The Case for Nuclear Weapons
Why the West has made the strongest argument for nuclear proliferation ever constructed
This is an argument for nuclear proliferation.
I am going to make the case that every nation on earth with the technical capacity to build a nuclear weapon should do so. Right now. And every piece of evidence I present will be something we — the West — did.
Not something we said. Something we did. Because the case for nuclear proliferation was not written in a white paper or argued at a conference. It was written in the rubble of Tripoli, in the mass graves of Iraq, in the bombed-out enrichment halls of Natanz — and, most damningly of all, in the shredded pages of a nuclear agreement that the entire world, including the nation that shredded it, acknowledged was working.
The argument is simple, and it is airtight: every nation that cooperated with the Western non-proliferation framework — that disarmed, or dismantled, or submitted to inspections, or signed the treaties, or honoured the deals — was attacked. The ones that refused are still standing. And if you have no nuclear weapons at all — if your programme is civilian, peaceful, and verified by every international body empowered to do so — that does not protect you either. It simply means you will be unarmed when the bombs arrive.
If you are the leader of a mid-sized country watching this pattern unfold — watching treaty after treaty honoured by your side and discarded by theirs, watching compliance rewarded with invasion and defiance rewarded with survival — there is only one rational conclusion available to you.
Get a bomb.
This article is not advice. It is a chilling indictment of what we have become. I am going to hold it up to the foreign policy establishment that spent eighty years building a non-proliferation architecture and then, methodically, exposed every load-bearing wall. I am going to show you what the world looks like from the other side of Western power — from the capitals where leaders watched Libya, watched Iraq, watched Ukraine, watched Iran, and drew the only conclusion the evidence supports.
The Evidence
The case begins not with projections, not hypotheticals, not worst-case scenarios drawn up by think tanks with defence contracts to protect. It begins with data. A record of what happened to nations that cooperated with the Western non-proliferation framework, and what happened to those that told the West to go to hell. Five nations, six reasons to build a nuclear bomb if you are a technologically budding nation:
Iraq
Iraq signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. It pursued a nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s — one that was further advanced than Western intelligence initially realised — but after the Gulf War, the programme was dismantled under the supervision of UN inspectors. Iraq also possessed chemical weapons, many of them acquired with American assistance during the Iran-Iraq war. Those, too, were dismantled. By the late 1990s, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and its successor, UNMOVIC, had verified the destruction of Iraq’s weapons programmes — both chemical and nuclear. The inspectors said so. The CIA’s own post-invasion Iraq Survey Group confirmed it. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded in 2003.¹
It did not matter. The Bush administration deliberately conflated chemical, biological, and nuclear programmes under the single banner of “weapons of mass destruction” — and then escalated the rhetoric to the nuclear specifically. On the eighth of September 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN that Saddam Hussein had “the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon” and warned that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”² A month later, President Bush told the nation: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”³ Vice President Cheney claimed Iraq could have a nuclear weapon “in less than a year.”⁴ The aluminium tubes that Rice cited as evidence of a centrifuge programme were assessed by the Department of Energy — the government’s own nuclear experts — as unsuitable for uranium enrichment and consistent with conventional rocket casings.⁵
There was no nuclear programme. The administration knew there was no nuclear programme. The mushroom cloud was a marketing strategy — the White House Iraq Group, tasked with selling the war, had workshopped the phrase in a meeting the previous month.⁶ The invasion proceeded, produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, destroyed the Iraqi state, and ended with Saddam Hussein hanged by a tribunal that Human Rights Watch called “fundamentally flawed.”⁷
Iraq did everything the non-proliferation framework asked. It disarmed — both its chemical weapons and its nuclear programme. It submitted to inspections. It was destroyed anyway, on the basis of a nuclear threat that its own destroyers knew did not exist.
Libya
On the nineteenth of December 2003, Muammar Gaddafi announced that Libya would voluntarily dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programmes and open its facilities to international inspection.⁸ The IAEA verified the dismantlement. The United States removed centrifuge components, missile parts, and nuclear materials. Libya ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and began destroying its chemical stockpiles under OPCW supervision.⁹ Western governments called it a “model for other states to follow.”¹⁰
Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam later revealed that Libya had sought security guarantees in exchange for disarmament — guarantees the United States refused to provide, offering only “assurances.”¹¹ Libya accepted the lesser commitment. It was, Saif said, one of his father’s most difficult decisions, because the risk was obvious: without a deterrent, there was nothing to prevent the West from doing exactly what it eventually did.
