How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Iranian Bomb

Trump just wants a JCPOA with his name on it. Regardless of any deal, if Iran wanted a bomb, it could have one tomorrow.

BLUF: I don’t care if Iran gets nuclear weapons.

Now, that doesn’t mean I think it’s ideal. I just don’t think it matters very much.

The long-dormant nuclear weapons program has always been a distraction, a vestigial and irrelevant component of the Islamic Revolution’s imperial expansion.

Obviously, we can’t know what we can’t know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t extrapolate from what we do know, and I just don’t think the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution would ever use a nuclear weapon, whether directly delivered on a missile or via one of its many, although now severely diminished, Arab organs or individual terrorist operatives.

If the Soviets under Stalin and his successors, the Chinese Communist Party under Mao, the Pakistanis under their persistent jihadist deep state, and the North Koreans under the Kim of the day never used their nukes, there’s no reason to believe Khamenei would.¹ If you think the Islamic Revolution is somehow madder or more revolutionary than the aforementioned regimes, you simply don’t know anything and shouldn’t be thinking about this issue at all. It doesn’t mean Iran couldn’t use a weapon, only that if past is prologue, why make that assumption?

Also, nuclear weapons are useless. Israel has “allegedly” (*eyeroll*) possessed them since the 60s. Did that stop multiple wars and attacks to destroy the state over the last six decades, including the Islamic Revolution’s October 7 war?

Were any communist insurgents and regimes and then jihadist groups and regimes afraid of the US, British or French nuclear arsenals? Did the mujahideen fear the Soviet arsenal? Did Ukraine surrender because of Russia’s arsenal? Was it deterred from attacking deep into Russia countless times? Did India and Pakistan go to war both before and after they developed nuclear weapons? Did the US arsenal deter the USSR and China from directly intervening in Korea and Vietnam? Did the Soviet arsenal discourage Israel from dogfights?

I could go on, but the point is that nukes do nothing except, at best, deter others from using nukes. And nobody is using nukes regardless. So nukes just do nothing.

Nobody has conducted a substantial military attack on Iran even without nuclear weapons, and they wouldn’t after it had them. The equation won’t change. At the height of US power in the 1990s, the US was too diffident to do anything serious in response to North Korean provocations. The US continued to do nothing after North Korea developed nuclear weapons. The equation never changes.

One might argue that the problem is less Iran having a nuclear arsenal itself than that it might spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and a cascade of Arab nuclear weapons programs and a Turkish bomb. I don’t think this is a serious concern, either, because see above. Again, not ideal, but meh, as the kids (used to?) say.

Perhaps a greater risk is that, upon developing a nuclear arsenal, one of the Middle Eastern regimes might collapse and nuclear weapons could potentially fall into the hands of criminal or terrorist groups, but given this didn’t happen after the collapse of the Soviet Union and that there’s been no proliferation from Pakistan, there’s no reason to believe it’s anything but an extreme fat tail risk.

Thankfully, this is all entirely theoretical, as the Islamic Revolution understands that a bomb option is far more useful than an actual bomb and has understood this since late 2003, when it “halted” its nuclear weapons program. If it wanted a bomb, it would already have one. But it doesn’t.

However, for those who want to be as certain as possible that the regime won’t restart its nuclear weapons program, then there are only two options, as Obama correctly asserted in 2015: “Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war.”

Some Form of War?

“War” is a very strong word for what would happen under a military approach to ending Iran’s program, given Iran is utterly impotent. It can neither defend itself nor retaliate effectively, whether directly with its missiles or via its broken, bupkis global terrorism apparatus.

This was the case long before Israel destroyed what Iran did possess in terms of air defence systems. The regime’s alleged attempts to reconstitute its useless air defences are, well, useless. With Hezbollah now decimated, Iran doesn’t even have a theoretical deterrent, although as we now know, it actually never had one, as Israel would simply have detonated the pagers and walkie-talkies if Hezbollah ever tried to intervene.

Israel alone, much less the US, could easily destroy Iran’s entire program, including all enrichment facilities. Even the deeply buried ones, if not entirely destroyed from the air, could be finished off via ground raids.² Israel already demonstrated proof of concept for this in Syria last year, and could readily replicate that operation using its massive agent network in Iran and its ability to operate directly from Azerbaijan.³

In my youth, I advocated for this approach, and in theory, I still do.