The Economist: Arms race would start a nuclear chain reaction

The world stands on the brink of a nuclear-arms race.

If one can be avoided, a big reason will be this: currently, the first country to start such a race risks paying a terrible price. Rogue states caught sprinting for a bomb face crippling sanctions and military strikes.

Meanwhile, any halfway respectable country that flouts the Non-Proliferation Treaty — a legal ban on the creation of new nuclear-armed powers, signed by 191 states — risks becoming a pariah, with unknowable economic and diplomatic costs.

Less happily, if a nuclear-arms race does get under way, it will carry on, like toppling dominoes.

That is not this columnist’s breathless judgment. It is the view of the world’s nuclear police chief, Rafael Mariano Grossi, soberly expressed on April 13 in an interview for Inside Geopolitics, a video show produced by The Economist.

As director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr Grossi has the task of persuading countries not to break nuclear-arms curbs, and of sounding the alarm if they try.

Asked whether he is worried about a nuclear-arms race, the veteran Argentine diplomat replies: “I really am.”

Can he confirm reports that many countries are privately debating getting nuclear arms, whether that means Iran’s neighbours in the Persian Gulf, or American allies such as Germany, Japan, Poland or South Korea, who are no longer sure that they are protected by an American nuclear umbrella?

“These discussions are being held,” he answers.

Mr Grossi concedes that the existing non-proliferation regime has, over the years, failed to stop several countries from joining the club of nuclear-armed powers. But he calls it “one of the last points of stability that we have” in a dangerous world.

If more countries pursue nuclear arsenals, a domino effect will “inevitably” lead “a good number of countries” to follow, he suggests.

Mr Grossi deplores the strategy of nuclear bluffing that led Iran to its current grim fate.

He notes how the Iranian regime boasted of having all the elements needed for a nuclear bomb, including uranium enriched almost to weapons grade, then asked the world to believe that it had no intention of ever building bombs or warheads.

He does not endorse American and Israeli claims that an Iranian nuclear breakout was imminent.

Instead he describes appealing, in vain, to Iran’s rulers to grant his IAEA inspectors the full access that their country’s large and ambitious nuclear programme demanded, for in the atomic realm “promises are not enough”.

Alas, Iran’s leaders preferred their policy of ambiguity, and the patience of America and Israel ran out.

In a wood-panelled boardroom on the 28th floor of a UN skyscraper in Vienna, Mr Grossi lays out the results of Iran’s fatal gamble.

He recalls visits to underground Iranian nuclear complexes that have now been reduced to rubble, and his exchanges with Iranian officials and scientists killed by air strikes and targeted assassinations.

To the IAEA boss, a lesson can be drawn from the deaths of Middle Eastern leaders who sought nuclear arms in Iran, Iraq and Libya.

Rulers with nuclear ambitions should return to the negotiating table. He is too diplomatic to mention Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal and the angst that causes some neighbours.

Others draw exactly the opposite conclusion. A European diplomat frequently discusses nuclear strategy with governments across his continent.

He reports a cynical mood that gripped European capitals when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, intensifying after President Donald Trump returned to office last year.

Behind closed doors, European officials agree that “Ukraine would not have been attacked if it had nuclear weapons”.

Yes, Mr Grossi is “absolutely right” that the world as a whole is safer without more nuclear weapons.

“But look at the interests of individual state actors,” urges the diplomat.

The rulers of Iran, Iraq and Libya negotiated with the West about their nuclear programmes. All are dead.

“The one who is alive is Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean despot who defied the world to build nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The diplomat lists a dozen countries believed to be seriously researching nuclear options, from northern Europe to Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

“I don’t ever want to see a nuclear-armed Germany,” says the European diplomat, whose country suffered greatly in the Second World War.

But he predicts that Germany will one day want a nuclear bomb “and will get one, because they cannot rely on the US, and I cannot believe I am even saying that sentence.”

The quest for security in a lonely world

Back in Vienna, Mr Grossi is too worldly to be shocked by regimes who think they would feel safer if they had nukes. Instead, he calls for a sophisticated analysis of different countries’ incentives. The nuclear-arms-as-protection argument is “valid for North Korea”, he concedes.

But the Kim regime mostly has to withstand pressure from America, China and South Korea in a corner of north-east Asia.

In contrast, he says, the geography and politics of the Middle East generate complex dynamics that make it more perilous for a country in that region to “burn bridges” and seek atomic arms.

Yet even in the Middle East, force is no cure-all. Mr Grossi is sure that Iran’s nuclear programme cannot be completely bombed out of existence, not least because “you cannot unlearn what you have learned.”

He calls a negotiated settlement the only solution.

Other diplomats and experts offer a bleaker prediction.

As war drags on in the Gulf, they see ever more reasons for Iran to seek a nuclear device, though its programme may have to become smaller and even more secretive to combat its penetration by Israeli and American intelligence, and the devices it makes may be rather crude.

“We could wake up to a flash in the desert one morning,” says an expert.

Still, even a simple nuclear blast sends a message that neighbours will feel compelled to heed.

The dominoes of proliferation are wobbling. One more shove could tip them over.