spate of break-ins has been taking place in your neighborhood. Armed thugs associated with a crime syndicate have been knocking down doors and grabbing what they can. The police show up only after the assaults, which have led to injuries and even a few deaths. Under-resourced and overstretched, they haven’t been able to thwart the robbers.
Someone in your neighborhood puts up a sign: This Homeowner Is Armed and Dangerous. The next night, the thugs break into the houses on either side, not even bothering to test whether the homeowner in the middle has a gun or knows how to use it. They just leave that house alone.
Question for you: do you buy a gun?
Maybe you don’t believe in guns. So, do you consider putting up a similar sign even though the most dangerous item in your house is a nail clipper? The evidence seems clear. Even just the threat of retaliation is enough to dissuade the would-be attackers. Your life and the lives of your family are on the line.
This is the dilemma facing many countries around the world, except that the gun in this analogy is a nuclear weapon. Countries without nuclear weapons — Libya and Yugoslavia — experienced attacks that eventually led to regime change. Countries that possess even just a few warheads — North Korea and China — have managed to deter states with malign intent.
Iran, a country that has put up a warning sign in its window without fully committing to acquiring the ultimate deterrent, was recently bombed by both Israel and the United States. A tenuous ceasefire now holds in this conflict. The Trump administration imagines that it has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. It also believes that it can now put more pressure on Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program at the negotiating table.
But the obvious takeaway for Iran after the recent attacks is that it’s certainly dangerous to semi-covertly pursue nuclear weapons, but it’s perhaps even more dangerous not to have them. If nuclear powers don’t suffer devastating bombing campaigns, insecure nations conclude that they best acquire a nuke as quickly as possible.
It’s not just Iran. Other countries are drawing similar conclusions about how to survive in an international environment where collective security — the global equivalent of the police — is falling apart as quickly as a fence in a hurricane.
Iran’s complex
Guns can be used for different things — to hunt, to hit clay targets, to massacre children at a school.
Likewise, nuclear complexes can serve very different purposes. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear facilities are for the production of energy, medical isotopes and so on. But a country doesn’t need to enrich its uranium to 60%, as Iran reportedly has done, to achieve these peaceful goals. Nuclear power requires an enrichment level of 3–5%. Weapons-grade uranium, meanwhile, is 90%.
The Obama administration, with a number of international partners, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped the level of enrichment at 20% and began diluting Iran’s uranium stockpiles to 3.5%. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the agreement. The enrichment level of Iran’s uranium not surprisingly began to creep upwards.
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