On the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb attacks, the world stands in grave danger of nuclear warfare again breaking out—particularly in light of the pattern of Israeli aggression in the Middle East and the perpetuation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
In the U.S, all mechanisms of diplomacy and nuclear deterrence have been diminished to fear-mongering and propaganda of the country’s designated enemies.
The ongoing conflicts are steamrolling to a potential mushroom cloud, as Western politicians sabotage any and all efforts towards peace.
We are led to believe Iran is a potential threat to world peace and Western liberal democratic values; yet the U.S. is the only nation to have used a nuclear weapon while engaging in routine aggression directed against Iran, including by trying to sabotage its economy through draconian sanctions.
The U.S. is a bad faith actor. One can point to the many of its regime change operations as evidence and with its wealth of nuclear weapons, the world is held captive to it’s demands.
The rot of American exceptionalism has reduced our capacity for understanding.
As history and recent events have shown, the U.S. empire and its Israeli counterpart, are principally against Iran forging its own destiny. While ideally all nuclear weapons should be abolished, under the present world circumstances, Iran may be forced to obtain a nuclear weapon, especially if its future sovereignty is at stake.
So far, there is no indication that it has done so, even if the latter allegations were the basis for the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign carried out in June that targeted Iranian nuclear sites and killed over a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists.
Under Attack Since the Time of the Iranian Revolution
Iran was viewed as part of the Western club when it was ruled by the Shah of Iran.
He was installed in a CIA-MI6 coup d’état in 1953 targeting Mohammad Mosaddegh a secular nationalist leader who tried to nationalize Iran’s oil.
Known as a brutal tyrant who tortured opponents in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, the Shah restored Western corporate control over Iran’s oil industry and turned over Iran’s economy largely to foreign investors.
In 1957, the U.S. actively assisted Iran in its initiation of a nuclear program through the “atoms for peace” program.
The aim was largely to develop nuclear energy in Iran to satisfy the country’s energy needs.
When the Shah was overthrown in an Islamic revolution, the U.S. tried to undermine it, initially by supporting Iraq in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.
Functioning largely as a surrogate for U.S. power in the Middle East, the Israelis forged excellent relations with the Shah and assisted too in the development of its nuclear program.
General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military attaché from 1977 to 1979, wrote that “the cooperation with Israel [in that time] was tremendous. Every Iranian general visited Israel and we visited them.”
After the 1979 revolution, however, which established Iranian economic and political sovereignty, Israel began working on the front-lines to try to destabilize and undermine the new regime. As Israeli politics shifted more and more to the right, regime change became ever more the goal.
A key ploy of Benjamin Netanyahu—Israel’s far right leader from 1996 to 1999, 2009 to 2021, and 2022 to the present—was to play up Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, even though Iran has long insisted that it has never developed a nuclear weapons program—only a nuclear energy program.
Deterrence Against External Aggression
Netanyahu has overseen the assassination of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists, including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, who was killed by remote-controlled weapons while attending a funeral in November 2020.
TRT Global reported that Fakhrizadeh had been a target of Israeli intelligence for 15 years. In a sophisticated operation, he was “killed by a remote-controlled, AI-powered machine gun mounted on a Nissan pickup truck near Tehran. The one-tonne weapon, smuggled into Iran in pieces, was operated by a Mossad team from a command centre outside the country. The truck exploded after the attack to destroy evidence. Iran accused Israel, with reports suggesting the operation delayed the country’s nuclear programme significantly.”
In June 2025 military operations, Israel claimed to have killed 14 Iranian scientists along with top Iranian military commanders. Iran declared victory after Israel stopped short of completely destroying Iranian labs and pursuing the strategy of regime change.
Netanyahu’s claim has long been that Iran is three to five years from nuclear weapons. This has always been the pretext behind Israel’s regime-change ambitions.
Al Jazeera reported: “For more than three decades, a familiar refrain has echoed from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed Israel’s Knesset as an MP, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. ‘Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,’ he declared at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.”