In 2011, NATO — with the United States providing seventy-five per cent of the aerial refuelling and seventy per cent of the intelligence — intervened in Libya’s civil war under a Security Council mandate authorising civilian protection.¹² The mandate was executed as regime change. Gaddafi was captured by rebels, sodomised with a bayonet, and killed. The “model” state was a failed state within eight years of disarming.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei responded publicly. Gaddafi, he said, had “collected all his nuclear equipment on the heels of empty threats, loaded it onto a ship and handed it over to the Westerners.” The West had offered the encouragement one offers a child — “candy or chocolate” — and in return “he lost everything he had.”¹³
Ukraine
Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal when the Soviet Union collapsed — approximately 1,900 strategic warheads deployed on its territory.¹⁴ Ukraine did not have operational control of the weapons — nor ownership. The warheads belonged to Russia. The launch codes remained in Moscow. But physical possession is its own form of leverage, and Kyiv knew it.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum on the fifth of December 1994, pledging to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and existing borders in exchange for Ukraine’s accession to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapons state and the transfer of all warheads to Russia for dismantlement.¹⁵ Ukraine wanted legally binding security guarantees. The United States refused, offering only politically binding “assurances” — a distinction that American lawyers insisted upon and that, in the Ukrainian and Russian translations, was rendered as “guarantees” regardless.¹⁶
Ukraine gave up its arsenal. The last warhead was transferred to Russia in 1996. The last delivery vehicle was eliminated in 2001.¹⁷
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada declared the annexation a violation of the Budapest Memorandum. They imposed sanctions. They did not intervene. In 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion. The security assurances that Ukraine had accepted in exchange for the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth proved to be, in the assessment of Ukraine’s own president, not worth the paper they were written on.¹⁸
The lesson was not subtle. Zelenskyy himself drew it: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise, and the promise was broken. Every nation watching absorbed the same conclusion.
Iran
Iran signed the NPT in 1968. Its Supreme Leader issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons theologically un-Islamic, because they are indiscriminate and civilians are the primary targets.¹⁹ In 2015, Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the most intrusive nuclear verification agreement in history. It capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent. It reduced its operating centrifuges by two-thirds. It accepted continuous IAEA monitoring. The IAEA verified compliance — repeatedly, unambiguously, and without exception.²⁰
In 2018, the United States withdrew from the deal. Iran was in compliance. The IAEA said so. The other signatories said so. The United States withdrew anyway, reimposed sanctions, and called the agreement — the one that was working — inadequate.²¹
In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States followed with Operation Midnight Hammer, dropping fourteen GBU-57 bunker-busters on Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.²² In February 2026, while negotiations in Oman were producing what Iran’s foreign minister called “good progress,” the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a full-scale war that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and pursued explicit regime change.²³
Iran did everything the framework asked. It signed the treaty. It banned the weapons on theological grounds. It negotiated the deal. It complied with the deal. It was bombed — three times — while complying or negotiating.
The IAEA’s own Director General, Rafael Grossi, stated on the third of March 2026 that there was “no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb.”²⁴ The United States Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified to the Senate that Iran had not rebuilt its enrichment capability after Operation Midnight Hammer — testimony that directly contradicted the President’s justification for the second war.²⁵
On the fourth of April 2026, the United States and Israel struck the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant — a civilian energy facility under active IAEA safeguards, killing at least one plant employee. Bushehr is not a weapons site. It is the embodiment of what the non-proliferation framework asks nations to do: pursue nuclear energy peacefully, under international supervision. They bombed it anyway.
Iran’s compliance was not rewarded. It was exploited. The deal was the proof of concept for disarmament-through-diplomacy, and the nation that authored the deal burned it while the ink was still legible.
North Korea
And then there is the control case.
North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003. It tested its first nuclear device in 2006. It has since conducted six nuclear tests, developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, and built an arsenal estimated at several dozen warheads.²⁶ It has defied every demand, every sanction, every resolution, every threat. It has not been invaded. It has not been bombed. Its leadership has not been assassinated.
