Israel says it first bombed Iran to stop it from being able to produce nuclear weapons and the “existential threat” they would represent. But the conflict may in the long run serve the opposite purpose: illustrating to Tehran and other nuclear-aspirant nations that nuclear weapons are essential in shielding them against attack.
Countries such as North Korea already pointed to Libya, whose leader, Moammar Gadhafi, gave up his nascent weapons program but was toppled anyway in 2011 after a NATO intervention. That’s one of the reasons Pyongyang has developed its own arsenal — which is believed to have San Francisco and other U.S. cities within range — to protect itself against attempts at Western-backed regime change.
“If you look at the last five or six years, you’ve got a repeated series of incidents that demonstrate nuclear weapons are a really, really powerful deterrence,” said Robert Kelly, a professor specializing in nuclear proliferation at South Korea’s Pusan National University.
As Iran just found out, “if you don’t have them, you get bombed,” he said.
Kelly is among the expert watchers who worry that Israel’s attack on Iran will trigger proliferation both “horizontal” — nuclear states building more weapons — and “vertical” — nonnuclear states trying to get them.
That would accelerate an existing trend, according to watchdogs such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Sweden-based weapons monitor known as SIPRI.
“The signs are that a new arms race is gearing up that carries much more risk and uncertainty than the last one,” SIPRI Director Dan Smith said in a statement Monday as his group released the findings of its 2025 yearbook.
Cold War adversaries America and Russia are both modernizing their weapons, while the fastest warhead production is happening in China, SIPRI said. Meanwhile India and Pakistan have developed new systems, with their decadeslong enmity almost spilling over into conflict earlier this year.
In terms of potential new members of the nuclear club, “the most obvious is Iran itself,” Kelly said. “As soon as this war is over, I think it’s pretty clear they’re going to go back and build these things again. I’d be really shocked if they didn’t.”
That chimes with what former U.S. officials told NBC News this weekend: there could be a scenario in which Israel’s strikes prompt Tehran to rush toward building a bomb.
That could start what experts call a “cascade” effect.
A nuclear-armed Iran would cause great anxiety in Israel — which is estimated to have around 90 nuclear weapons, although it has never publicly admitted this.
But it would also provoke grave fears in Iran’s historical Sunni Muslim adversaries, such as Saudi Arabia, despite a recent tentative rapprochement.
“Although Saudi Arabia does not possess weapons of mass destruction, Saudi officials have expressed that they will acquire nuclear weapons if their regional rival, Iran, does,” according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile North Korea will likely see Israel’s strikes as a ringing validation.
They "must be patting themselves on the back right now,” Decker Eveleth, an analyst at the Washington nonprofit CNA Corporation focusing on Pyongyang’s weapons program, posted on X. Israel’s bombardment “is precisely the sort of air campaign” North Korea “anticipated for decades and the reason why they wanted nuclear weapons,” he said.
There is growing jitteriness among America’s allies, too, after President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned Washington’s postwar commitment to defending them. That has “created additional uncertainty,” SIPRI said, and calls for these countries to develop their own arsenals.
South Korea was always told it did not need its own weapons because it was protected by Washington’s “nuclear umbrella.” Now — after Trump openly suggested that it might have to pay billions of dollars for U.S. military support — South Koreans increasingly want their own warheads, with a poll by Gallup Korea last year putting support at 72.8%.
There's a smaller but growing debate in Germany, which signed a treaty upon unification in 1990 saying it was never allowed to own nuclear weapons. The pollster Civey found in March that 38% back the idea.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in March that the “profound change of American geopolitics” means his country must assess nuclear options. And even Japan — where such a measure is taboo after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of War War II — a once verboten debate has stirred discussion of the issue.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, an ex-commanding officer of the U.K.’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, believes Israel had no choice but to attack Iran, given it believed it was about to produce a bomb. He also thinks nuclear weapons have historically contributed to global peace.
Nevertheless, the global current picture worries him gravely.
“As long as there is parity and equilibrium between the superpowers, then it will carry on being the guarantor of peace,” he said of nuclear weapons. “However, all this proliferation is creating a non-equilibrium.”
While the weapons programs of Washington and even Moscow may be “robust enough to make sure a misjudgment, an accident or a misinterpretation doesn’t lead to somebody firing off a weapon,” he said, “I would not be so confident with some of the others: Iran, potentially Pakistan and particularly North Korea.”
