a nuclear war. Nuclear proliferation always undermined the project of superpower deterrence, however, which is why the Cold War superpowers largely cooperated on nuclear nonproliferation.
I am oversimplifying the history, of course, but the point is that it was always in everybody’s interest to limit the size of the nuclear club, because if everybody had The Bomb, then somebody was bound to use it, eventually, and then the war might cascade into larger, more total destruction.
Iran is ultimately a rational actor. While the rationale in Tehran, Qom, or IRGC headquarters may be obscure to Americans, they are applying rational cognition to formulate their nuclear strategy. Furthermore, recent experience with frenetic American policy has changed the rationale, and the Biden administration clearly does not want to accept the changes.
During the Obama administration, Iran’s uranium enrichment program was a powerful bargaining tool for the regime. The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) had critics within the regime who denounced it as “capitulation” to the west. After Donald Trump abrogated the agreement, “a perpetual sense of victimization and outrage” resulting from western sanctions empowered hardliners to elect Ebrahim Raisi, “a man with close links to the Supreme Leader and the security services,” as president of the Islamic Republic, according to Ali Parchami.
As a result, Raisi’s “elevation has been accompanied by a system-wide purge of experienced technocrats,” replacing expertise with “a younger cadre of ideologues whose sole qualification appears to be personal allegiance to the current Supreme Leader.” Today, Iran’s leadership “may lack even the most basic diplomatic skills necessary to engage in realistic and constructive international negotiations.” The enrichment program has become a sacred value instead of a bargaining chip. Joe Biden cannot buy it from them at any price, now.
As good as his intentions might be in trying to revive the JCPOA and freeing up sanctioned Iranian sovereign wealth accounts, Joe Biden has catastrophically misjudged the mood of his antagonist. Worse, by bringing back Rob Malley, the Obama administration’s point man on JCPOA, to lead the resuscitation effort, Biden has invited a massive national security scandal. Malley lost his clearance under murky circumstances last year and the Biden White House has stonewalled all efforts by Republicans in Congress to find out what is going on. Malley has dubious friends with alarming ties to the regime and access to the White House as well as the Pentagon.
Once again, I am oversimplifying this bizarre story. If you want to read the details from another, more recent source, here is a good summary from John Schindler in Friday’s Washington Examiner. What matters here is that the regime actually blew this story up themselves, in their own press, and destroyed the career of their very best friend in Washington, simply to embarrass the Great Satan. They are not interested in any nuclear deals, anymore.
A nuclear weapon test in the middle of the Kavir Desert, in the middle of an election year, would render American politics radioactive. That might just be the plan, now.
The Biden State Department is talking tough. “One way or another,” Biden is determined that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.” But talk is cheap, and Biden has been consistently weak in the face of Russian nuclear threats. If Iran surged production of a hundred nuclear warheads spread around the country, announcing their new status to the world after, then what would Biden actually do about it?
Applying yet another Cold War term, Team Biden suffers from a bad case of reflexive control. They have let Kremlin deception get inside of their heads, manipulating and undermining their decision-making process. Nuclear risk-aversion has therefore enlarged the war in Ukraine; indeed, it has invited Hamas and Iran to play genocidal games while the Great Satan is distracted. If history is prologue, an Iranian nuclear breakout would result in some new sanctions, a lot of tough talk, and very little action.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have seen how the West responds to support Israel, a nuclear power, the instant they need a “no-fly zone.” Kyiv remembers how the United States and the West made empty promises to protect them from Russia when they gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1991, and how they were denied any similar response in the face of Russian invasion. If Ukraine developed their own nuclear deterrent right now, could anybody blame them?
American domestic politics have only deepened the impression that the US is an unreliable partner. This would be less problematic if not for European reliance on America’s strategic nuclear deterrent. As Phillips O’Brien says, the net effect of Team Biden and Team MAGA on American aid has been to incentivize nuclear proliferation in Europe. We can hope that this will change now that Congress has finally done its job, but hope is a terrible strategy.
France and the Royal Navy already have small strategic nuclear deterrent forces — too small compared to the Russian arsenal, though, so if they can no longer count on the American nuclear umbrella, then NATO powers will have to consider nuclear options. O’Brien suggests that air-launched cruise missiles might complement existing and future submarine-launched ballistic missile systems in European arsenals. I also see two potential additions to the nuclear club in Europe: Sweden and Poland.
As Harrison Menke recalls in the Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture, Sweden had a secret nuclear program in 1950, an initiative of the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) that grew too expensive to conceal. “Sweden planned on around 100 tactical nuclear weapons fixed to torpedoes, missiles, and nuclear-capable aircraft to complement conventional operations in destroying points of embarkation to deny an amphibious invasion,” Menke writes. Russia was of course “at the core of Sweden’s security precautions” at that time, as Muscovy has been since the 17th century.
The SDP abandoned nuclear weapon development because they assumed any Russian invasion would be part of a much broader conflict, and that NATO would naturally defend Sweden. With Donald Trump providing early warning signs that America might not be a reliable responder, Sweden chose to formalize this strategic relationship with the alliance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Until then, Sweden preferred unspoken agreements with strategic defense partners.
That strategic habit of unspoken agreements is also why Sweden has chosen not to sign the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons. If the consensus of European states on nuclear security changes, Sweden already has civilian nuclear reactors to jump-start a crash weapons program. It would be a relatively simple task to put nukes on Grypen jets. This is why I consider Sweden the most likely European state to achieve nuclear breakout.
Less likely is Poland, perhaps acting in cooperation with Sweden or the Baltic states that live on Russia’s doorstep. Warsaw might also consider developing a nuclear deterrent in response to Vladimir Putin’s decision to “give” Belarus nuclear weapons in 2023. A “Baltic Bomb” also makes sense as a way to deter Russian leadership from any nuclear use in Ukraine. Poland is only just beginning to build a nuclear power industry, however, so it would take them longer than Sweden.
During the 1970s, it was normal for magazines and books to publish lists of countries that were supposedly on the cusp of developing a nuclear bomb “within five years.” Iran was always on the lists because the United States had helped the Shah build a nuclear program.
Israel was always on those lists. So was South Africa, which gave up its nuclear arsenal along with Apartheid. So were Pakistan and India and North Korea, all three of which are nuclear powers today. Indonesia and Turkey and Brazil used to show up on those lists, too. How many of those aged predictions have to come true, decades later, before we admit that weakness in the face of nuclear-armed aggression is a bad nonproliferation strategy?
Finally, the global left has never accurately understood the Iranian revolution and remains a pack of useful idiots for Tehran. A new nuclear arms race in Europe would necessarily reignite European anti-nuclear activism in response, too. Proliferation will increase political polarization. Governments of the “free world” will be even more tempted to leverage state censorship and information control, to crack down on dissent, and forget they are democracies.
I keep saying that Cold War II is a rotten sequel. I hate being right.
I honestly don't foresee Indonesia joining the nuclear club anytime soon.