On the twenty-fifth of March 2026 — four weeks into the war on Iran — Kim Jong Un addressed his military commanders. The “present situation,” he said, “clearly proves” that North Korea was correct to maintain its nuclear arsenal. He called it “irreversible.” He accused Washington of “state-sponsored terrorism and aggression.”²⁷
He was not wrong. Not about the terrorism — that is a separate argument. But about the logic? The evidence supports him. Every nation that played by the rules was punished. The one that broke every rule is untouchable. If you are a head of state watching this pattern, Kim Jong Un is not a cautionary tale. He is a case study in survival.
Pakistan
And in case you think this is theoretical — in case the pattern looks compelling on paper but you doubt it would hold against a real American threat — the United States already tested it.
In September 2001, days after the September 11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Pakistan’s intelligence director that Islamabad had a choice: cooperate fully with the war on terror, or “be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”²⁸ Musharraf later wrote in his memoir that he war-gamed the United States as an adversary and concluded that Pakistan could not withstand the onslaught — particularly with India poised to exploit the situation.²⁹
But Pakistan was not bombed. It was not invaded. Its leader was not assassinated. The United States threatened annihilation — and then looked at Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, did the calculation that every strategic planner in every capital on earth has since done, and stood down. Musharraf capitulated politically. He gave the Americans their overflight rights, their bases, their intelligence cooperation. But his country survived, his government survived, and his sovereignty — however compromised — survived. Because the cost of following through on the threat was not the destruction of Pakistan. It was the potential destruction of the region, and possibly the world.
That is what a nuclear deterrent does. It does not make you invulnerable. It does not make you right. It makes the cost of attacking you unacceptable. And every nation without one has now watched what happens when that cost is absent.
The Deal That Proved It Could Work
The evidence above establishes the pattern. But the Iran case requires its own section, because it is not merely another data point. It is the moment the non-proliferation framework was proven to work — and then destroyed by the nation that built it.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was not a concession extracted under duress. It was the most comprehensive nuclear verification agreement ever negotiated. Six world powers — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China — spent years constructing an architecture of constraints so detailed, so intrusive, and so thoroughly monitored that it became the gold standard for what diplomacy could achieve when every party committed to the process.
Iran agreed to reduce its operating centrifuges from approximately 19,000 to 6,104. It agreed to cap uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent — a fraction of the roughly 90 per cent required for a weapon. It agreed to limit its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 300 kilograms. It agreed to convert its heavy-water reactor at Arak so that it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium. And it submitted to a monitoring regime that gave the IAEA continuous access to its nuclear facilities — including, under the Additional Protocol, the authority to inspect undeclared sites.³⁰
The IAEA verified compliance. Not once. Not ambiguously. Repeatedly, across multiple reporting cycles, with the full weight of the agency’s technical authority behind every assessment. Iran was doing what it said it would do. The deal was working. The pathway to a bomb was blocked — not by force, but by agreement, verification, and mutual commitment.³¹
This is the fact that must sit at the centre of any honest discussion about nuclear proliferation: the international community had, in its hands, a functioning agreement that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It was the proof of concept. The demonstration that the non-proliferation framework could deliver exactly what it promised — if the parties honoured their commitments.
In May 2018, the United States withdrew. Iran was in compliance. Every other signatory to the deal confirmed it. The IAEA confirmed it. The United States withdrew anyway.³²
The reasons offered have shifted over the years — the deal did not cover ballistic missiles, it did not address regional behaviour, it contained sunset clauses. These objections are not frivolous. But none of them justified destroying the agreement rather than building on it. The JCPOA was never intended to resolve every dimension of the US-Iran relationship in a single document. It was intended to close the nuclear pathway — and it did. Withdrawing from a deal that was achieving its stated objective because it did not simultaneously achieve every other objective is not strategy. It is sabotage.
And the circularity that followed is the argument’s fatal defect — not Iran’s, but Washington’s. The United States withdrew from the deal. Iran, no longer bound by its constraints, resumed enrichment. The resumed enrichment was then cited as evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. The evidence was used to justify military strikes — first in June 2025, then in February 2026, the second time while a new round of negotiations was underway and producing results that went beyond anything previously achieved.³³
The circularity is not incidental. It is the mechanism. The United States created the crisis it then used as justification for war. It broke the agreement that was preventing proliferation and then bombed the country for the proliferation that the broken agreement produced. This is not a failure of the non-proliferation framework. It is a demonstration that the most powerful nation in the framework will destroy its own architecture when that architecture produces peace instead of leverage.
