Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
After Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, there were good reasons to be skeptical about the official justification for launching the operation. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a decades-long history of crying wolf about the “imminent threat” of Iran pursuing nuclear weapons. When Israel recently presented the United States with what was supposed to be new evidence of Iran’s sprint towards the bomb, American officials were less than convinced.
Yet, every skeptical voice ultimately had to deal with what seemed to be the key question: Why else would Iran recently produce such large stocks of highly enriched uranium, if not to build nuclear weapons? As representatives of Western states have kept repeating, uranium enrichment to a 60 percent concentration of the isotope U-235 — close to a 90 percent “weapons-grade” level — is unusual for a country without a nuclear arsenal and with “no credible civilian justification.” As such, after the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report highlighted a further dramatic increase in the production of sensitive fissile material, as well as a host of additional concerns about Iranian non-transparency, it has been fairly easy for many observers of Iran’s behavior to settle for a simple answer: Tehran is probably on a quest to acquire nuclear weapons. And it is only a matter of time until it gets there.
All the existing evidence, however, points to a more complex story behind Iranian decision-making. Rather than a sign of immediate intent to build nuclear weapons, Tehran’s decision to amass highly enriched uranium could be plausibly interpreted as a gambit for leverage in negotiations with the United States. The situation has become particularly urgent this year: Without a new agreement in place, Iran faced the prospect of reimposed “snapback” sanctions and overall worsening of its strategic position. However, by speeding up enrichment and effectively becoming a “latent nuclear state,” Iran may have overplayed its hand — and now faces limited options for adapting its failed coercive strategy.
A Route to a Latent Arsenal
After President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Tehran was left with a limited set of response options. One option was to condemn Washington’s breach of the agreement and keep upholding its end. From a purely external security perspective, this approach would carry minimal short-term risks. However, in the long run, the regime would appear weak, while the Iranian economy would continue to be battered by sweeping American sanctions.
Another option for Iran was to stick to the agreed enrichment limits and rely on the remaining parties — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China — to counterbalance American pressure. Iran attempted to take this approach until early 2019, when the International Atomic Energy Agency found Tehran to be still abiding by the deal. However, there was no sign of Trump changing his “maximum pressure” policy. And while the Europeans explored mechanisms such as a “special trade vehicle,” the imposition of American secondary sanctions on non-U.S. entities ensured that these initiatives brought little relief to Iran’s strangled economy.
Lacking any other meaningful leverage, Iran started to gradually breach the restrictions in 2019. From the start, it was a calibrated approach: enriching slightly above the 3.67 percent limit, accumulating more low-enriched stocks than allowed, and installing more advanced centrifuges in contravention of the original deal.
When incremental steps failed to budge Washington, Iran had to decide whether to back down or escalate further. In practice, this meant breaching the enrichment limits to the extent that Iran would become a “threshold” or a “latent” nuclear power — a state that does not own nuclear weapons, yet possesses the technological capability to build them on short notice. Tehran likely calculated that demonstrating this latent potential might pressure the United States into coming back to the agreement or signing up for a new deal.
Iran took steps toward nuclear latency already in 2021 when it started enriching uranium to 20 percent and 60 percent, gradually expanding the stocks of the latter in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Some Iranian officials have not shied away from communicating their intention to the rest of the world. As the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran mentioned during an interview in 2024, “We possess all the nuclear science components and technology … It’s like having all the parts to build a car.”
The Critical Year
As Tristan Volpe argues, aspiring latent nuclear powers face a credibility dilemma. On the one hand, they need to demonstrate sufficient resolve through the capacity to build nuclear weapons in a (relatively) short time. On the other hand, they need to signal enough restraint to demonstrate a willingness to scale the program back when the other party accepts their demands. Historical studies of Japan, South Korea, and North Korea show how critical it is to find the “sweet spot” for latent nuclear states’ coercive diplomacy to succeed.
In 2025, Iran likely sensed a new urgency to get to this spot. October would mark 10 years since the Iran nuclear deal’s adoption, when many restrictions would be lifted. It is also the deadline for the signatories to activate the “snapback” mechanism to bring back the original U.N. Security Council sanctions if they found that Tehran did not comply with its obligations. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have already signaled that unless they see a new agreement or a return to compliance, they would use this mechanism to reapply the sanctions.
This was an outcome that Tehran wanted to avoid at any cost. Even though the direct economic impact of the “snapback” would likely be limited, activating this measure would re-legitimize multilateral Western sanctions and further isolate Iran diplomatically. Iran’s bargaining position would worsen significantly, reducing the prospects of a deal that removes the punitive measures that bite Tehran the most: American primary and secondary sanctions. The situation has been a ticking time bomb — in a country battling low economic growth and high levels of inflation, continued sanctions could contribute to domestic instability, stir up anti-government protests, and further threaten the regime from the inside. The “snapback” could also have been used by Israel as a pretext for military action: Without President Joe Biden’s pressure, Israel would have probably struck Iranian nuclear facilities in 2024.
Consequently, Iran once again faced a decision. Backing down would probably appease the European parties to the original nuclear deal. But doing so would be a blow to the regime’s defiant image, and it would not solve the problem of continuing American sanctions. A clearly more attractive, but risky, option was to move forward on the nuclear latency spectrum. Primarily, this would create a similar sense of urgency in Washington to close the new deal in time. Secondarily, it would create a security “hedge” and retain Tehran’s option to quickly weaponize its uranium stocks if the situation turned sour and there were a threat to the regime’s existence. Iran may have even believed that reaching the nuclear threshold would itself work as a functional “weapon-less deterrent” against external aggression by signaling that any such military action could trigger immediate weaponization.
