Iran’s Nuclear Breakout Would Be Catastrophic For America

On October 26, Israel struck air-defense sites and missile facilities in Iran. Under pressure from the United States, Israel limited its retaliation. Apparently seeking deescalation, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive victory or reestablishing deterrence since the start of this latest Middle East war. 

Of course, such a policy can only lead to further escalation. Israel is sure to keep pressing the war against Iran’s proxies, which are merely tentacles of the Iranian regime itself. And Iran, having chosen this moment to get into a war with Israel, will not back down until Israel inflicts a punishment so painful that the mullahs in Tehran dare not risk another. Indeed, Iran has already signaled that it will retaliate with a “definitive and painful” response, perhaps in the coming days. Capitalizing on America’s (and Israel’s) inexplicable failure to attribute Iranian proxy attacks directly to it, Iran will likely make greater use of its militias in Iraq, thereby goading Israel into attacking Iraq while catching the few remaining U.S. troops there in a cross-fire.

Indeed, Iran’s coming escalation may have dire consequences for the United States. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently said that Iran must obtain the means of greater power and should not “refrain from obtaining means that might trigger the sensitivities of the [great] powers.” A leading Iranian parliamentarian, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, was more explicit, warning that the confrontation with Israel could make it necessary to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) altogether.

It is not a coincidence that Iran chose this moment to get embroiled in a war with Israel. Iran has reached the threshold of nuclear breakout. Whenever it makes the decision to start making nuclear warheads, Iran is now just weeks away from being able to test a device. Compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections is now the only thing standing between it and nuclear weapons. 

In response to sabotage at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in 2021, Iran began enriching uranium to 60 percent enrichment, a level that has no plausible civilian justification. As of August 2024, Iran had 363.1 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium. That’s enough to make at least a dozen warheads once further enriched to 90 percent enrichment, the threshold for “weapons-grade” uranium. Iran surely has secret nuclear facilities, but in order to take the final step to nuclear breakout, it will almost certainly need to use the massive facilities currently subject to IAEA inspections. 

Hence the critical importance of Iran’s continued compliance with the NPT. A nuclear-armed Iran would be as grave a threat to the United States as to Israel. Indeed, because it could entail the wholesale collapse of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, an Iranian decision to abandon the NPT would threaten civilization itself. Given the stakes, Iran’s abandoning the NPT will almost certainly force the U.S. to either accept a nuclear-armed Iran or do whatever is necessary to prevent it. 

To understand why, let’s go back to the North Korea nuclear crisis of 1994. 

How Iran Learned From North Korea

After North Korea blocked IAEA inspections and announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT, President Bill Clinton came close to bombing the nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Unfortunately for the world to come, Clinton blinked, and we were soon forced to accept the fact of a nuclear-armed North Korea. The cruel dictatorship in Pyongyang has held the world hostage ever since, extorting enough food and fuel to stay in power by rattling the nuclear saber whenever the fancy strikes, as happened again just last week. 

North Korea’s demonstration of how even the most depraved regime on Earth can attain nuclear weapons had important lessons for the mullahs in Tehran. First, it revealed something that nobody knew before: The Americans were not necessarily prepared to use force to defend the nonproliferation regime. Second, the “plutonium pathway” that North Korea had chosen was cheap and easy but had a single-point-of-failure that made it needlessly risky: It relied on an exposed nuclear reactor that could be destroyed by a single airstrike, as Saddam learned when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Furthermore, that single-point-of-failure also made for an early “red line.” North Korea’s hard-water reactor produced trivial amounts of electricity by power-plant standards; its obvious purpose was military. Once North Korea started discharging the reactor pool at Yongbyon, bombing it was a “now or never” decision for Clinton even though North Korea was still years away at the earliest from actually having a nuclear warhead. That marked the last point in time at which the location of North Korea’s fissile material could be known with certainty.