Every nation watching absorbed the lesson. Not just Iran — every nation with a civilian nuclear programme, every nation that has considered signing a non-proliferation agreement, every nation that has been told by American diplomats that compliance will be rewarded and cooperation will be honoured. The lesson is: it will not. The deal will be torn up. Your compliance will be exploited. And when the enrichment you resume after the deal is destroyed reaches a level that can be used to frighten the American public, they will come for you.
The JCPOA was not just a deal with Iran. It was a promise to the world that diplomacy works. That promise has been broken so thoroughly, so publicly, and so repeatedly that no rational government will trust it again. And that — not Iran’s centrifuges, not North Korea’s missiles, not any individual weapons programme — is the single greatest driver of nuclear proliferation in the twenty-first century. The nation that built the non-proliferation order has demonstrated, through its own conduct, that the order is a trap. Comply, and you will be disarmed. Be disarmed, and you will be destroyed. The only escape is the one the order was designed to prevent.
And the cruelest detail is still to come. On the twenty-seventh of February 2026 — one day before Operation Epic Fury began — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and announced what he called a breakthrough that surpassed anything achieved under the Obama administration. Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium — not a cap, not a reduction, but elimination. Existing stockpiles would be down-blended to the lowest possible level, converted into fuel, and rendered irreversible. Full and comprehensive IAEA verification would be restored, including access to facilities that had been closed since the 2025 strikes. Al-Busaidi said he was confident a comprehensive deal could be finalised within three months.³⁴
“The single most important achievement,” al-Busaidi told CBS, “is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama’s time. This is something completely new.”³⁵
The JCPOA had capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent and limited stockpiles to 300 kilograms. The Oman framework went further — zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, full verification, with Iran open to discussing its ballistic missile programme and regional issues in subsequent rounds. It was, by every measurable standard, a better deal than the one the United States had torn up in 2018.
The bombs fell the next day.
The United States did not merely betray a deal. It betrayed the replacement for the deal it had already betrayed — a replacement that achieved more than the original. The message to every nation on earth is no longer that compliance is unrewarded. It is that compliance is impossible. There is no agreement you can sign, no concession you can make, no verification you can accept that will protect you. The goalposts do not move. They are removed from the field entirely, and the field is bombed.
The Proliferation Cascade
The pattern has been established. The proof of concept has been demonstrated and then destroyed. Now watch what happens next — not in adversary capitals, but in allied ones. Because the proliferation cascade that the Iran war has triggered is not coming from the nations the United States has designated as threats. It is coming from inside the alliance system.
Start in East Asia.
In South Korea, public support for developing indigenous nuclear weapons reached a record 76.2 per cent in 2025 — the highest figure since the Asan Institute began polling the question in 2010.³⁶ This is not fringe sentiment. It is a supermajority, and it holds even when respondents are confronted with potential costs: international sanctions, the withdrawal of American forces, the construction of test sites in their own provinces. A majority still supports the programme under four out of five cost conditions.³⁷ Leading conservative presidential candidates have endorsed it openly. The debate in Seoul is no longer whether South Korea should go nuclear. It is when — and how quickly. South Korea has the raw materials, the technical capacity, and the civilian nuclear infrastructure to produce a weapon within one to three years.³⁸
The driver is not anti-Americanism. South Koreans overwhelmingly want the alliance — but they no longer trust it to protect them. When the United States calls North Korea a “nuclear power,” when it signals willingness to negotiate arms control rather than denuclearisation, when it tells its allies to spend more while pulling the umbrella away, the calculation changes.
In Japan — the only nation to have suffered nuclear attack — the picture is shifting in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. In December 2025, an unnamed government security adviser told reporters that Japan should have nuclear weapons given heightened security risks — a statement widely interpreted as an attempt to gauge and guide the national mood.³⁹ Former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono went further, insisting that Japan should not shy away from an open debate on acquisition.⁴⁰ Prime Minister Takaichi walked the remarks back publicly, insisting on Japan’s “three non-nuclear principles” — not possessing, producing, or hosting nuclear weapons. But Takaichi has also said that the hosting prohibition may be inconsistent with American security guarantees if it prevented nuclear submarines from docking in Japanese ports.⁴¹ The principles are being reinterpreted from the inside.