Listen to this episode of The Insider featuring author Michal Smetana by becoming a War on the Rocks member here
On the Horns of a Dilemma
On the resolve side of the credibility dilemma, Iran has dramatically expanded its stocks of 60 percent enriched uranium to more than 400 kilograms. This was an increase of almost 134 kilograms in three months. Altogether, this was enough material to produce about nine nuclear weapons if further enriched to 90 percent, an operation that would take about three weeks in the Fordow enrichment plant. The “breakout time” was estimated to be just two or three days. Importantly, this expansion was taking place alongside concerns that Iran was experimenting with even higher enrichment levels than 60 percent, hoarding undeclared centrifuges, conducting computer simulations potentially useful for building a bomb, and being insufficiently transparent about its nuclear-related activities at several undeclared locations.
On the restraint side, Tehran likely believed it was signaling sufficient willingness to reverse this course of action if its core demands were met in the negotiations with Trump officials: These were the lifting of American sanctions and the guaranteed possibility of low-level (3.67 percent) enrichment for civilian purposes. From what is known about the talks with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, Iran was once again willing to accept intrusive monitoring and inspections, including the implementation of the Additional Protocol, and return to original 2015 “Iran deal” level of enrichment capacity, with stocks of highly enriched uranium shipped out of the country and excess centrifuges uninstalled.
Given Iran’s urgency to secure a deal, it is also conceivable that the United States would be able to push Tehran into accepting longer timeframes than the “sunset clause” that was included in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This way, Trump could have credibly claimed that he had, indeed, struck a better deal than President Barack Obama, as he had promised to do in 2018. With the end of the Russo-Ukrainian war nowhere in sight, this could have been a major foreign policy win for Trump’s second term.
There are various sources to support the Iranian claim that Witkoff preliminarily agreed to a deal that would allow Iran to enrich uranium to low levels. However, following pressure from Netanyahu and hardliners in the United States, the Trump administration subsequently did a U-turn, demanding a zero-enrichment agreement. The complete shutdown of Iran’s enrichment capacity was a red line that Tehran was never willing to cross.
All the evidence points to the fact that Iran’s approach to negotiations was serious, and there would have been a high chance of striking the deal in June had the United States stepped back from the zero-enrichment demand. Iran has even signaled openness to the idea of a regional enrichment consortium, a potential compromise to bridge the divide between the two sides. It is also clear that, in the context of these ongoing talks, it would make little strategic sense for Iran to cross the nuclear threshold and launch a serious effort toward weaponization. Such a decision would immediately lead to the re-imposition of multilateral sanctions that would threaten the regime’s domestic stability. It would disrupt Iran’s diplomatic relations with other states in the region and beyond, completely ruining the long-standing normative position in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime.
But most importantly, it is not at all clear that Iran would manage to build a deliverable nuclear weapon before its attempt was detected by Israel and the United States. There is a dangerous window for proliferating states between the launching of the weaponization process and building a survivable arsenal that would serve as a functional deterrent against preventive strikes. If we assume that the number one motivation of Iran’s theocratic regime is its survival, dashing to a bomb in the context of these negotiations would bring enormous costs and risks and very unclear strategic benefits, even if it succeeded.
Iran’s Failure
In hindsight, Iran has tragically missed that critical “Goldilocks” zone between resolve and restraint in its coercive strategy. Even more importantly, however, it underestimated the Israeli motivation to strike and convince the Trump administration to go along, even at a time when talks were ongoing.
It appears likely, however, that the Israeli-American strikes merely moved Iran back on the latency spectrum rather than destroying its latent nuclear capability. The key issue is that Iran still likely possesses the stocks of 60 percent highly enriched uranium that were originally stored in a facility near Isfahan, and now their whereabouts are unknown. Even if all centrifuges in Natanz and Fordow were destroyed, Iran may have stored additional ones in hidden locations, or it can build new ones using available stockpiled components. Similarly, although the conversion facility — that could have been used to convert enriched uranium hexafluoride to metal for a nuclear weapon core — was likely completely destroyed in the strikes, Iran may have a hidden backup conversion capacity or build a new one. Iran has a deep network of underground tunnels and available locations that can be used for weapon-related activity — for example, Kolang Gaz La, a deeply buried tunnel complex near Natanz.
After the failure of Iran’s strategy to compel the United States into a new deal, Iran now faces few good options. It could still accept the zero-enrichment proposal, but this would be akin to admitting strategic defeat, something that Iranian elites will likely see as a humiliation that would make the regime appear weak and potentially endanger it over the long haul. Relying on nuclear latency as a coercive strategy vis-á-vis Washington will probably not be seen as a wise choice: The equilibrium has now shifted, and it is extremely improbable that the United States (and Israel) would now accept any Iranian enrichment, as that would invalidate their earlier justifications for the strikes.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the attacks will now embolden the Iranian hawks, who will claim that the “hedging” strategy has failed, and the only alternative is to cross the nuclear Rubicon and build a reliable nuclear deterrent, in a way North Korea did in the 2000s. While Iran’s recent decision to suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency could be used as just another bargaining chip, the halt of inspections could also facilitate covert activities leading toward weaponization. If that happens, history will likely see 2025 not only as a year in which Iran’s coercive strategy failed, but also a year in which a meaningful diplomatic solution was pushed aside by an unsuccessful attempt at military counterproliferation that eventually led to the emergence of a 10th member of the contemporary club of nuclear-armed states.
Michal Smetana (@MichalSmetana3) is an associate professor at Charles University and the director of the Peace Research Center Prague. He has published extensively on nuclear weapons in leading academic and policy journals. He is the author of Nuclear Deviance.
Image: Standardwhale via Wikimedia Commons
