The bombing of Iran may teach an unwelcome lesson on nuclear weapons

President George W. Bush looks over a cache of centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium that Libya turned over to the U.S., at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., July 12, 2004. The bombing of Iran may teach an unwelcome lesson on nuclear weapons; will America’s pre-emptive strike discourage other countries from pursuing a weapon — or just the opposite? (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Mark Landler

It has been nearly two decades since any country elbowed its way into the club of nuclear-armed nations. President Donald Trump, with his bombing of three Iranian nuclear installations last weekend, has vowed to keep the door shut.

Whether Trump’s preemptive strike will succeed in doing that is hard to predict, so soon after the attack and the fragile ceasefire that has followed. But already it is stirring fears that Iran, and other countries, will draw a very different conclusion than the one the White House intended: that having a bomb is the only protection in a threatening world.

The last country to get one, North Korea, has never faced such an attack. After years of defying demands to dismantle its nuclear program, it is now viewed as largely impregnable. Trump exchanged friendly letters with its dictator, Kim Jong Un, and met him twice in a fruitless effort to negotiate a deal. In Iran’s case, Trump deployed B-2 bombers just weeks after making a fresh diplomatic overture to its leaders.

“The risks of Iran acquiring a small nuclear arsenal are now higher than they were before the events of last week,” said Robert J. Einhorn, an arms control expert who negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration. “We can assume there are a number of hard-liners who are arguing that they should cross that nuclear threshold.”

Iran would face formidable hurdles to producing a bomb even if it made a concerted dash for one, Einhorn said, not least the knowledge that if the United States and Israel detect such a move, they will strike again. It is far from clear that Iran’s leaders, isolated, weakened and in disarray, want to provoke him.

Yet the logic of proliferation looms large in a world where the nuclear-armed great powers — the United States, Russia and China — are viewed as increasingly unreliable and even predatory toward their neighbors. From the Persian Gulf and Central Europe to East Asia, analysts said, non-nuclear countries are watching Iran’s plight and calculating lessons they should learn from it.

“Certainly, North Korea doesn’t rue the day it acquired nuclear weapons,” said Christopher R. Hill, who led lengthy, ultimately unsuccessful, talks with Pyongyang in 2007 and 2008 to try to persuade it to dismantle its nuclear program.

The lure of the bomb, Hill said, has become stronger for America’s allies in the Middle East and Asia. Since World War II, they have sheltered under a U.S. security umbrella. But they now confront a president, in Trump, who views alliances as incompatible with his vision of “America first.”

“I’d be very careful with the assumption that there is a U.S. nuclear umbrella,” said Hill, who served as ambassador to South Korea, Iraq, Poland, and Serbia under Democratic and Republican presidents. “Countries like Japan and South Korea are wondering whether they can rely on the U.S.”

Support for developing nuclear weapons has risen in South Korea, though its newly elected president, Lee Jae-myung, has vowed to improve relations with North Korea. In 2023, President Joe Biden signed a deal with Seoul to involve it more in nuclear planning with the United States, in part to head off a push by South Korean politicians and scientists to develop their own nuclear weapons capability.

In Japan, the public has long favored disarmament, a legacy of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But it has begun debating whether to store nuclear weapons from the United States on its soil, as some members of NATO do. Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister, said that if Ukraine had kept some of its Soviet-era bombs, it might have avoided a Russian invasion.

President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons early in that conflict gave pause to the Biden administration about how aggressively to arm the Ukrainian military. It also deepened fears that other revisionist powers could use nuclear blackmail to intimidate their neighbors.

Iran’s strategy of aggressively enriching uranium, while stopping short of a bomb, did not ultimately protect it either.

“To the extent that people are looking at Iran as a test case, Trump has shown that its strategy is not a guarantee that you will prevent a military attack,” said Gary Samore, a professor at Brandeis University who worked on arms control negotiations in the Obama and Clinton administrations.

Samore said it was too soon to say how the Israeli and American strikes on Iran would affect the calculus of other countries. “How does this end?” he said. “Does it end with a deal? Or is Iran left to pursue a nuclear weapon?”

Experts on proliferation are, by nature, wary. But some are trying to find a silver lining in the events of the last week. Einhorn said that in delivering on his threat to bomb a nuclear-minded Iran, Trump had sent a reassuring message to U.S. allies facing their own nuclear insecurities.

“In Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing,” Einhorn said, “they’ve taken notice not just of the reach and capacity of the U.S. military, but the willingness of this president to use that capability.”