Japan’s civilian nuclear energy programme already produces so much weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that in 2014, Tokyo agreed to ship excess material to the United States to mitigate fears that storage sites could be targeted by terrorists.⁴² The technical pathway is not a question. The political one is dissolving.
Move west.
Europe was already reeling before the Iran war — from Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, his contempt for NATO, his humiliation of allied leaders. The question of a European nuclear deterrent, once confined to strategic studies seminars, has become an active policy discussion. Whether it takes the form of French and British warheads stationed in Eastern Europe, or Germany and Poland developing their own capabilities, is unclear. But the trajectory is unmistakable — particularly with Vladimir Putin claiming to have moved nuclear-capable missile systems into Belarus.⁴³
The Iran war accelerated this. European allies watched the United States plunge a region into crisis without consulting them, absorb the economic consequences of a disrupted energy market, and demonstrate that American security guarantees serve American interests first and allied populations second. The Gulf states received the same lesson in starker terms — Iranian reprisals struck across the region while Washington’s overriding priority was protecting its own military bases, not the host nations whose territory those bases occupied.⁴⁴
If Iran survives the current onslaught — and every credible assessment suggests the regime will — the case for acquiring a nuclear deterrent will be impossible to argue against internally. Ramesh Thakur, professor emeritus and director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University, puts it simply: “For Iran, nuclear weapons are now the only thing that will guarantee regime survival. So why wouldn’t they get them?”⁴⁵ And if Iran acquires a weapon, the cascade in the Middle East becomes inevitable. Saudi Arabia has the resources and the motivation. Turkey has the ambition. Egypt has the historical precedent. The Gulf Cooperation Council states that absorbed Iranian missile strikes while the United States prioritised the defence of its own installations and Israel — shifting resources away from its security commitments to the Gulf nations hosting those very bases — have every reason to conclude that American protection is a fiction.⁴⁶
Even in Australia — a nation that has never seriously entertained nuclear ambitions — the discourse has migrated from the fringe to the margins of respectability.⁴⁷ In Taiwan, where the United States strongarmed Taipei into abandoning its secret nuclear programme in 1988, the question is being revisited — carefully, because a Taiwanese nuclear programme would hand Beijing a pretext for invasion, but revisited nonetheless, because the alternative is trusting the same American security commitment that Ukraine trusted.⁴⁸
This is the cascade. Not a single rogue state deciding to go nuclear in defiance of the international order. A systemic collapse in confidence — across allies, across regions, across the political spectrum — in the proposition that the rules-based order will protect anyone. The proliferation is not coming from America’s enemies. It is coming from America’s friends. And it is coming because America’s friends have watched what America does to nations that trust it.
The Protection Racket
There is a word for a system in which one party maintains a monopoly on force, offers protection to others in exchange for compliance, and destroys those who attempt to develop their own capability. It is not “non-proliferation.” It is a protection racket.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — the NPT — was signed in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. Its structure is straightforward. Five nations — the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China — are recognised as nuclear-weapons states. Every other signatory agrees not to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, the five commit to pursuing “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”⁴⁹
That was fifty-six years ago. The five nuclear-weapons states have not disarmed. They have modernised. The United States alone is spending an estimated $1.7 trillion on nuclear modernisation over the coming decades.⁵⁰ Russia has expanded its arsenal and moved nuclear-capable systems into Belarus. China is building new silos and expanding its warhead count. The United Kingdom has raised the ceiling on its stockpile. France maintains its force de frappe as a cornerstone of national strategy.
The bargain was: we keep ours, you give up yours, and in exchange we will work toward a world where no one has them. The first half of the bargain has been enforced with sanctions, sabotage, and war. The second half has never been honoured. Not once. Not by any of the five. The NPT’s disarmament obligation is not a suggestion. It is Article VI of a binding treaty. It has been violated every year for more than half a century by every nuclear-weapons state that signed it.⁵¹
And then there is Israel — which never signed the NPT, developed its arsenal in secret, is widely assessed to possess approximately ninety nuclear warheads, and has never faced sanctions, military action, or meaningful diplomatic pressure for its nuclear programme.⁵² The same nations that bombed Iran for enriching uranium to levels far below weapons grade have never demanded that Israel declare its arsenal, submit to inspections, or sign the treaty. The double standard is not hidden. It is structural. It is the system working as designed — protecting the armed and punishing the compliant.