Mind-Boggling Double Standards
The U.S. double standards on nuclear weapons is absolutely mind-boggling.
The United Nations approved the ‘Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.’ Ideally, this treaty would ban and eliminate all nuclear weapons, taking effect in January 2021. Unwavering in their overt hypocrisy, as they maintain a plethora of nuclear armaments, neither the U.S. or Israel were a co-signatory to this treaty.
The U.S. itself used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and assisted Israel to develop a nuclear weapons program, which is still unacknowledged, in the 1960s. At the same time, it conveys outrage when countries that it targets for annihilation like North Korea or Iran might want to develop nuclear weapons for deterrence.
In the North Korean case, the U.S. and its allies literally bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War.
The U.S. continues to arm South Korea to the teeth and to apply devastating sanctions as part of a continued regime-change operation. In addition to this, the U.S. stores nuclear weapons in South Korea, though it presents North Korea as somehow a threat to world peace.
The case of Libya is also instructive because the U.S. convinced Muammar Qaddafi to relinquish his nuclear weapons program in the mid 2000s in exchange for normalizing diplomatic relations.
But then, less than a decade later, the Obama administration double-crossed Qaddafi and launched a bombing operation that resulted in his ouster and lynching and plunged Libya into chaos.
It is no surprise that countries like North Korea would be reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons program.
Historical Precedent of Double Standards
Iran has been under heavy scrutiny since the inception of its nuclear program.
In stark contrast and a hindrance to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, Israel has hidden its nuclear program from public scrutiny while not being held to the same standards as Iran.
The hypocrisy here, as in the facets described above, is clear.
The international community only became aware of Israel’s nuclear program through the brave acts of former Israeli nuclear technician and whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.
Even though the existence of its nuclear program is known, Israel is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has not accepted IAEA safeguards on some of its principal nuclear activities. The Israeli policy of nuclear opacity has nevertheless been tolerated by both allies and adversaries, in large part because Israel performs key functions for the U.S. empire and has developed a formidable arms industry that supplies repressive governments around the world which are reluctant to criticize its policies or try to isolate it.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered the depths of Israel’s nuclear program and strategy called the Samson Option, a last resort, major retaliatory strike if Israel is meaningfully threatened by hostile actors.
After Israel’s recent military aggressions, Middle East non-proliferation has generally taken a step back. Unsurprisingly, Iran decided to no longer comply with the IAEA.
Moral Delegitimization of the West
Taking a critical look at the region, a large proportion of the world’s population has awakened to see Israel and its Western allies’ hegemonic agenda as a threat to human decency and civility.
As we recently witnessed in June, 12 days of Israeli military aggression on Iran, the problem lies not with the potential lethality of Iran’s future nuclear armament, but with the rampant instability caused by the United States and Israel, two nuclear powers.
With the ascension of BRICS we are on the fast track toward a multipolar world where the U.S. Empire’s tentacles of influence are being curtailed.
As we are on the precipice of this new global alignment, it would not be surprising if Iran decided to pursue nuclear deterrence from potential Israeli and Western hostilities. The alternative is to potentially go the way of Libya, which was destroyed in a U.S.-NATO onslaught after its nationalist leader, Muammar Qaddafi, decided to abandon Libya’s nuclear weapons program.
As western powers and their proxies force nuclear weapons to become part of Iran’s survival strategy, regardless, our predisposition should always be to strive for a nuclear free world. With the looming threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), total nuclear disarmament should be urgently pursued by all nations—especially those nations that are already nuclear armed and engaging in imperialist plunder and aggression.
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About the Author
Jonathan Urmeneta is a writer and researcher involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Jonathan has traveled extensively, denouncing and exposing U.S. imperial machinations from Silicon Valley to Russia to the Middle East.
His work focuses on the intersection of power, geopolitics, and resistance, with a particular emphasis on the Global South.
Jonathan can be reached on his Instagram account at humanr1ghtspulse or via email at jurmeneta@protonmail.com.