The mullahs had always been interested in nuclear weapons. Nukes could ensure the survival and success of the Islamic Revolution — and help it put an end to Israel, if only by scaring Jews into leaving the Holy Land altogether. After the U.S. in effect gave a green light to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the mullahs realized that they, too, could get nuclear weapons if they played their cards right. 

Unlike North Korea, however, they decided to focus on the more ambitious “uranium pathway.” This would be a far more expensive, sophisticated, and laborious undertaking. But it had several advantages. The uranium pathway doesn’t have a vulnerable single-point-of-failure. Rather than extracting weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods of a hard-water reactor, the uranium pathway for nuclear weapons relies on “centrifuge cascades” designed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade incrementally without having to go through a reactor at all. The centrifuge cascades can be dispersed and buried deep underground. And unlike weapons-grade plutonium (which is extremely radioactive), highly enriched uranium (HEU) can be detected by Geiger counters but is still safe to handle with bare hands, making transport and storage much easier.

Moreover, the incremental nature of the uranium pathway has no early Rubicon-style red line like the plutonium pathway does. The facilities involved in the uranium pathway for producing HEU are the same as those needed to produce “low enriched uranium” (or LEU) for use in commercial light-water reactors, the main difference being that the centrifuges have to run much longer. That meant that the mullahs could nest a weapons program within a civilian commercial program, exploiting perhaps the most significant loophole in the NPT, which is that dual-use facilities (those that have both military and civilian uses) are permissible as long as there is no “diversion” of nuclear material for weapons use. The year after the North Korea nuclear crisis, Iran signed an agreement with Russia to build a commercial light-water reactor at Bushehr. 

It is easier to develop nuclear weapons on the periphery of a large-scale “civilian” nuclear program based on uranium enrichment than to develop an entire plutonium pathway in secret. All one has to do is impose a few key restrictions on IAEA inspections. 

Sure enough, as the latest IAEA report shows, Iran has failed to account for the presence of enriched uranium detected at several undeclared locations, has failed to be fully transparent with respect to centrifuge manufacturing, and has secretly conducted high-explosives testing consistent with warhead design. As a result, the IAEA is not “in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.” 

Based on recent IAEA reports, one nuclear watchdog group concludes that Iran has completed all the steps needed for full nuclear weapons breakout and — whenever it makes the decision to go nuclear — could produce up to nine nuclear warheads in a month, and 15 in five months. Moreover, it was discovered last year that Iran has built a new nuclear facility under a mountain near Natanz that is so deep underground that it might be beyond the reach of conventional weapons. With this facility, it will be able to make nuclear warheads even faster.

Whatever the scope of Iran’s secret nuclear activities, it almost certainly has not been producing nuclear weapons. Rather, what Iran has been trying to do in secret is get ready to produce nuclear weapons. In order to engage in serial production of nuclear weapons, Iran will need the far-flung facilities that it has developed under the guise of a civilian program. All it has to do is to stop cooperating with the IAEA and withdraw from the NPT (whether formally or de facto) so that it can pull a veil of secrecy over the entire program. 

From that point forward, we will have to assume that Iran is a nuclear weapon state. North Korea didn’t conduct its first test of a nuclear device until 2006, but by then the U.S. had long since been forced to accept the high probability that it was a nuclear weapons state.

Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT will result in a cascade of disastrous consequences. Saudi Arabia has said that if Iran gets the bomb, it will get one, too. Turkey and Egypt are then likely to join the club. And consider how desperate Israel’s position will become. It will have to assume not just that any ballistic or cruise missile launched from Iran could be nuclear-tipped, justifying the use of its own nuclear deterrent, but that Iran could smuggle a nuclear device into Tel Aviv with plausible deniability that it had done so. 

