The new conflagration in the Persian Gulf, the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran before the United States intervened with its bunker-buster bomb on the Fordow nuclear site, appeared to be a conflict between a State armed with nuclear weapons and one seeking to acquire them. There is talk of Benjamin Netanyahu’s gamble, which since October 7th, 2023, has engaged Israel on seven war fronts and in a massacre in Gaza that has no end. But, in reality, Israel’s commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is a long-term strategic decision shared by all its political currents and known as the Begin doctrine.
Wars are part of the revisions of history
in political theories and strategies; this also applies to the norms and doctrines of international law, the paper walls
of the liberal conception of international relations that we already saw crumbling in the first Gulf War in 1991.
The NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was approved in 1968 by the UN General Assembly. Initially signed by three declared nuclear powers – the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain – and 40 non-nuclear States, it was intended at the time above all to prevent a German bomb. France and China joined in 1992, and subsequent enlargements have brought the current number of signatories to 191. The treaty committed the powers armed with nuclear deterrents (the five permanent members of the Security Council) to non-proliferation, while protecting the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes by other powers, under a surveillance regime overseen by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The role of international treaties cannot be completely denied, and neither can abstention from or denunciation of such treaties, but it is clear that objective power relations prevail in international relations between States. Alongside the written treaty, there is therefore a real NPT, which is an expression of the general and regional power relations between the powers as they evolve, or, if you like, an expression of a given order of unitary imperialism. It is necessary to assess the extent to which the crisis in the world order affects this aspect of international relations, defined by some as the nuclear order, or in any case the condition of nuclear moderation that has limited the proliferation of atomic deterrents over the decades.
The real NPT was based on a series of implicit corollaries. Several powers belonging to the Atlantic Alliance were granted a sort of nuclear sharing through the extended deterrence exercised by the United States. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy – and, with a less clear status, Turkey – host American nuclear weapons. The formula, at least for Germany, involves American bombs carried by German aircraft; for some, this is a real double key that would give Germany nuclear status in the event of conflict, while for others this is less true because the final decision remains with Washington. Japan does not have this status, in accordance with the three non-nuclear principles that have so far constrained Tokyo not to possess, produce, or allow the introduction of nuclear weapons into the archipelago. However, the US has always refused to specify whether its ships or submarines stationed at Japanese bases carry nuclear weapons.
A second corollary concerns Germany and Japan, powers defeated in the Second World War that became key allies of the US in the two oceans but also powers to be kept under conditional sovereignty. The Germans and Japanese were eventually granted the status of nuclear latency or threshold status, i.e., they possessed all of the productive and technical requirements for the bomb and its missile carriers, but were frozen a few months or even weeks from the final operational assembly. This status is more the result of a process and a series of battles throughout the 1970s, especially for Japan. Under President Jimmy Carter, attempts were made to deny Tokyo consent to process nuclear waste from nuclear power plants, a source of plutonium for warheads, even though there were those within the administration who were in favour of granting this threshold condition, in the name of strategic interests of the alliance. Japan held its ground for years, until Ronald Reagan, in political agreement with Yasuhiro Nakasone, gave the final approval. Since then, some have argued that nuclear latency is a kind of additional protocol that Tokyo has secured, complementing the Japan-US Security Treaty.
A third corollary concerns certain countries that had launched proliferation programmes starting with civil nuclear power or by acquiring critical materials, but were dissuaded from doing so: Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa. Pretoria, in secret collaboration with Israel, had gone so far as to assemble four devices, but declared that it had dismantled them. According to Joseph Nye, the recently deceased theorist of soft power, this nuclear moderation is the actual result of the NPT and the Carter administration's active commitment to non-proliferation, in which Nye himself played a significant role.
Finally, some small and medium-sized powers have succeeded in recent decades in acquiring a nuclear deterrent: Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Vipin Narang was an adviser in the Biden administration and the architect of the 2024 review of the US nuclear doctrine. His Seeking the Bomb [2022] suffers from the excessive attempt to reduce the different paths of proliferation to a conceptual scheme, with sprinter
powers that went for speed, sheltered
powers that sought a protected path, and hider
powers that have had to move in secret. However, the conclusion is decisive: powers that were themselves protected by other powers were successful in proliferation.
Israel’s deterrent, estimated by SIPRI at 90 warheads, was aided by German funding, French technology, and American strategic backing. On the basis of recently declassified documents, Narang certifies the artifice of pretended ignorance
proposed by Henry Kissinger to Richard Nixon, according to which the US should accept complicity in Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons
, provided that Tel Aviv undertook not to make that possession public.
