After Trump’s Successful Strikes on Iran, No More Non-Proliferation Illusions

High-minded international commitments are easy to make; enforcement is a different story.

L ike Mark Wright and Noah Rothman, I am inclined to believe the Iranian nuclear program has been dealt a severe setback. Was the program “obliterated”? That claim by President Trump and his subordinates seems at once overblown and beside the point.

To say that Trump is prone to exaggeration is the antithesis of exaggeration. Plus, the claims of total eradication started flying before it was possible to have performed a damage assessment in a country in which American spy agencies — while highly capable of technical surveillance — are dependent on allied intelligence services for the kind of on-the-ground information needed for a reliable assessment.

Let’s remember: The stubborn fact spurring our years of controversy over the state of Iran’s weapons program — were they years, months, or just days from “break out”? — is that we lacked knowledge of the scope of the program, including whether some of the relevant facilities even existed, and where. It is not rational to believe that we could go from epistemological fog to apodictic knowledge in one weekend based on one series of strikes — even allowing that the strikes were immense.

On the other hand — and this warms up to the point I want to make about non-proliferation — Trump green-lighted the attack, which he would have never ordered even two weeks earlier, because of the patent damage Israel had already done to the program. Damage not just to nuclear facilities that could be substantially destroyed without U.S. massive ordinance penetrators, but also to Iran’s all-important knowledge base and defense infrastructure.

The IDF eliminated top nuclear scientists. It is not enough to say such expertise cannot be replaced in short order; by these assassinations, Israel deeply discourages technical experts from participating in future weaponization efforts. Moreover, nuclear weapons production is a vast, expensive, and dangerous enterprise; a regime is not going to pour the necessary resources into it if there are real questions about the regime’s capacity to safeguard construction and maintenance.

Deficits in facilities, expertise, and defense were problems for Iran even before the U.S. strikes. The IDF war plan was so effective that Trump was gushing with praise for it — and taking credit for how “we” had established complete dominance of air space — only days after Secretary of State Rubio had seemed to distance the U.S. from the Israeli campaign at its inception. So of course the program has been dealt a material blow. That was obvious before the U.S. attack on Saturday and, a fortiori, is more certain now.

It is easy, though, to put too much stock in this. Even a country with armed forces as formidable as ours cannot “obliterate” a threat that is predicated on intellectual capital and material components that, if not homegrown, can be procured from outside.

I thought it was important, amid the rhetoric over the weekend — the administration’s triumphal pronouncements and the media-Democratic complex’s predictably gross understatements of the damage done — to try to focus attention on Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr. As I detailed, it is a working reactor in which Iran collaborates with Russia, whose anti-American dictator, Vladimir Putin, credibly claims that Israel provided assurances that it was not a military target. And not that Trump didn’t target it, either.

Now, the Bushehr reactor uses enriched uranium to generate power for civilian uses (e.g., electricity). It is low-enriched uranium, well below enrichment levels needed for weaponization. The enrichment process, however, is the same in principle; and the byproducts of the facility’s containment of irradiation can be diverted to weaponization.

The vaunted international community satisfies itself that weaponization won’t happen because of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and its mandates for monitoring by the United Nations’ watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Transnational progressives interpret the NPT as an affirmation that all countries have a right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes (rather than as a set of obligations for countries that choose to try to develop nuclear power).

And yet . . . and yet.

North Korea weaponized while a member of the NPT, under the guise of a supposedly peaceful nuclear “scientific research” program. Both the Clinton and Bush-43 administrations opted against using military force even as Pyongyang blatantly violated its NPT obligations, before the regime withdrew from the NPT in 2003, by which point weaponization was far along. The first test of a device occurred in 2006.

India weaponized, beginning in 1974. Simultaneously, it participated in the negotiations for the NPT and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But it refused to join either, which would have pulled back the civilian veil from its enrichment ramp-ups and weapons testing.

Pakistan, which also refused to join the NPT, similarly weaponized while claiming its nuclear power development efforts were for peaceful civilian purposes. Based on its claims, it procured foreign help: A. Q. Khan, the prime mover, was educated and worked on commercial uranium enrichment projects in Europe, and Pakistan acquired many of the necessary components through exceptions from export restrictions on military items that have ostensible civilian uses.

A few lessons flow from all this.

First, as long as the world’s default rationalization is that nations have an international law right to develop nuclear power for civilian purposes, it will not be possible to obliterate nuclear programs. Too many countries — in particular, Russia, a rogue state — have significant financial interests in selling the expertise and components necessary to construct nuclear facilities. The scientific process for uranium enrichment for civilian purposes is, in principle, indistinguishable from the process for weapons purposes; the thing that prevents the former from becoming the latter — namely, the NPT inspections regimen — has shown itself easy to defeat. The problem is the same problem that has plagued the United Nations from the beginning: It will never have a military force of its own, and thus relies on member nations, especially the United States (and Israel, though the U.N. would never admit that), to decide that their vital interests demand that hostile nations be denied. They are usually unwilling. High-minded international commitments are easy to make; enforcement is a different story.

Second, the “peaceful civilian nuclear program” con game is a ready excuse for American administrations to rationalize capitulation to the nuclear aspirations of rogue regimes. Clinton could have taken out North Korea’s nuclear program in 1994 and Obama could have dispensed with Iran’s in 2012 — the time frames when both presidents threatened to resort to military force. But each president retreated, reasoning that assisting the rogue regimes in the development of nuclear power for civilian uses would bring them around, or at least buy time during which — they hoped — the regimes might collapse . . . or their persistence would be some future president’s problem. The “right” to civilian nuclear development becomes not only an obstacle to policing against proliferation but a rationale for encouraging nuclear ambitions.

Third, we should resist the false confidence that Trump’s strikes, even assuming (as I do) that they were successful in gutting Iran’s nuclear program, have restored deterrence against nuclear proliferation. Trump would not have acted had Israel not already done much of the heavy lifting. Israel acted for existential reasons, not to vindicate nonproliferation. The threat against it was not so much nuclear weapons as nuclear weapons in the hands of a jihadist regime pledged to Israel’s destruction.

Iran’s program was a target of opportunity due to an array of circumstances that fell into place — largely thanks to Iran’s own miscalculations in launching a multi-front proxy war against Israel in 2023. Tehran’s nuclear program had been a threat to the United States for a generation; but the president acted now, even though he wouldn’t have acted just two weeks earlier, because of factors extraneous from any commitment to nonproliferation.

What happened here was good fortune, not doctrine. When the next nuclear threat crystallizes, whether an American president takes military action to suppress it will similarly depend on the circumstances, not on any renewed zest for nonproliferation. And it will always be easier to delude ourselves into believing promoting civilian nuclear power for “peace” is less risky than attacking nuclear facilities militarily — even if the latter is the path to actual peace.