Nuclear dominoes could start falling after Iran strikes
10:48 Share

This summer, Instacart is bringing back your favorites from 1999 with Prices from 1999. That means 90s prices on juice pouches that ought to be respected, 90s prices on box mac and cheese, and 90s prices on ham, cheese, and cracker lunches. Enjoy all those throwbacks and more at throwback prices, only through Instacart.

$4.72 maximum discount per $10 of eligible items. Limit one offer per order. Expires September 5th while supplies last. Discount based on CPI comparison. Is your cash working hard for you right until the very moment you need it?

It could be if it was in a Wealthfront cash account. With Wealthfront, you can earn 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks until you're ready to invest, nearly 10 times the national average. And you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7, 365. 4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn. And it takes just minutes to transfer your cash to any of Wealthfront's expert-built investing accounts when you're ready. Wealthfront.

Money works better here. Go to Wealthfront.com to start saving and investing today. Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC. Wealthfront is not a bank. The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY. The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024. Go to Wealthfront.com to start today.

Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Stuart Willey and Alex Dibble. The attacks on Iran, which were aimed at hindering its nuclear program, could not only heighten tensions in the Middle East, but also, some analysts fear, trigger a new global arms race.

As Israel and the US act unilaterally against Iran, states may choose to ignore constraints and accelerate their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It's an issue Professor Nicholas Wheeler of the University of Birmingham has been writing about. He's a senior fellow at the nuclear risk think tank BASIC and is with us now.

Nick, President Trump has claimed victory, saying his bombs have stopped the nuclear threat from Iran. Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu says they've removed the threat of nuclear annihilation. Are those gentlemen right? Is the world now safer? They clearly think so or want us to think so. I mean, the first question, I guess, is have they actually eliminated the threat? And I think that's really problematic.

Because, first of all, it's not clear that all the enriched uranium has actually been obliterated, to use Trump's term. So there's the question about where it actually is. Given that the Americans gave warning before the attack, that obviously provided some window of time for the enriched uranium to be moved to other places.

And even though the Iranians have, prior to these attacks, a large stockpile of enriched uranium, up to 60%, we think, and maybe more, it's still a long way from there to actually developing a weapon. So there's uncertainty about whether uranium it is. And then there's the question mark about whether Iran will now make a decision, having been attacked...

to weaponize. So my argument would have been that Iran has not gone for full weaponization, believing that that would be the circumstances under which it would be attacked.

My argument would also be that it's acquired that stockpile of enriched uranium as a hedge against the uncertain future of perhaps one day it would need that weapon and it needs to put itself in that position where it could race for the bomb. So when you ask the question, is the world safer? It may actually have accelerated these attacks by Israel and crucially the US may actually have accelerated Iran's determination to acquire the weapon and to take those steps.

and they may have clandestine enrichment facilities that we know nothing about. It's a big country. Up until these strikes, Iran was cooperating with the UN's nuclear agency, the IAEA. There were intensive inspections of their sites. They insisted their nuclear program was peaceful. But now Tehran seems minded to block the IAEA. What is the argument, therefore, to keep them in the non-proliferation treaty?

Well, I think their calculation has to be if they do try to develop the weapon and that becomes openly known, then of course they risk further attacks and further strikes. And it becomes much easier for those people attacking them to legitimize and justify what they're doing. So if Iraq, Iran, sorry, wants to maintain international public opinion more on its side, and if it wants to show that it's living up still to its obligations, then...

then it may be in its interest not to leave the treaty and to risk sanctions and all the consequences that would bring. And as I say, I think if they were to accelerate for the weapon...

They do risk, of course, increased attacks, and it becomes harder to criticize the United States for attacking them, as we did last week, if Iran is actually trying to develop a weapon in defiance of the NPT. How will other countries, maybe ones in Iran's neighborhood or the likes of North Korea, be looking at what's been going on in the last few weeks?

Well, I think the general picture, you know, is one in which the signal that's clearly sent is that if you don't have nuclear weapons, you make yourself vulnerable to regime change and military action. And I think that lesson is being learned over and over again. So you go back to Iraq in 2003, Saddam didn't have nuclear weapons. You go to Libya in 2011,

Libya. Gaddafi had actually given up his program in 2003 to try and come back in after the Lockerbie bombing. And of course, you look at Ukraine, 2022. Ukraine, of course, gave up insofar as it controlled these weapons. And now you have this. So people out there are going to look at it and say, but look at North Korea. North Korea left the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003.

tested a nuclear device in 2006, and hasn't actually been attacked or had any military use of force against it. So the lesson that clearly these strikes show, I think, and which is why it's such a dangerous development for me, is that it really underlines the argument that if you want to be secure in dangerous neighborhoods, then national nuclear capabilities become extremely important.

