Uneasiness Persists Over America’s Decision to Use Military Means to Prevent Iran from Developing a Nuclear Weapon
May 4, 2026
The complaints have cited numerous factors and become more prevalent as the conflict stretches into its tenth week. Little thought seems to have been put into devising a plan for how Iran would be governed afterward. Planners of the operation failed to spell out a clear exit strategy. Neither the Congress nor America’s former allies were consulted in advance, so it’s hardly surprising that they balked when asked to oversee the next stage of the fight. An inconsistency existed from the get-go, when the operation explicitly avoided the use of U.S. ground troops yet identified removal of Iran’s weapons-grade uranium, located deeply underground, as a central and non-negotiable objective of the war. President Trump’s foreign, domestic and political advisors were carefully selected because of their loyalty to him and willingness to execute his orders fully, quickly and without any dissent. A group so chosen was ill-prepared to thrash out all conceivable and complex pros and cons, as one would hope before an initiative like this one that carried so much potential risk as well as reward. Since the start of the war on February 28, it has been explained to the U.S. and world public in a confusing and often-changing way.
One immovable goal that has been constant from the start has drawn scant rebuttal, however, and that is that given the Iranian government’s radical conduct for many decades going back to the 1970’s, the country has to be deprived of joining the nuclear weapons club. The group currently has nine members. The United States in 1945 was the first to develop a nuclear weapon and the means to use it, followed by the Soviet Union (now Russia) in 1949, Great Britain as of 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, Israel presumably around 1967, India in 1974, Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2006. All but France and the U.K. are now ruled by governments that are either extremely autocratic and at the least somewhat authoritarian. Like Iran, several in the group have aided political groups outside their borders to foment regime changes and influence geopolitical fault lines in other ways.
The argument has not been explicitly demonstrated nor even credibly attempted to justify why it is okay and in the world’s best interest for each current member of the club to possess nuclear weapons but catastrophic if Iran acquires them, too — so much so, moreover, as to justify all the economic and humanitarian costs now rippling throughout the world. To some extent, the answer no doubt lies with Middle East’s oil and strategic location at a crossroads of international trade. Rather than shy away from that fact, that reality should have been laid out at the beginning back in February. Such authenticity may have promoted longer popular acceptance of Trump’s decision.
There are other considerations that muddy the war’s justification. In the history of war, nuclear weapons are unique, and in practicality were a weapon only during their first usage that ended the second world war. Back then, only the United States possessed a nuke, so there was never a risk of a nuclear retaliation. The only reservations were the unthinkable destruction that two bombs would create and that using them just once would open a Pandora’s Box, which it did. It is widely understood, however, that far more lives on all sides would have been lost if World War 2 had been forced to be ended by a conventional land invasion of Japan.
Four years later when the Soviet Union proved it too possessed nuclear weapons, a nuclear arsenal no longer could be thought of entirely as a weapon of war. In reality, nuclear weapons transitioned into a deterrent no longer to be actually used because doing so raised a high risk of enormous destruction to both sides. As developed nuclear weapons became far more destructive than the ones that ended WW2, use of them in fact has come to risk annihilation of all life forms. The incentive to have them has become defensive, not to be used against a foe but rather to prevent countries with more powerful conventional armed forces from doing what was in fact done to Iran in March. By having nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to targets far away, North Korea need never fear what happened to Iran. Is the mutual guaranteed destruction of nukes a perfect deterrent? Clearly no. Accidents and false alarms can happen, and the need for split-second decisions raises the chances of a disaster. But that reality already exists, and ten countries with nuclear weapons isn’t an exponentially greater danger than the nine that already do.
It’s not clear that the U.S. will be able to remove Iran’s highly enriched uranium. The failed attempt at regime change already has given Iran the idea of weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz, which has been more powerful than any mischief committed by Iran in the past. And on a wholly different dimension, an editorial by Tom Friedman in today’s New York Times lays out a compeling argument that the coming age of Artificial Intelligence will enhance the ability of smaller powers to hold their own against far larger conventionally armed forces. What’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine’s ability to hold onto most of its territory provide a peek at huge changes in warfare that lie not far ahead.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
Tags: Middle East War
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