Beyond Nuclear International
Rapid escalation
With arms control agreements weakened and diplomatic safeguards fading, nuclear-armed conflicts are no longer an abstract possibility, warns Paul Saoke
The ongoing confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has created a moment of extraordinary danger for the international system. Public debate has largely focused on conventional escalation, missile strikes, drone warfare, and air campaigns. Yet beneath these visible dynamics lies a far more consequential risk: the steady erosion of the global nuclear restraint regime.
In today’s geopolitical environment, where arms control agreements have weakened and diplomatic safeguards are fading, nuclear escalation is no longer an abstract or distant possibility. It is becoming structurally conceivable.
Recent developments across the Middle East, including intensified exchanges and tensions around strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, illustrate how rapidly regional conflicts can acquire global significance. Military actions intended to degrade capabilities are increasingly entangled with broader strategic calculations, extending the scope and stakes of confrontation.
One immediate concern is the status of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile. Estimates suggest that Iran retains significant quantities of highly enriched uranium, potentially sufficient for weaponization if further processed. Reports that external actors are considering operations to secure or neutralize these materials underscore a dangerous reality: when nuclear assets exist within active conflict zones, the margin for miscalculation narrows dramatically.
If a state perceives that its nuclear capabilities or infrastructure are at imminent risk of destruction, the incentive to escalate pre-emptively increases. In such environments, actions intended as defensive or preventive can be interpreted as existential threats, triggering unpredictable responses.
Yet the immediate battlefield risks are only part of the problem. The deeper concern lies in the erosion of the international arms control architecture that has historically constrained nuclear competition.
Read MoreThe Iran nuclear crisis and how we got here
Trump destroyed a perfectly good nuclear agreement with Iran, then went to war to get another one, writes Lawrence S. Wittner
If the objective of the U.S. war upon Iran is to ensure that that country does not develop nuclear weapons, that goal was attained more than a decade ago through a far different approach than the one now being followed by the Trump administration.
Iran, as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, had agreed to forgo the development of nuclear weapons. Even so, fears grew during the early 21st century that Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used for peaceful purposes, might be diverted to the development of the Bomb, thereby throwing the volatile Middle East into yet another crisis, including a frenzied nuclear arms race.
As a result, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and Germany began lengthy negotiations with Iran, offering it various incentives to halt uranium enrichment. A key incentive was the lifting of international sanctions, which were having a severe impact on sales of Iran’s oil and, thus, its economy. After the election in 2013 of an Iranian reformer, Hassan Rouhani, as president, the negotiators came to a preliminary accord to guide their talks toward a comprehensive nuclear agreement.
The final agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was negotiated by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union. Signed in July 2015, it granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on its nuclear program. These included Iran’s agreement to ban production of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, ensure that its key nuclear facilities pursued only civilian work, and limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that it could operate. In addition, Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, unfettered access to its nuclear facilities and undeclared sites.
In the United States, the Iran nuclear agreement was strongly supported by the Obama administration, which played a key role in securing it, and by Democrats, but denounced by Republicans. Jeb Bush, then a leading presidential contender, called it “dangerous, deeply flawed, and short-sighted,” while U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that it was a “death sentence for the state of Israel.” Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, lobbied ferociously against U.S. acceptance of the Iran agreement, furiously attacking it as a “historic mistake.”
Despite the opposition, the agreement went into effect in January 2016 and, initially, had smooth sailing. The IAEA certified that Iran was keeping its commitments, nations repealed or suspended their sanctions, Iran’s oil exports surged, and the United States and European nations unfroze about $100 billion of Iran’s frozen assets.
In May 2018, however, Donald Trump, Obama’s successor as President, breaking with America’s European allies, unilaterally withdrew the U.S. government from the Iran agreement and announced the reimposition of oil and banking sanctions. “It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of this deal,” Trump announced. Assailing the Iran agreement as “defective to its core,” Trump condemned it for failing to deal with Iran’s ballistic missile program and its proxy warfare in the Middle East, as well as for the agreement’s 10-year sunset provision.
In response, Iranian President Rouhani, stating that the U.S. government had failed to “respect its commitment,” declared that he had “ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to be ready for action if needed, so that if necessary we can resume our enrichment on an industrial level without any limitations.” Even so, he promised, he would wait to speak about this with allies and the other signatories to the agreement.
Thereafter, things went downhill. Although France, Germany, and Britain sought to keep the agreement alive by evading the U.S. banking sanctions through a barter system, this effort eventually collapsed. Meanwhile, Trump got into a verbal brawl with Rouhani, threatening Iran with what he called “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Ultimately, Iran began exceeding the agreed-upon limits to its stockpile, enriching uranium to higher concentrations, and developing new centrifuges.
Although Joe Biden, as a 2020 presidential candidate, promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and “to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it,” by the time he was in office the relationship with Iran had deteriorated too far to make this feasible. Coming under a new, more reactionary leadership, the Iranian regime grew more repressive, as well as more distant from the United States and more politically toxic. As a result, a new agreement was increasingly out of reach.
In retrospect, are there any lessons that can be learned from these events?
