Why Force Fails to Stop Nuclear Proliferation

For a third time in four decades, warplanes have tried to bomb a Middle Eastern nuclear program into submission. The most recent attempt began with an Israeli air campaign against Iran on June 13. Then, in the early morning hours of June 22, seven U.S. Air Force B-2 stealth bombers unleashed 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear sites. The United States’ primary targets were the deeply buried enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz, as well as a nuclear technology center at Isfahan.

Washington declared the mission, called Operation Midnight Hammer, a resounding success; President Donald Trump said the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” But the reality is far less certain. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the intergovernmental body that assesses compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, was barred from going within about 40 miles of the affected facilities and has been unable to check the extent of the damage to the underground halls at Fordow and Natanz. The U.S. Department of Defense later softened Trump’s claims about the scale of the destruction and conceded that it did not know the whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

Indeed, there is strong circumstantial evidence that before the American bombs fell, Tehran had evacuated nuclear materials, as well as advanced centrifuge assemblies used to enrich uranium, stored at the target sites. Commercial satellite imagery showed significant truck activity at the Fordow site in the days preceding the June 22 attack. According to information Iranian regulatory authorities gave to the IAEA, after the bombing there was no measured increase in radiation levels in areas surrounding the targeted facilities, indicating that the strikes probably failed to destroy uranium stocks. In fact, it is likely that Iran still possesses much or even all of its pre-strike stockpile of highly enriched uranium—enough, by some estimates, to build as many as ten nuclear bombs.

But even if the bombing campaigns did wreak substantial damage on Iranian nuclear sites, history shows that shattering surface infrastructure rarely yields lasting security. Strikes may set back an emerging nuclear state’s capabilities, but they also tend to intensify that state’s nuclear aspirations. When it comes to Iran, the Trump administration, like Israel before it, appears to be caught up in the “smart-bomb trap”—a mistaken confidence in the power of precision weapons to stunt nuclear breakout or even provoke regime collapse. The more plausible reality is that Operation Midnight Hammer has merely bought the Trump administration time—time it should use to negotiate the long-term strategic solution to Iranian nuclearization that it wrongly believes it has already achieved.

JUST FOR SHOW

Direct military attacks on nuclear programs are designed to eliminate a state’s ability to build a nuclear weapon by destroying critical infrastructure, killing key personnel, or otherwise limiting the target’s capacity to assemble a device. But physical capability is only half of what goes into a nuclearization push. Building a nuclear deterrent also requires immense political will. In the forthcoming edited volume Atomic Backfires: When Nuclear Policies Fail, Tyler John Bowen and I detail how conventional military attacks on all but the most nascent nuclear programs rarely achieve their long-term objectives. Our research, encompassing every case of offensive counterproliferation, shows a consistent pattern: although bombing a country’s nuclear program may temporarily reduce its physical capability to build a device, such an attack almost invariably strengthens the target country’s belief that building nuclear weapons is essential to its survival.

Proponents of conventional strikes against nuclear programs point to Israel’s 2007 bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar reactor. The attack seemed to be remarkably effective. Al-Kibar, a covert plutonium-production reactor modeled on a North Korean design, was destroyed before it became operational, after which Syria never renewed its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. But al-Kibar is the exception that proves the rule. The success of the operation relied on factors not likely to be repeated. The reactor was imported wholesale, and Syria lacked the domestic expertise to replicate it independently, making its nuclear program critically reliant on foreign assistance. This dependence severely constrained Syria’s ability to reconstitute the program; following the strike, international scrutiny intensified, and Syrian leaders could not domestically procure or rebuild essential components. The country was furthermore buckling under the weight of a devastating drought and on the verge of a catastrophic civil war. The site was later seized by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). Ultimately, the al-Kibar strike was less a decisive blow than a firm nudge to a program already teetering on the brink of collapse.

The case of Iraq offers a more cautionary tale. Israel’s airstrike on the country’s Osirak reactor, in 1981, was originally lauded as a triumph of preventive action. But a closer examination reveals that the attack was probably counterproductive. Although it destroyed the reactor, it also convinced Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, that he needed a nuclear deterrent. Instead of halting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, the attack drove it underground—further from international scrutiny—and prompted Saddam to invest more resources into enriching uranium. By 1990, Iraq was perilously close to being able to build a nuclear bomb.