Pakistan now has 170 warheads. As we shall see later, it received the same assent from the US in the context of the 1979 war in Afghanistan, and was later supported by China. India, which now has 180 warheads, made its deterrent public with a test in 1998 after Pakistan’s deterrent had become known; after mild sanctions by the Clinton presidency, New Delhi received de facto endorsement from George W. Bush. North Korea, with 50 warheads, is only a partial exception to the rule, in that it is believed to have obtained nuclear technology from Russia and exploited China’s benign neglect, while relying on its own status as a buffer State.
Other States, that have attempted a nuclear weapons programme without the protection of other powers, have been stopped militarily by the United States or Israel: Libya, Iraq, Syria and, for now, Iran. This is the real NPT: as is evident, it reflects the power relations between States and the changes in those relations.
So far, all military operations to block attempts at nuclear proliferation have occurred in the Middle East. From Israel’s point of view, this is the application of the Begin doctrine. It could also be seen as the application of the Carter doctrine, formulated in early 1980 after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which established that the United States would prevent any hegemonic control of the Gulf and the Middle East. All subsequent American presidencies have adhered to it, and the wars of 1991 and 2003 were ultimately its implementation.
However, the documents cited in Seeking the Bomb show that Pakistan’s President General Zia-ul-Haq was given an endorsement of his nuclear programme by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski of the same tenor as the pretended ignorance
that Kissinger had agreed with Golda Meir; Deng Xiaoping welcomed the decision. There have been discussions for years about the threat of an Islamic bomb, understood as the risk of proliferation among powers that are not yet Westphalian States and are permeated by apocalyptic religious cultures. It has also been pointed out that this threat stemmed from the relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, since the Saudis were the financiers of the Pakistani bomb and could expect to be repaid with materials for a future deterrent for the petro-monarchy. The fact is that at the origins of Pakistani proliferation were the countermeasures put in place by Brzezinski and Carter, a champion of non-proliferation, to confront Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR in Afghanistan: the real secret corollary to the Carter Doctrine was the Sunni Islamic bomb granted to Islamabad.
Today, with the twelve-day war, at issue is the interdiction of the Shiite Islamic bomb; it is as of yet unknown how successfully this objective has been achieved. Paradoxically, the attacks on the sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan may lead us to opposite conclusions. On the one hand, it can be argued that the rules of power of the old order still apply. Iran has been prevented from proliferating nuclear weapons because neither Russia nor China wanted to be its protector.
A widespread theory holds that Netanyahu has captured Donald Trump in his military logic: the tail that wags the dog, as goes the American aphorism. Israel is also said to have crushed Trump’s own attempt at negotiation, accusing him of wanting to resurrect the JCPOA treaty, the negotiating framework that defined a controlled regime for uranium enrichment in Iran under international guarantee. However, it is forgotten that the most systematic opposition to the JCPOA, based on the argument that the treaty transformed the context from preventing proliferation
to managing proliferation
, came from Kissinger. The doyen of the American realist school went so far as to take a preventive war by Israel almost for granted. In this sense, Trump, who was decisive in the decapitating blow against the Iranian bomb, could rightly stake a claim to be the executor of Kissinger’s line.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the crisis in the world order is sweeping away what remains of both the real NPT and non-proliferation policies. At the regional level, there are those who believe that Tehran, however much its plans have been slowed down, will be pushed to cross the threshold of nuclear deterrence, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt following suit. This would mean five nuclear powers in the most unstable region in the world.
On a global level, the extreme and ostentatious exercise of unilateral decision-making by the United States undermines its system of alliances. Tokyo sees its nuclear threshold status being called into question and is ill-disposed towards pressure for further increases in military spending: it has withdrawn its participation in the NATO summit, as has Seoul.
In Europe, the decision to rearm to 5% of GDP within a NATO rebalanced on the European pillar is a crucial step. However, it is also a path made narrower and more difficult by the erratic and spectacular manifestations of American unilateralism, starting with the doubts that Trump continues to raise about Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, which commits member States to mutual defence.
As for the United States, finally, the twelve-day war certainly saw the deployment of a military machine that is still unrivalled, but this is accompanied by internal political division and an unsustainable situation in terms of public deficit and debt. The most uncertain factor is this combination of strength and weakness in a power that no longer wants to – or is no longer able to – share the responsibility of guaranteeing the global order.