Iran’s ‘Missile Terrorism’ Against Israel Is an Existential Threat

The “July War” of 2006 between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah left Iran’s most powerful proxy with little to show for its effort other than several thousand dead fighters. After that, Hassan Nasrallah, the recently departed leader of Hezbollah, loudly professed solidarity with the Palestinians every time a war between them and Israel erupted, but largely kept his powder dry. Iran had apparently decided to husband Hezbollah for use at the right time and focus on building up its arsenal of rockets in the meantime. Within a few years, Hezbollah had ten times as many rockets as it had before the July War — more than most NATO countries.

But for what purpose exactly did Iran mean to use Hezbollah? 

Iran’s ultimate goal is the survival and expansion of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, particularly across the Arab heartland. Arabs have long been hostile towards encroaching Persians, but the mullahs hit on a galvanizing cause that might help them unify the Arab world: the destruction of Israel. Terrorizing Jews into abandoning Israel became a defining commitment of the regime, something it hopes to accomplish through what one might call “missile terrorism.” 

Iranian missile terrorism is very different from your garden-variety Arab terrorism. Palestinian terrorists, for example, are scary but not that scary. True enough, Palestinian suicide bombers killed thousands of Jews on buses, in restaurants, and at wedding venues between 2001 and 2003. But Israel’s 2002 “Defensive Shield” operation in the West Bank, along with beefed-up security and a “separation wall” in the West Bank, greatly reduced that threat. Car-ramming and marketplace knifings are terrifying. But even in the most dangerous part of Israel, pedestrians are a lot safer than in, say, Baltimore. Even Hamas’ unspeakable crime of Oct. 7, 2023, has only made Israelis more determined than ever to prevail; other than that, all Hamas has to show for its “Al Aqsa storm” is the destruction of Gaza.

As practiced by Iran and its proxies, on the other hand, missile terrorism is an entirely different kind of threat, as the July War itself had shown. The 100+ rockets that Hezbollah fired at northern Israel every day for a month caused few casualties. But they scared a third of Israel’s population into bomb shelters for weeks. Many Israelis started leaving for the United States, in many cases indefinitely. 

Hence, missile terrorism poses a threat to the existence of Israel that is far beyond the potential casualty figures: A state that cannot make its people feel safe going about their daily lives, that can’t even keep its airports open because of terrorism, is in danger of failing. Whereas Palestinian terrorism targets Jews for the sheer satisfaction of murdering them, Iranian terrorism targets Israelis’ faith in the state of Israel. Iran has realized what too many Israeli leaders have not: that missile terrorism is an existential threat. Missile defenses such as Iron Dome have lulled too many Israelis into thinking that the threat is manageable. It isn’t. 

So here is the question. After holding back from helping Hamas in its confrontations with Israel for nearly 20 years, why did Iran decide to join the fight this time? Perhaps Iran sensed a unique opportunity to combine the missile terrorism of all its proxies and the mayhem that antisemites and wannabe terrorists could cause in Western cities and universities to deliver a fatal blow to the morale of Israel. 

Maybe. But alas, Iran’s decision to fight Israel now was likely part of a much more dangerous plan. 

Iran Has a Weak Hand, But It’s Willing to Take Great Risks

Given the stage that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has reached, the timing of Hezbollah’s attack — a day after Oct. 7, 2023 — is just too perfect to have been a coincidence. 

That’s not to say that Iran or Hezbollah knew in advance of Hamas’s plan to attack on Oct. 7. Just as Israel would be foolish to share precise attack plans with the leak-prone Americans, Hamas would risk a leak by sharing its plan with the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which are both infested with moles. 

But the IDF discovered evidence in Yahya Sinwar’s final hiding place that Hamas had tried to convince Iran to join the attack for more than a year before Oct. 7, and that Iran demurred. So we know that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’s intentions — as, in all likelihood, did Israeli intelligence, which probably greeted Hamas’s evergreen dreams of genocide with a fateful yawn.

Given the dispatch with which Hezbollah joined the fight after Hamas’s attack, it seems very unlikely that it acted on impulse. More likely Iran and Hezbollah had carefully considered the implications of Hamas’ plans and had decided that, under the right circumstances, they were ready for war with Israel. Whether Iran gave a green light or just tacit assent is not particularly important. The mullahs had plenty of time — years in fact — to think through the chain of events that might result from a major Hamas attack and how they could turn all those highly expendable Palestinian civilians to their advantage. 