What ultimately dismantled Saddam’s program was not a targeted strike but the bureaucratic and legal controls imposed after the Gulf War—namely, the United Nations’ comprehensive sanctions and its intrusive inspections regime, which oversaw the destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent U.S. cruise missile strikes on sites such as Zaafaraniyah were largely performative; UN inspectors confirmed that the sites had already been mothballed. The lesson is clear: inspections and sanctions, not bombs, were the key to Iraqi disarmament. The United States’ subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq, predicated on a phantom weapons-of-mass-destruction program, provided a powerful example to Iran and North Korea on the perils of lacking a nuclear deterrent. Pyongyang explicitly cited Saddam’s fate when it accelerated the work that culminated in its first nuclear weapons test, in 2006.

THE NUCLEAR UNDERGROUND

Iran has long weathered attacks that failed to fatally damage its nuclear program. These include the Stuxnet cyberattack on the Natanz facility, a joint U.S.-Israeli effort that damaged roughly 1,000 centrifuges in 2009 and 2010; a wave of Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012; and more recent Israeli acts of sabotage against the Natanz facility in 2020 and 2021. Iran has responded to each attack by making its physical infrastructure more resilient, including by building more advanced centrifuges and moving key facilities such as Fordow deep underground. Some of Iran’s advantages remain beyond the reach of airstrikes, including its mastery of the nuclear-fuel cycle—something Syria’s far less extensive program lacked.

Crucially, the attempts to attack its nuclear program have hardened Iran’s resolve and intensified the beliefs of the country’s leadership that a nuclear deterrent is necessary to prevent its enemies—primarily Israel and the United States—from threatening Iran at will. Senior regime officials have condemned the latest U.S. assault as a “barbaric violation” of international law and publicly discussed withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a move that would end IAEA oversight of Iran’s nuclear program and remove the last legal barrier to rapid weaponization. Even if inspections continue, Tehran will likely become less cooperative with them. Politically, the strikes reinforce the Iranian hard-line view that compromise invites vulnerability—Tehran believes that allowing IAEA inspectors to remain onsite would make future attacks easier by exposing sensitive locations to adversaries under the guise of international monitoring.

Counterproliferation efforts against Tehran reverberate far beyond Iran’s borders. Should the country walk away from the nuclear treaty, for instance, a regional shift toward nuclear proliferation is all but inevitable. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have long harbored nuclear ambitions, would almost certainly accelerate their own programs, thereby opening new fronts in the Middle Eastern nuclear race. In this way, a strike intended to solve one proliferation problem could end up creating several more.

A wounded proliferator learns from the attacks it survives.

At best, Operation Midnight Hammer may have delayed Iran’s nuclear program by roughly 12 to 18 months. According to reporting published in The Wall Street Journal on July 2, the Pentagon has estimated a one-to-two‑year setback at most, but other U.S. intelligence assessments have also suggested that the delay the strikes imposed could be as short as a few months, given Iran’s ability to salvage materials, disperse its sites, and rebuild using hidden facilities. Viewing this pause as a strategic victory would be a critical error. In response to the attacks, Tehran will build deeper, more dispersed, more heavily defended nuclear facilities, thereby diluting the efficacy of subsequent strikes.

To turn this tactical pause into a strategic gain, Washington should use this short window to pursue a diplomatic off-ramp. Such a deal could take many forms, including requiring Iran to return to its past nuclear nonproliferation commitments and grant the IAEA immediate access to and snap-inspection authority over its nuclear sites, perhaps in exchange for phased sanctions relief and a pledge from Gulf countries to forgo their own uranium enrichment.

The problem is that negotiators now face an Iran that has been attacked by two of the world’s most advanced militaries and may see any compromise as an invitation to future attacks. Experience shows that a wounded proliferator learns from the attacks it survives, hardens its infrastructure, and returns to the task with greater secrecy and political resolve. Bombs can buy time; only diplomacy can buy lasting security.

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