Bombing Iran Threatens Non-Proliferation Regime

In the Financial Times, Ankit Panda opines that the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites may be the death knell for the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Iran’s lead­ers now have sev­eral options, but a chief con­sid­er­a­tion will be the mat­ter of whether to remain in the NPT or to become only the second state, after North Korea, to have signed, rat­i­fied, and exited that agree­ment — pos­sibly to then test a nuc­lear explos­ive, as North Korea did in 2006.

An Ira­nian with­drawal is more likely than not at this point — with poten­tial ripple effects across the broader Middle East and a heightened prob­ab­il­ity of an Ira­nian bomb. Iran has already passed a law, approved by the coun­try’s power­ful Guard­ian Coun­cil, call­ing for the total ces­sa­tion of co-oper­a­tion with the Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency. This could pres­age a with­drawal from the NPT, which man­dates such co-oper­a­tion. With an exit from the NPT, Iran would no longer have an act­ive safe­guards agree­ment with the IAEA, lim­it­ing trans­par­ency as it seeks to rebuild its nuc­lear pro­gramme.