One is that, to the degree that the development of nuclear weapons by Iran is currently a problem, it is a problem of Trump’s making. Or as Biden put it years ago, Trump’s pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was “a self-inflicted disaster.”
Another is that getting a country to forgo nuclear weapons development is easier to accomplish through international―and especially UN Security Council―action than through unilateral action. A threat from one nation to another can easily be viewed and dismissed as bullying. But pressure from a worldwide organization representing the community of nations has greater impact.
More generally, if nations are going to be asked (or pressured) to forgo development of nuclear weapons, it is useful to have a framework that treats nations equally. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty fosters this equality through a bargain, in which the non-nuclear nations forgo building nuclear weapons in exchange for the nuclear nations eliminating their own nuclear arsenals. The next time Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten to annihilate Iranian civilization, someone might remind them of that.
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
Headline photo: Operation Epic Fury, US Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons.
The opinions expressed in articles by outside contributors and published on the Beyond Nuclear International website, are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Beyond Nuclear. However, we try to offer a broad variety of viewpoints and perspectives as part of our mission “to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future”.
Nuclear Abolition. A Scenario
Tim Wallis’s book provides an optimistic view, but it’s also a methodical journey toward the nuclear-free world we all want, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
The Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is about to begin in New York City. There is no reason to be particularly optimistic about any positive outcome. Meanwhile, signatories to the treaty itself continue to defy it, most specifically the United States.
The US is a signatory to the NPT, which in its Article VI states: “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.”
It is the second shortest clause in the entire treaty. And yet, what we are seeing instead is a clear intent by the major nuclear powers, especially the US, Russia and China, to arm up rather than down.
Meanwhile, two nuclear armed states — the US and the undeclared nuclear weapon nation Israel — are busy attacking a non-nuclear armed state, Iran, that is also a signatory to the NPT. (Israel cannot join because it officially neither confirms nor denies whether it has the upwards of 200 nuclear weapons that everyone knows it does have.)
Read MoreRemembering Chornobyl
40 years on we are still asking the wrong questions and getting a lot of wrong answers, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Probably the most heinous crime, other than the avoidable accident itself and its immediate coverup, is the way that the Chornobyl (Ukrainian equivalent spelling) nuclear power disaster in Ukraine, 40 years old this week, has been used to downplay and normalize the long-lasting health impacts caused by that April 26, 1986 explosion.
Still today, the myth is repeated that “no one died” — meaning no one in the public. Instead, we are told over and over that it was only a handful of liquidators, sent in to deal with the immediate crisis, who were killed by the massive release of radiation resulting from the reactor explosion.
And still today, in part because of that myth, now so firmly cemented in the public and media narratives around the Chornobyl disaster, the true health effects of even just routine reactor operation, or the exposures suffered by communities living around active or abandoned uranium mines, or by those working in uranium enrichment or fuel fabrication facilities, are discounted and dismissed.
Worse still, we are now facing a concerted effort by the Trump administration to emasculate already weak radiation protection standards, once again ignoring females who are most vulnerable to harm, and especially pregnant women, babies and children.
Read MoreBombing Bushehr could be another Chornobyl
Iran’s civil nuclear program provided a smokescreen for the real US/Israeli agenda for war, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Watching Iran’s civilian infrastructure and countless of its civilians being mercilessly attacked by the US and Israel, followed by US President Donald Trump’s chilling threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight”, left no doubt that the motives behind this needless war had nothing whatever to do with Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons from its civil program, which Trump had already bragged was “obliterated” by the US/Israel bombing raids on all of Iran’s key nuclear facilities last June , was provided as justification for the current war by the White House.
But it’s a patently false premise, as was most unequivocally confirmed by Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer on the Iran desk. At a riveting legal symposium last week, organized by Ralph Nader and his team and looking at all the ways President Trump could, should and indeed must be impeached, Sterling vowed that “it’s been decades of the US interfering with Iran” and that the Iran task force at the CIA was set up “as an ongoing operation not for peace in Iran but regime change in Iran.”
The search for a justification for war has been ongoing, according to Sterling, “for 47 years since the 1979, the Iran revolution,” and, above all, it has been a “drive for revenge,” Sterling said, after the US was kicked out of Iran and its puppet, the Shah, deposed.
Sterling was the CIA case officer on Operation Merlin during the Clinton Administration, a plot designed to frame Iran by providing it with a false nuclear weapon component. Sterling found himself quickly wondering “is this actually something designed to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons or is it something designed to continue the rhetoric, to justify the rhetoric, to essentially plant evidence?”(Sterling is now well known as the CIA whistleblower who revealed the scheme to the New York Times.)
There was consensus throughout last week’s symposium that Iran’s nuclear ambitions did not constitute the real reason for the current war. If not regime change, which seems likely, it was certainly a grab for control of resources, as is so often the case. But, even if the June bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities did indeed do lasting damage, another nuclear threat remains in the form of Iran’s civil nuclear power plant at Bushehr.
There is a ceasefire in place — tenuous at best and almost certainly designed to squeeze concessions from Iran — that has at least for now spared any harm from befalling Bushehr. However, missiles have already landed perilously close to the plant four times, according to Iranian authorities, and the danger is by no means over. If destroyed in an attack — or even should the war cause an extended loss of external power — Bushehr could become the next Chornobyl, the source of a region-wide radiological catastrophe of monumental proportions.