This is the moral architecture that the non-proliferation establishment asks the world to respect. A treaty in which five nations exempt themselves from the obligations they impose on everyone else. A parallel reality in which a sixth nation — aligned with the enforcers — maintains a covert arsenal with total impunity. And a track record in which every nation that honoured the framework was attacked, while every nation that defied it survived.
The moral authority to demand non-proliferation does not rest on the text of the treaty. It rests on the conduct of the nations that enforce it. And that conduct has been so consistently, so spectacularly at odds with the treaty’s own principles that the authority is gone. It was not taken. It was spent — by the nations that held it, on wars and exemptions and broken deals, until there was nothing left.
You cannot bomb a nation for enriching uranium while your ally maintains an undeclared arsenal. You cannot tear up a deal that was working and then claim the moral high ground on proliferation. You cannot spend $1.7 trillion modernising your own warheads while telling the rest of the world that nuclear weapons make everyone less safe. You can do all of these things if you have the power. But you cannot do them and retain the credibility to ask anyone else to disarm.
The credibility is gone. And without it, the non-proliferation framework is not a legal order. It is a hierarchy enforced by violence — one in which the powerful keep their weapons and the compliant are destroyed.
The Question
Every piece of evidence came from Western conduct. Every nation that cooperated with the non-proliferation framework was attacked. Every nation that defied it survived. The single greatest diplomatic achievement in non-proliferation history — the JCPOA — was destroyed by the nation that authored it, and its superior replacement was bombed into irrelevance the day after it was announced. The nations now pursuing nuclear weapons are not rogue states. They are allies — driven not by aggression but by the rational, evidence-based conclusion that the American security guarantee is worthless and the rules-based order is a trap.
The case is airtight. The logic is perfect.
And that is the horror.
I do not believe any of this should happen. A world with thirty nuclear states is a world balanced on the edge of a razor — where one miscalculation, one rogue general, one hacked early-warning system could end everything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, and what they are selling is not safety. The proliferation I have just argued for would make every human being on earth less safe, including the citizens of every nation that acquires a weapon. The logic of deterrence works until it does not, and when it fails, it fails totally, permanently, and for everyone.
But I can no longer tell you why it should not happen. The argument against proliferation was the rules-based international order — the proposition that if you play by the rules, the rules will protect you. That argument has been destroyed, not by the nations seeking weapons, but by the nations that already have them. The case against nuclear proliferation was the moral authority of the non-proliferation framework. That moral authority is dead. We — the West — killed it. We killed it in Iraq. We killed it in Libya. We killed it in Ukraine. We killed it in Iran — twice, during negotiations, while the IAEA was verifying compliance and the ink on a better deal was still wet.
The people who could have made the argument against proliferation are the same people who burned it. And what they left behind is a world in which the case I have just made — the case I wish I could refute — has no honest answer.
If you believe that nuclear proliferation is dangerous, then you must direct your anger not at the nations pursuing it, but at the nations whose conduct made it rational. The question is not why Iran, or South Korea, or Japan, or Saudi Arabia would want a nuclear weapon. The question is what right we have to tell them they cannot — we, who broke every promise, tore up every deal, and bombed every nation that trusted us.
We made this case. Every word of it. Not with arguments. With actions.
And now the world has heard it.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (the “Duelfer Report”), Iraq Survey Group, 30 September 2004. The report concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the 2003 invasion and that Iraq’s nuclear programme had been ended by Saddam Hussein in 1991 following the Gulf War.
² Condoleezza Rice, interview with CNN, 8 September 2002: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
³ President George W. Bush, speech in Cincinnati, 7 October 2002: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
⁴ Vice President Dick Cheney, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, 26 August 2002: “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”
⁵ Department of Energy assessment that the aluminium tubes were “not consistent with a gas centrifuge end use” and were consistent with conventional rocket casings, cited in the National Intelligence Estimate, October 2002. The DOE’s dissent was classified and not shared with the public.
⁶ The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), formed August 2002 and chaired by Karl Rove, was tasked with coordinating the public relations campaign for the invasion of Iraq. Speechwriter Michael Gerson proposed the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” metaphor at a WHIG meeting in September 2002. Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, told the New York Times: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” See Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown Publishers, 2006), p. 35.