Iran appears to have decided sometime in 2023 that should Hamas indeed execute a significant attack against Israel, it would quickly open up the other fronts available to it, starting with its militias — Hezbollah operating from Lebanon and Syria, the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. 

Then, depending on Israel’s response to the militias’ missile terrorism campaign, Iran would have in reserve several more cards that it had spent decades patiently preparing. Israeli operations, overt and covert, against Iranian military assets across the region had become increasingly bold. Should Israel cross the red line of overtly violating Iranian sovereignty — for example by killing an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general in an Iranian consulate, as happened on April 1 of this year — Iran was prepared to retaliate directly against Israel by launching a wave of ballistic and cruise missile attacks.

Any such move would entail high risk but also a potentially huge payoff. The best that could happen was that the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of pulling Israel back from reestablishing deterrence would continue even after an Iranian attack. (This gamble, too, was destined to pay off: The hardliners in Tehran could hardly believe their luck when President Biden told Israel to “take the win” and forebear to retaliate against Iran for launching hundreds of ballistic and cruise missiles directly at Israeli cities in April. U.S. missile defense for Israel was now serving to protect Iran from the consequences of its aggression.) The U.S. might even force Israel to accept a “new normal” of persistent missile terrorism, as France and other U.S. allies would like it to do, further eroding Israeli morale. 

The worst that could happen would be a devastating Israeli counterstrike against military, energy, and nuclear infrastructure (which may well happen in the next round of escalation). But even in that case, Iranian planners likely assessed that there was only so much pain that the tiny state of Israel could inflict on Iran. Israel has a small navy and no aircraft carriers. Its submarine force is part of a credible nuclear deterrent, but of limited benefit against Iran otherwise; sea-launched cruise missiles carry relatively small conventional payloads. Israel’s mighty air force was definitely a force to be contended with, having humbled the region’s most powerful armies before, but it had no heavy bombers. 

In short, the mullahs likely thought, Israel is not the United States. It could inflict enormous pain on Iran, but it likely could not deliver a fatal blow to the state itself as the Americans did to Iraq in a single night of shock and awe. 

Israel’s recent destruction of all four Russian-made S-300 antiaircraft batters — the only truly capable air defenses that Iran possessed — has made much of Iran’s nuclear and other critical infrastructure vulnerable to another Israeli strike, which is likely to increase Israel’s deterrence. But much of that infrastructure is buried deep underground, beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional bunker-busters. And given America’s foolish restraint of Israel, the mullahs are reasonably certain that they can survive even a fierce Israeli counterattack.

They still have a nuclear option, as it were, and the Palestinians may have given them the perfect cover to use it. The North Korea nuclear crisis showed that an unprovoked decision to withdraw from the NPT would force the U.S. to at least consider using force to destroy a rogue nuclear program. Iran could risk provoking an Israeli attack, but not an American one. 

On the other hand, a large-scale Israeli attack on Iran was sure to be condemned by many governments around the world, including a number on the Board of Governors of the IAEA. Withdrawing from the NPT in response to an Israeli attack, with the justification that it was being attacked by a nuclear power and needed nuclear weapons of its own, would be seen by many governments as an understandable response. Opposition from allies could make America hesitate. 

Moreover the risk of such a move could be significantly mitigated, and here a page from the North Korea playbook might work brilliantly. The NPT allows states to withdraw with 90 days’ notice. When North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 1993, it waited to see what America’s reaction would be. When it seemed that Clinton might be prepared to use force, North Korea went down to the wire and “suspended” its withdrawal from the NPT a few days before the 90 days were up. North Korea then bluffed its way to nuclear weapons by threatening to unleash war on the Korean peninsula, a real bluff considering North Korea’s dictatorship could not have survived three days of such a war. 

