It has been nearly two decades since any country elbowed its way into the club of nuclear-armed nations. President Trump, with his bombing of three Iranian nuclear installations last weekend, has vowed to keep the door shut.
Whether Mr. Trump’s pre-emptive strike will succeed in doing that is hard to predict, so soon after the attack and the fragile cease-fire 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, nonnuclear 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, Mr. Hill said, has become stronger for America’s allies in the Middle East and Asia. Since World War II, they have sheltered under an American security umbrella. But they now confront a president, in Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Joseph R. Biden Jr. 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 American 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 V. 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.
The lesson of Ukraine could end up being, “If you have nuclear weapons, keep them. If you don’t have them yet, get them, especially if you lack a strong defender like the U.S. as your ally and if you have a beef with a big country that could plausibly lead to war,” wrote Bruce Riedel and Michael E. O’Hanlon, analysts at the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, in 2022.
Saudi Arabia, an ally of the United States and archrival of Iran, has watched Tehran’s nuclear ambitions with alarm. Experts say it would feel huge pressure to develop its own weapon if Iran ever obtained one. The United States has tried to reassure the Saudis by dangling assistance to a civil nuclear program, but those negotiations were interrupted by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
And yet, for all the predictions of a regional arms race, it has yet to occur. Experts say that is a testament to the success of nonproliferation policies, as well as to the checkered history of countries that pursued weapons.
The Middle East is a messy landscape of dashed nuclear dreams. Iraq, Syria and Libya all had their programs dismantled by diplomacy, sanctions or military force. In the category of cautionary tales, Libya’s is perhaps the most vivid: Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Eight years later, after a NATO-backed military operation toppled his government, he crawled out of a drainpipe to face a brutal death at the hands of his own people.
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.
Mr. 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. Mr. Einhorn said that in delivering on his threat to bomb a nuclear-minded Iran, Mr. Trump had sent a reassuring message to American allies facing their own nuclear insecurities.
“In Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing,” Mr. 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.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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