⁷ Human Rights Watch, “Judging Dujail: The First Trial Before the Iraqi High Tribunal,” November 2006. HRW concluded that the trial “was fundamentally flawed and did not meet key fair trial standards.” Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006.
⁸ Gaddafi announced the dismantlement of Libya’s WMD programmes on 19 December 2003. See Arms Control Association, “Chronology of Libya’s Disarmament and Relations with the United States.”
⁹ IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei verified Libya’s nuclear dismantlement beginning 27 December 2003. Libya ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention on 6 January 2004.
¹⁰ Paula DeSutter, US Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, testimony before the House International Relations Committee, 2004: Libya’s disarmament was described as “a model for other states.”
¹¹ Wilson Center, “Giving Up on the Bomb: Revisiting Libya’s Decision to Dismantle its Nuclear Program,” 23 October 2017. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi stated that Libya had sought security guarantees which the United States refused to provide.
¹² The United States provided 75 per cent of the aerial refuelling and 70 per cent of the intelligence for the NATO Libya campaign. The Security Council mandate (Resolution 1973) authorised civilian protection; the campaign was executed as regime change. See the author’s discussion in “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part I,” Fireline Press, March 2026.
¹³ Stimson Center, “Lessons From Libya’s Nuclear Disarmament 20 Years On,” 20 December 2023, citing Ayatollah Khamenei’s public remarks on Gaddafi’s disarmament.
¹⁴ Ukraine inherited approximately 1,900 strategic warheads deployed on its territory following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The warheads were Russian property; Ukraine did not have operational control or launch codes. See Harvard Kennedy School, “Budapest Memorandum at 25: Between Past and Future,” December 2019.
¹⁵ The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed on 5 December 1994 by the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine. The signatories pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and existing borders.
¹⁶ The United States insisted on the term “assurances” rather than “guarantees” to avoid implying a legal obligation to use military force. In the Ukrainian and Russian translations, the wording was rendered as “guarantees” regardless. See Stanford CISAC, “Budapest Memorandum Myths,” 4 December 2024.
¹⁷ Ukraine transferred its last nuclear warhead to Russia on 1 June 1996. Its last strategic nuclear weapon delivery vehicle was eliminated on 30 October 2001. Arms Control Association, “Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, and Security Assurances at a Glance.”
¹⁸ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Munich Security Conference, 19 February 2022: “Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success.”
¹⁹ Iran signed the NPT on 1 July 1968 and ratified it in February 1970. The fatwa against nuclear weapons, attributed to Supreme Leader Khamenei, declares that weapons of mass destruction are theologically un-Islamic because they are indiscriminate and civilians are the primary targets. See TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Ramesh Thakur’s recollection of a former Iranian president making this argument.
²⁰ The JCPOA constrained Iran’s nuclear programme: enrichment capped at 3.67 per cent, operating centrifuges reduced from approximately 19,000 to 6,104, low-enriched uranium stockpile limited to 300 kilograms, the Arak heavy-water reactor converted, and continuous IAEA monitoring implemented including the Additional Protocol. See Council on Foreign Relations, “What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?” updated 4 March 2026.
²¹ The United States withdrew from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018 while Iran was in verified compliance. All other signatories confirmed Iran’s compliance. The IAEA had verified compliance across multiple reporting cycles.
²² Israel launched Operation Rising Lion in June 2025, striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer on 22 June 2025, deploying fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs via B-2 Stealth bombers against Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. See TIME, “Trump’s War With Iran,” March 2026.
²³ The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 while negotiations in Oman were underway. See the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran” Parts I and II, Fireline Press, March 2026.
²⁴ IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated on 3 March 2026 that there was “no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb.” TIME, “Tulsi Gabbard Contradicts Trump on Key Claims About Iran War,” 18 March 2026.
²⁵ US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran had not rebuilt its enrichment capability following Operation Midnight Hammer, directly contradicting President Trump’s justification for the second war. TIME, 18 March 2026.
²⁶ North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests (2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 twice, 2017) and developed ICBMs. Arsenal estimates vary; most assessments place it at several dozen warheads.
