The Day After Iran Gets the Bomb

Will Iran ever acquire nuclear weapons? What would happen if it did? The answer to the first question seems increasingly to be yes. The second question, however, is as unclear as ever.

The Islamic Republic has been at odds with the United States and many of its neighbors for 45 years, ever since the revolution that toppled the shah in 1979. The United States backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (even though Baghdad had started the conflict), and then-U.S. President George W. Bush included Tehran in his infamous “axis of evil.” The Obama administration eventually signed a nuclear deal with Iran, but it also collaborated with Israel to conduct a major cyberattack on Iran’s enrichment infrastructure. Not to be outdone, then-President Donald Trump eventually authorized a drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Suleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, and tried to weaken the regime through a program of “maximum pressure.”

Iran has responded to these various activities and others by supporting the Assad regime in Syria, moving closer to Russia and China, and arming and training militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. And as Raphael S. Cohen recently outlined here at FP, the covert war between Israel and Iran is likely to continue for a long time to come and could easily get worse.

The potential for trouble here is manifest, but one prominent international relations theorist thought there was an obvious way to reduce it. According to the late Kenneth Waltz’s last published article, the most straightforward way to stabilize the region would be for Iran to acquire a nuclear deterrent of its own. He argued that possession of a nuclear arsenal would reduce Iran’s security fears, give it less reason to make trouble for others, and force its regional rivals to refrain from using force against it in ways that might inadvertently lead to a nuclear exchange. As Winston Churchill put it in the early years of the Cold War, stability would become “the sturdy child of terror.”

Waltz had laid out the central logic of this argument in a controversial 1981 monograph, drawing on basic nuclear deterrence theory. He began with the familiar realist assumption that states in anarchy are primarily concerned with security. In a world without nuclear weapons, such fears often lead to miscalculation, risky behavior, and war. Nuclear weapons altered this situation by threatening a level of destructive power that even the most ambitious or aggressive leaders had to respect. He saw a nuclear deterrent as the ultimate security guarantee: No sensible leader would try to conquer or overthrow a nuclear-armed rival because to do so would inevitably risk a nuclear attack. No conceivable political gains would be worth the loss of a handful of one’s own cities, and even a low probability of a nuclear response would be sufficient to deter a direct attack on another country’s independence. Miscalculation would be less likely because it is easy to any minimally intelligent person to understand what the effect of a nuclear exchange would be. States with a secure second-strike capability would not be as worried about their survival, therefore, and competition between them would be constrained (though not eliminated) by mutual fear.

Waltz did not suggest that nuclear deterrence eliminated all sources of security competition. Nor did he argue that every country would be better off with the bomb or that the rapid spread of nuclear weapons would be a good thing for the international system. Rather, he suggested that the slow spread of nuclear weapons might be beneficial in some contexts, and might even be preferable to all-out efforts to prevent it. He believed that the mutual fear of escalation that helped the United States and Soviet Union avoid a direct clash of arms during the Cold War and that had reduced the size and scope of wars between India and Pakistan would have similar dampening effects elsewhere, including the war-torn Middle East.

Waltz’s contrarian position attracted plenty of criticism, and his original monograph eventually led to an extended and illuminating exchange with Stanford University professor Scott Sagan. Skeptics warned that new nuclear powers might be led by irrational, or messianic, leaders who could not be deterred, though it is far from clear that they would be any less rational or circumspect than the leaders of existing nuclear weapons states. Others worried that new nuclear powers might lack sophisticated security measures and command-and-control procedures, thereby making their arsenals more vulnerable to theft or unauthorized use. Hawks claimed that new nuclear powers might threaten nuclear use to blackmail others or as a shield for aggression, even though none of the existing nuclear powers had ever done this successfully. Other critics predicted that nuclear acquisition by Iran would lead some of its neighbors to follow suit, though evidence of earlier “proliferation cascades” was at best mixed.

The U.S. government never considered embracing Waltz’s position, of course, and certainly not with respect to countries like Iran. On the contrary, the United States has almost always tried to dissuade other countries from developing their own nuclear arsenals, and it has worked overtime to keep Iran from doing so. Democratic and Republican presidents have repeatedly said that all options are on the table should Iran try to build an actual bomb, and they have imposed increasingly stringent economic sanctions in a mostly failed effort to persuade Tehran to abandon its enrichment program. The Obama administration eventually negotiated an agreement (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) that rolled back Iran’s enrichment capacity significantly, reduced its stockpile of nuclear material, and expanded monitoring of Iran’s remaining nuclear activities. In a stunning strategic blunder, Trump abandoned the deal in 2018. The result? Iran began enriching uranium to even higher levels and is now closer to having a bomb than ever before.

Apart from the JCPOA, the United States (and Israel) has done just about everything it could to convince Tehran that it cannot be secure without its own deterrent. Congress has funded “democracy promotion” efforts directed at Iran, including funding for Iranian exile groups.  Washington has spurned several Iranian attempts to improve relations, clashed with Iranian naval forces in the Persian Gulf, deliberately assassinated a top Iranian official, and conducted an array of covert activities inside Iran. Washington has openly backed the formation of an anti-Iranian coalition in the region and does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran (unlike Russia, China, and most of America’s allies). Whatever one thinks of the Iranian regime—and there is much to dislike about it—these and other measures undoubtedly increase its interest in having the same deterrent protection that nine other countries—including Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea—now enjoy.

So why hasn’t Iran crossed the nuclear threshold already? No one knows. One possibility is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei genuinely believes that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam, and that crossing the line would be morally wrong. I don’t put much stock in that explanation myself, but I can’t rule it out entirely. It is also possible that Iran’s leaders are not that worried about a direct U.S. attack or invasion (whatever they may say in public), especially in light of America’s disastrous efforts at regime change in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and a few other places. They may recognize that no U.S. president wants to relive those experiences, and especially not against a country that has nearly four times the land area and twice the population of Iraq. The United States is a dangerous adversary but not an existential threat, so there’s no need to sprint for the bomb. Tehran may also be deterred by the threat of preventive war, insofar as an attempt to build a working weapon is likely to be detected and could easily lead the United States or Israel (or both) to attack the nuclear infrastructure Iran has sacrificed much to create. If there’s no urgent need and the circumstances aren’t propitious, it makes more sense for Iran to stay on this side of the proliferation threshold.

If the United States and others want to keep things that way, then they should combine their warnings about the possible consequences of a break-out attempt with assurances that Iran won’t be attacked if it continues to eschew a weapons capability. Dialing down the covert war between Israel and Iran would help as well, although it is hard to imagine the Netanyahu government choosing that path or facing significant pressure to do so from the Biden administration.

Here’s what bothers me. If the current level of animosity persists, it’s hard to believe that Iran won’t eventually decide that it needs a nuclear deterrent of its own, and what would happen then is anyone’s guess. It might spark another Middle East war, which is the last thing anyone needs. If Iran succeeded in building its own bomb, it could lead states like Saudi Arabia or Turkey to follow suit.

But guess what? It might also reveal that Waltz was right all along, and that a rough nuclear balance in the Middle East would finally induce these perpetually quarreling states to temper their animosity and opt for peaceful coexistence. If I’m completely honest, however, this is one of those social science experiments I’d rather not run.