The present impasse over Iran’s nuclear future lays bare the enduring hypocrisy at the heart of the global non-proliferation order. As talks in Doha stumble through disputes over frozen assets and verification mechanisms, Tehran is being pressed to accept full dismantlement of its enriched uranium stockpile in exchange for economic compensation for decades of sanctions, even as President Masoud Pezeshkian insists Iran will not relinquish its sovereign right to enrich uranium. The demand is unambiguous. Yet the five recognised weapons powers, and Israel, undeclared but widely known to possess the bomb, face no comparable ultimatum to disarm.
The current confrontation raises an unavoidable question: on what grounds should Iran relinquish a capability that nine nuclear states retain for themselves? The claim that Iran is uniquely dangerous, unstable, or aggressive is a conclusion in search of evidence, and cloaked in language by states whose own commitment to international law is selective at best.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) institutionalised a hierarchy rather than dismantling it. It divided the world into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” and enjoined the latter to restraint while the former continue to modernise their nuclear arsenals.
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Iran, Israel and the pitfalls of the global nuclear regime
Against this backdrop, the treatment of Iran is not an anomaly. India and Pakistan, both outside the NPT, possess substantial nuclear arsenals and are welcomed as strategic partners by the very powers that patrol the non-proliferation order. Israel, whose nuclear programme is an open secret, has never submitted to inspection and is never named in the discourse of proliferation risk. Iran, by contrast, pursued enrichment within a legal framework, submitted to the most intrusive inspection regime in the history of arms control under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and was “rewarded” with unilateral American withdrawal, the reimposition of sanctions, and the renewed threat of military destruction. Iran complied and got punished anyway.
There is a deeper historical contradiction that the current discourse labours to suppress. The global nuclear order is, in a fundamental sense, anchored in an act of unparalleled destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These remain the only instances in history of nuclear weapons being deployed in conflict. They established the catastrophic potential of such arms as well as the precedent that their use could be justified, and absorbed into the language of strategic necessity by the state that employed them. The U.S. survived this act morally, emerging successfully as the designated guardian of nuclear order.
This precedent complicates every subsequent moral claim. A state that has demonstrated the willingness to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations occupies a singular position when it seeks to regulate the ambitions of others. The authority it claims is derived from the fact of prior use, and from the geopolitical dominance that use helped to consolidate. Albert Einstein warned with characteristic precision that humanity must choose between abolishing war and facing annihilation. That choice stands only deferred, and most effectively by those with the largest arsenals.
The unravelling of the JCPOA remains one of the most instructive episodes in recent diplomatic history, precisely because it was so revealing. Negotiated painstakingly under the Barack Obama administration, the agreement represented a genuinely achieved instance of multilateral diplomacy. Its abandonment by the Donald Trump administration in 2018 sent a message that resonated far beyond Tehran. For any state observing this trajectory, the conclusion inescapably underscores that future arms agreements with the U.S. carry no guarantee of American compliance. It must be kept in mind that if the Iran nuclear crisis deepens further, the JCPOA’s destruction will stand as its proximate cause.
The question, in the end, is not whether Iran should or should not enrich uranium. It is whether the framework within which that question is posed is coherent, consistent, or just. By any honest reckoning, it is none of these things. Until that framework is confronted directly, and not obscured by the language of non-proliferation, the contradictions at the heart of the nuclear age will continue to compound. The answer to that question has been available since 1955, when Einstein and Bertrand Russell unambiguously asserted that nuclear weapons must be abolished altogether, by all states, without exception, or the logic of deterrence will produce the catastrophe it claims to prevent. Seven decades later, that conclusion remains as sound as ever.
We stand at a crossroads in a world that has grown accustomed to the gun on the table, until the day it goes off. Selective enforcement of non-proliferation, punishing Iran for compliance while rewarding others for defiance, and the indefinite deferral of the NPT’s disarmament obligation do not constitute a rules-based order. They constitute a system that has chosen, knowingly, to tolerate the most destructive weapons in history rather than eliminate them. That choice carries a cost. The only question is whether we confront it through policy or through catastrophe.
Shelley Walia has taught Cultural Theory at Panjab University, Chandigarh
Published - July 16, 2026 12:48 am IST