Nick, you've also argued that uncertainties as to whether the US would step in with its nuclear umbrella to support allies are adding to the worries here. You've got, you know, people in Poland, you know, senior people,

like the Prime Minister, raising questions about whether Poland might need some kind of capability in the future. You've got debates about whether Europe needs to start thinking about some kind of independent nuclear capability separate from the US to protect it against future Russian aggression after Ukraine. You've got people in South Korea and Japan

questioning whether in the face of growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear capabilities, the United States can really be relied upon ultimately in a crisis to sacrifice Chicago for Seoul or Tokyo. The same question that de Gaulle asked Kennedy all those years ago in 1960, would the United States really be prepared to sacrifice New York for Paris?

So growing doubts about that American extended deterrence, particularly around Trump's unpredictability. And suddenly the proliferation picture starts to look really quite concerning and alarming. And I think a lot of people are now worried that proliferation is more likely in the next 10, 15, 20 years.

You know, potentially you could see another half dozen, maybe more nuclear armed states. And that starts to raise all sorts of concerns about just how what people are calling the third nuclear age, just how stable that might be.

What is the solution here? Are there alternatives beyond bombing nuclear programs out of existence? That's a good question. I mean, I would say that, you know, I do a lot of work in my research on the challenges of building trust between nuclear armed adversaries. And one of the starting points for thinking about that increasingly is that you can't begin to build trust until you've actually dissolved distrust. And the Secretary General talked at the opening of the last Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference about the need to replace distrust with dialogue.

So, I mean, and I think in the end, if the risks of nuclear conflict and nuclear proliferation are to be rolled back, and if we're to see some kind of marginalization of nuclear weapons and international relations rather than what we're seeing, which is an increasing salience of nuclear weapons, then it's going to require...

the major nuclear armed states to radically transform their relationships. What I mean by that is, in the end, we got the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the late 1960s because the United States and the Soviet Union recognized a common interest in reducing nuclear risks. You need a similar common consciousness of the importance of restraint at the highest levels of nuclear diplomacy. And at the moment, that's extremely difficult to get.

Because the United States and Russia, up until Trump came in, have been mired in deep distrust. We just don't know what the trajectory of the US-Russian relationship is going to be.

So in the absence of the kind of cooperation and consciousness of common interest and recognition of the importance of restraint, and if you think about the other dimension we haven't talked about is that the arms control regime is in tatters. The guardrails are fundamentally falling apart. And in the end, arms control is predicated on the idea that adversaries can share a common interest in restraint.

If you don't have that sense of common interest, placing a common value on security of one another, then it's extremely difficult. Is there any hope or has the starting pistol now been fired on a new nuclear arms race? My answer would be that unless there is that shift to the very highest levels, you know, it's very difficult. But we shouldn't say never, you know, in international politics, because in 1983, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire.

In November 1985, he sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, and they talked about a nuclear war, you know, must never be fought and can never be won.

And they started a journey that actually was critical to the end of the Cold War. So there are possibilities and moments in history that open up. But at the moment, I think, you know, it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic about the risks of nuclear conflict. And I think we're at the most dangerous. I sometimes ask people whether, because I grew up as a student in sort of in the early 80s,

And I sometimes ask, you know, friends and colleagues, you know, is this more dangerous than 1983? I think it's certainly the most dangerous point since 1983, even if it's not more dangerous. And so the need for bringing restraint to bear on these questions, I think,

has never been more urgent. Okay, Nick, thank you. That is Nicholas Wheeler, who is a professor of international relations at the University of Birmingham. For more on the calculations going on in Tehran, listen back to our episode from Friday, where we asked Trump versus the Ayatollah, what next for Iran? For now, that's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

We'll be right back.

I'm Will Kelleher. Join me and Alex Lowe for The Red Lions, a special three-part series on the history of the British and Irish Lions from 1950 to this year's Tour of Australia.

With first-hand accounts from the players themselves, it tracks the rancour and revival of rugby's greatest touring team, the Red Lions. Memories, music, match reports and more, available wherever you download the Ruck Rugby Podcast from The Times.