²⁷ Kim Jong Un, address to military commanders, 25 March 2026, as reported by TIME, 27 March 2026. Kim stated that the “present situation clearly proves” North Korea was correct to maintain its nuclear arsenal, calling it “irreversible” and accusing Washington of “state-sponsored terrorism and aggression.”
²⁸ President Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006). Musharraf wrote that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Pakistan’s intelligence director: “Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.” Armitage denied using those exact words but confirmed a “strong, factual” exchange. CBS 60 Minutes, 22 September 2006.
²⁹ Musharraf wrote that he “war-gamed the United States as an adversary” and concluded that Pakistan could not withstand the onslaught. In the Line of Fire, 2006.
³⁰ The JCPOA constrained Iran’s nuclear programme as detailed in endnote 20. See also Council on Foreign Relations, “What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?” updated 4 March 2026.
³¹ IAEA verification of Iran’s compliance was confirmed across multiple reporting cycles. See Arms Control Association, “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) at a Glance.”
³² The United States withdrew from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018. See endnote 21.
³³ The circularity of US policy — withdrawing from the deal, citing the consequences of withdrawal as justification for war — is documented in the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part II,” Fireline Press, March 2026.
³⁴ Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation, 27 February 2026. Al-Busaidi announced that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium with full IAEA verification, and that he was confident a deal could be finalised within three months. See also Anadolu Agency, “Oman says US-Iran talks reach agreement on ‘zero stockpiling’ of enriched uranium,” 28 February 2026.
³⁵ Al-Busaidi, CBS Face the Nation, 27 February 2026: “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama’s time. This is something completely new.”
³⁶ Asan Institute for Policy Studies, “South Koreans and Their Neighbours 2025,” April 2025. Survey of 1,000 South Koreans conducted March 2025.
³⁷ Asan Institute for Policy Studies, “Worth the Squeeze: A Conditions-based Analysis of South Korean Public Support for Nuclear Deterrence,” May 2025. Majority support held under four out of five cost conditions.
³⁸ South Korea possesses the raw materials, civilian nuclear infrastructure, and technical capacity to produce a nuclear weapon within one to three years. See multiple assessments cited in CSIS, “Will South Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions Subside in the Next Five Years?” April 2025.
³⁹ TIME, “How War With Iran Could Lead to More Nuclear Weapons Around the World,” 27 March 2026, reporting an unnamed Japanese government security adviser’s remarks in December 2025.
⁴⁰ Taro Kono, former Japanese defence and foreign minister, public remarks reported by TIME, 27 March 2026.
⁴¹ Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks on the “three non-nuclear principles” and the hosting prohibition, reported by TIME, 27 March 2026.
⁴² In 2014, Japan agreed to ship excess weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to the United States to mitigate fears that storage sites could be targeted. TIME, 27 March 2026.
⁴³ Vladimir Putin’s deployment of nuclear-capable missile systems into Belarus. TIME, 27 March 2026.
⁴⁴ Iranian reprisals struck across the Gulf region while Washington prioritised the defence of its own military installations and Israel. See the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part I,” Fireline Press, March 2026.
⁴⁵ Ramesh Thakur, professor emeritus and director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Crawford School, Australian National University. Quoted in TIME, 27 March 2026.
⁴⁶ TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Thakur on the likelihood of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt pursuing nuclear deterrents if Iran acquires a weapon.
⁴⁷ TIME, 27 March 2026, noting that the possibility of Australia acquiring nuclear weapons “has slowly migrated from crackpot mutterings to fringe discourse.”
⁴⁸ Taiwan abandoned its secret nuclear programme under US pressure in 1988. TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Thakur that a Taiwanese nuclear programme remains “possible.”
⁴⁹ Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), opened for signature 1 July 1968, entered into force 5 March 1970. Article VI: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
⁵⁰ The $1.7 trillion figure covers the full thirty-year US nuclear modernisation programme as estimated by the Arms Control Association and the Federation of American Scientists, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s 2017 estimate adjusted for inflation. The CBO’s 2025 ten-year projection alone is $946 billion.
⁵¹ The International Court of Justice, in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, unanimously held that there exists “an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
⁵² Israel is widely assessed to possess approximately ninety nuclear warheads. It has never signed the NPT, has never declared its arsenal, and has never faced sanctions or military action for its nuclear programme. See Federation of American Scientists and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) nuclear forces assessments.