Is Iran's war speeding up the production of the nuclear bomb instead of preventing it?

There is a central paradox in the war underway with Iran: while military strikes and political pressure from Israel and the United States aim to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, some analyses believe this war could yield the exact opposite result.

“There is a central paradox in the war underway with Iran: while military strikes and political pressure from Israel and the United States aim to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, some analyses believe this war could yield the exact opposite result”

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National Interest magazine and The New York Times have addressed this issue and concluded that this war will accelerate Iran’s drive to acquire a nuclear weapon rather than relinquish it.

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Additionally, the piece notes that National Interest concentrates on strategic calculations and nuclear deterrence, while The New York Times reveals the complexities of American intelligence assessments and the limits of the justifications for escalation.

In National Interest, International Relations professor Mohammad Ayub explains that the war currently waged against Iran may not weaken its nuclear program, but may speed it up, noting that the absence of a nuclear weapon makes it more vulnerable to attack, even if it adheres to a policy of nuclear opacity and does not cross the threshold of pre-producing a nuclear bomb.

Ayub adds that this conclusion reinforces the logic of nuclear deterrence in Iranian thinking, where the nuclear bomb not restraint is the true guarantee of security.

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Ayub also cites studies in international relations, especially Kenneth Waltz’s theses, that possessing nuclear weapons creates relative stability because it raises the cost of war to catastrophic levels.

Ayub emphasizes that the long-standing nuclear opacity strategy that Iran pursued for years, staying on the cusp of production capability without declaring armament, has harmed it severely.

According to his analysis, the military strikes have proven that not actually possessing a nuclear weapon did not prevent targeting, which weakens the value of staying in the gray area.

Consequently, Ayub argues that this war may push Tehran’s decision-makers to conclude that crossing the nuclear threshold is the only reliable way to prevent future attacks.

In The New York Times, its correspondent Robert Jimpson reports that American intelligence officials say that official assessments do not indicate that Iran is close to possessing missiles capable of striking the United States, which contradicts some political justifications put forward to justify the escalation.

“There is a central paradox in the war underway with Iran: while military strikes and political pressure from Israel and the United States aim to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, some analyses believe this war could yield the exact opposite result”

Al-Jazeera Net

Jimpson cites, according to their congressional testimonies, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, that Iran may need many years to develop a capability for intercontinental missiles.

Jimpson notes that intelligence officials distinguish between the regional threat and the direct threat to American soil.

While Iran possesses medium-range ballistic capabilities capable of threatening American bases and allies in the region and parts of Europe, it remains far from having systems able to reach the continental United States.

Weakening war narratives: Jimpson adds that this assessment weakens some narratives that link the war to an imminent direct threat.

He also quotes American intelligence officials that Iran, alongside other countries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan, continues to develop advanced missile systems, but that does not mean all of these states have reached a level of direct threat to the United States.

These officials say that the current Iranian threat primarily threatens the region, not the United States itself in an immediate strategic sense.

Size of the damage: The intelligence analysis—this is how The New York Times reports it—concludes that any precise assessment of the war’s results must take into account the actual scale of damage done to the Iranian military infrastructure, which has not yet become fully clear.

Thus, the question of whether the war weakens or accelerates Iran’s nuclear program remains open, given the gap between declared political objectives and actual intelligence assessments.

Between these two perspectives, a broader strategic dilemma emerges: the war will not lead to curbing the Iranian nuclear program, but to speeding up the moment when Iran becomes a nuclear power.