The 1,000 megawatt Russian built VVER reactor at Bushehr sits on the Iranian coast. It is the same design as the reactors in Ukraine where alarm has already been raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international authorities, should any of those reactors be struck or seriously damaged by Russian missiles as the war in Ukraine continues to drag on.
But there has been significantly less international alarm about the similar risks at Bushehr, a disturbing trend as the US president dispenses with all the norms and protocols of war. One can only conclude that this media silence, at least in the western English language press, is based on who is doing the attacking.
Hitting the Bushehr civil nuclear power plant would constitute a war crime — in keeping with the murder of Iranian schoolgirls and all other attacks on civilian targets — because the Geneva Convention specifically defines a war crime to include hitting facilities that, if damaged or destroyed, would result in extensive loss of civilian life. A commercial nuclear power plant certainly falls into this category. Indeed, Russia has already started evacuating some of its personnel from the facility.
The particular dangers at Bushehr stem from the highly radioactive uranium fuel inside the reactor and stored in cooling pools and on-site casks. Any extended loss of power caused by an attack or a direct hit could see the fuel overheat and ignite, potentially leading to explosions. The resulting radiological releases would result in long-lasting radioactive fallout affecting vast areas in Iran, neighboring countries and beyond, contaminating agricultural land as well as sea water, an essential drinking water source for a region that relies on desalination.
Nuclear meltdowns deposit radioactive contamination where the wind blows, coming down during rainfall as fallout. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power disaster resulted in a 1,000 square mile exclusion zone, still too radiologically contaminated for human habitation even today.
Japan experienced a triple meltdown in March 2011, when three of the four Fuskushima Daiichi reactors exploded. The long gestation period for some diseases caused by persistent exposure to radiation, means that the true health outcomes from that disaster, whether fatalities or debilitating diseases, will not be known for many years.
Meanwhile, the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, has called for restraint in Iran, citing the “Seven Indispensable Pillars” he created to try to discourage attacks on nuclear power plants. But the IAEA’s alarm is disingenuous at best. In addition to being a UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA promotes the use and expansion of nuclear power around the world. This means the agency must shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the extreme danger presented by a potential attack on Bushehr.
Similarly, Grossi’s cries of alarm about the dangers faced by Ukraine’s nuclear power plants embroiled in a war, ring hollow when you consider the IAEA’s happy endorsement of new reactors planned for that country.
Further, Grossi’s “seven pillars” make an assumption we can now recognize as entirely unreliable — that the world leaders expected to abide by these protocols are consistently sane and rational. This is clearly undermined by the genocidal calls made by Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear imperialist and expansionist agenda in the region (and existing genocidal actions in Gaza and the West Bank). This leaves Grossi clinging to his pillars like a barrelman aloft the mast of a storm-tossed ship about to hit the rocks, his cries of alarm drowned out by the mayhem around him.
Finally, what exposes the lie about an imminent Iranian bomb most definitively is that there was a perfectly good protocol in place to avoid such an outcome in the first place. This was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that ensured Iran stayed within the boundaries of a civil nuclear program by undergoing highly stringent inspection and verification programs to ensure it did. Even at the time of the June 2025 bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, US intelligence and the IAEA were both insisting that Iran was not on the path to a nuclear weapon.
But all of this evidence can never silence a compulsive liar. “Do not be surprised if he comes back to trying to find justification or presenting justification that Iran was imminently developing nuclear weapons,” Sterling said of Trump during the Nader symposium. “Don’t trust any of it. Do not trust any of it.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. She is the author of the book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press. Any opinions are her own.
Headline photo: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine hold a press conference at the Pentagon about Epic Fury, March 19, 2026. (Photo: D. Applebaum/Wikimedia Commons.)
Nuclear costs of the Iran War
Trump’s recent threats to end civilization in Iran gave many a nuclear weapons expert the jitters, writes Sharon Squassoni
President Donald J. Trump’s recent threats to end civilization in Iran gave many a nuclear weapons expert the jitters. For them, existential threats mean only one thing: use of nuclear weapons. Thankfully, Trump’s April 7, 2026 threats were empty and possibly just a ruse to create a dramatic background for the temporary ceasefire in Iran.
To be clear, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would serve no earthly strategic or tactical purpose, but threats to use them can be potent: even a latent capability in the hands of Iran was regarded as too threatening for the United States to tolerate any longer, which reportedly drove the U.S. and Israeli military actions.
It’s hard to tell who’s winning or losing in this conflict, but already it’s clear that disruption of energy sources (Iran’s blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the U.S. and Israel striking Iran’s oil infrastructure) focuses attention like no other infrastructure attack. A sudden cutoff that shrinks supplies and distorts prices echoes in economies across the globe.
This is one reason the world was hesitant to impose sanctions on Iran’s oil some twenty years ago when Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was first unveiled. Today, the Iran war has underscored just how dependent the world continues to be on foreign sources of oil.
Would nuclear energy be any different?
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