We should expect similar gamesmanship from Iran. We are at “the River” in Texas Hold’em. All the community cards have been revealed. Iran has a weaker hand than its enemies but is willing to risk far more. Israel is keeping its cards close to the vest, American surveillance and leaks notwithstanding, but its one ace — nuclear weapons — is worthless now. America has by far the strongest hand in the round, but it has become risk-averse to the point of torpor: its increasingly besotted national security establishment equates deterrence with provocation, which is the strategic equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Iran likes its chances. 

Obama Undermined the Diplomatic Option to Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program. 

When Iran’s nuclear program was first discovered in 2003, the U.S. could have nipped it in the bud with a single airstrike. The argument against that move at the time (and against military action since) was that Iran would quickly reconstitute the program. 

If that was the right answer, it was the wrong question. The military option on Iran’s nuclear program has to be assessed in terms of what Thomas Schelling would call a “tacit negotiation” between the U.S. and Iran: Properly conceived, the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program would be an important but incidental benefit of military force; the right goal — as with sanctions — would be to convince Iran to abandon the program. 

And for that strategic objective, the target list is much broader and includes everything the regime needs to survive in the short term. That means oil refineries, power plants, ports, and military command-and-control, up to and including Iran’s Ministry of Defense and the offices of the Atomic Organization of Iran. Targeting any of those early on could have fatally undermined the internal influence of Iran’s nuclear hawks.

Solving problems before they become crises is always a good idea. In international relations, the time to stop a dangerous deterioration in the status quo is at the start, before it has run its course. That is the single most important lesson of the chain of events that led to World War II, and it is particularly true in the case of a rogue nuclear program. It would have been much easier to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions when it had just one pilot facility that it half-expected somebody to bomb at any moment. 

Now the nuclear weapons program is the crown jewel of the Islamic Revolution, to which the mullahs have subordinated all other priorities. As Henry Kissinger wrote, in order to avoid the use of force, it is sometimes necessary to threaten its use. Because we have not done that, we are now playing defense at the one-yard line and may have no other option. 

Though its chances of success were never very high, there was a diplomatic option for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program — until President Barack Obama cashiered it in his Joint Comprehensive Plan Action (JCPOA), one of the most consequential examples of aiding and abetting terrorism in world history.

During the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. was able to orchestrate a powerful Iran sanctions regime, backed by the U.N. Security Council with the support of Russia and China. That was a remarkable feat considering that Iran is an important client of Russia and China is more dependent on Iranian oil than any other major economy. Obama, to his credit, built on those sanctions, which soon brought Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse. In 2014, Iran’s currency lost more than half its value. 

But just in the nick of time, Obama came to the mullahs’ rescue with the JCPOA, which dismantled the sanctions regime and provided Iran with a massive infusion of cash, just to secure Iran’s forbearance to go nuclear for a few more years. Needless to say, Iran took the money and ran. 

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. moved quickly to abandon the JCPOA. But alas, its benefits for Iran had already largely accrued. Obama’s cash infusion (which his dunce Secretary of State John Kerry had promised would not be used for terrorism) allowed Iran to lavishly fund the IRGC and Hezbollah. Even worse, the international sanctions regime could not be resurrected. The U.S. imposed “maximum pressure” through sanctions of its own, but while those exacted a heavy price, the reality was that Obama had fatally undermined the diplomatic option for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. 

In the supposed interest of peace and stability, the U.S. has waited until its most virulent enemy is in a position to turn the world upside down. The moment that the mullahs have been waiting so patiently for, suffering through decades of sanctions and privations, is finally here. They have a nuclear weapon within their grasp. They need but seize it, knowing that the odds of America’s folding are in their favor, and overwhelmingly so, as long as Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is in power.

All Iran needs to do now is withdraw from the NPT, and it will be a brave new world.

Mario Loyola, a professor at Florida International University and a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University, is a former defense policy adviser at the Pentagon and in the U.S. Senate.