When Iran Goes Nuclear

Excerpt

Since the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel, Iran’s allied militias and proxies have launched missiles and drones at international shipping and U.S. troops. Hezbollah, the crown jewel in the Islamic Republic’s “ring of fire” around the Jewish state, has dueled with the Israeli Defense Forces, driving nearly 100,000 Israelis from their homes. The Biden administration has responded with two aircraft-carrier groups on patrol (one has now departed), missile barrages and bombing runs against Iranian proxies, and a lot of peripatetic diplomacy, including multiple trips by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and envoys Amos Hochstein, Brett McGurk, and CIA Director William Burns. All this activity has obscured the fact that Tehran is moving deliberately toward nuclear breakout. Based on International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) documents, Reuters reported late last year that “Iran has enough uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to weapons-grade, for three atom bombs … and is still stonewalling the agency on key issues.” The clerical regime’s large stockpile of 20 percent uranium, which can quickly be spun up by advanced centrifuges, keeps increasing. 

The Islamic Republic’s unconstrained progress toward nuclear-weapons capability and its continuing stonewalling of the IAEA raises the question of whether a nuclear-armed Iran would be more aggressive and prone to take risks that might ignite an escalatory spiral engulfing much of the Middle East. There is a theory that proliferation can ultimately lead to a relatively benign state of deterrence through fear of “mutual assured destruction.” The late Robert Jervis argued in his enormously influential book, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, that “crises will be rare, neither side will be eager to press bargaining advantages to the limit, the status quo will be relatively easy to maintain, and political outcomes will not be closely related to either the nuclear or conventional balance” once states have accepted the notion of mutual vulnerability.

Eric S. Edelman is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and is a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Finland, and under secretary of defense for policy. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.