You’ll See

There is an undisclosed nuclear stockpile in the Middle East that reportedly contains at least ninety warheads. Those weapons belong to Israel. Attention is paid instead to Iran, which has, we are told, an alarming imminent potentiality. Since at least the 1990s, Israel has issued regular warnings about an impending Iranian nuclear threat and offered to attack Iranian nuclear sites to stop it. For just as long, the United States has weighed the feasibility of all-out war with Iran. As such, Iranians have located the uranium enrichment facility of Fordo hundreds of feet underground. To destroy it, according to U.S. defense officials speaking with the Guardian in June 2025 (before the American attack on the facility), the United States would have to “first soften the ground with conventional bombs and then ultimately drop a tactical nuclear weapon from a B2 bomber.” To prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the United States—the only country to have ever openly used them—might have to use them again. Iran can’t have nuclear weapons because this would compromise American interests in the region: a nuclear-armed Iran could deter Israel’s ability to do something akin to what it’s doing today.

On May 31, 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the body that oversees and promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy, issued a report claiming that Iran was hiding information about its nuclear activities and was, for the first time in almost twenty years, in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Reuters, in an article published on June 12, called it “damning” and interpreted its likely outcome as such:

Since Iran bristles at resolutions against it and this is the most significant one in years, it is likely to respond with a nuclear escalation, as it has said it will. That could complicate the current talks between Iran and the United States aimed at imposing new curbs on Iran’s accelerating atomic activities.

The talks were further complicated not long after, when Israel bombed Iran, assassinating nuclear scientists and military officials, often with their families and neighbors. Israeli officials and American media called the attacks “preemptive.”

Soon after, it was revealed that the United States’ recent negotiations with Iran were a setup intended to lull Iran into a false sense of security. Diplomacy as a cover for aggression, an extra nail in the already-buried coffin of international law. Among those targeted in that first round of Israeli strikes was a key figure overseeing Iran’s negotiations with Washington (he survived). After Israel’s attacks, the IAEA walked back its report, clarifying that it had no evidence, then or ever, that Iran had acted in pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

The United States has wanted to orchestrate regime change in Iran—regime being what we call governments we don’t like—since Iran’s first democratically elected government nationalized its oil back in 1951. It did just that in 1953, in one of the nascent CIA’s first such operations, restoring its puppet dictator, the Shah, to power (soon after which he sold almost half of Iranian oil to American companies). The CIA also helped to build up the Iranian SAVAK, the state’s intelligence security apparatus, which the Israeli Mossad partly trained. During this time, Israeli and American intelligence had more or less free rein. Iran was the rare friend of Israel, a fledgling settler colony trapped in a sea of Arab hate, and a destination for Israeli imports, including military tech; Israel purchased its oil from Iran.

In 1979 came the Iranian revolution. Many Israeli and American officials—including President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski—supported the Shah’s use of lethal force, but it was too late. According to human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, the then-director of research at the Israeli foreign ministry said at the time, about the popular uprising:

The social-economic-public character of the upheaval proved that the street and the masses could bring down a regime [that had] tanks, the most modern weaponry, and an air force. . . . The masses succeeded in overthrowing the regime. This is, in my opinion, a harbinger of danger to all the regimes in the region, including the radical ones.

Iran’s new government—and its people—remembered the role of the United States in reinstating the Shah. Iran integrated into its constitution a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, led by the recognition that Israel is a colonial enterprise, a vanguard for the West—by that point, the United States—in West Asia, meant to destabilize the region. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, established an annual day of protest on the last Friday of Ramadan called al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day to show solidarity with Palestinian resistance against Zionism. Since then, Iran has provided military, intelligence, and financial support to militias that undermine American imperialism through the Quds force—a dedicated wing of its military. (Meanwhile, Israel propped up Iranian opposition groups like the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, a formerly designated terrorist organization delisted by Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama’s secretary of state; John Bolton’s faves; and who are today treated by much of DC like Iran’s government in exile—more on MEK later.) It is therefore true that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel, just as Israel is an existential threat to the sovereign countries around it. This is the United States’ problem with Iran, not human rights, which one doesn’t promote by sanctioning or bombing to death those very humans. The nukes are a pretense; they don’t exist, and the threat is manufactured.

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare in 2014, after Iran had agreed to enter negotiations with the United States regarding its nuclear program in an attempt to lift some of the sanctions, designed to foment internal unrest and destabilize the country, that had crippled its economy for decades. Before the overthrow of the Shah, the United States had sponsored Iran’s initial nuclear program, and its first nuclear reactor was about 80 percent finished before being halted by the new government after the Islamic revolution. It was only once the Iran-Iraq War (in which the United States pledged to do everything “necessary and legal” to aid Saddam Hussein) left Iran in need of new energy sources that they decided to go through with it.

This nuclear program would look nothing like the Shah’s—it aimed for one reactor instead of twenty. Iran turned to Europe for enriched uranium and the IAEA for logistics. In 1968, it signed onto the NPT, which guaranteed Iran the provision of enriched uranium until the United States, under the Reagan administration, intervened, blocking the IAEA’s technical assistance in fuel production and uranium conversion and pressuring Germany and France to refuse to supply Iran with uranium. From the start, the United States’ concern was not nuclear threat but economic sovereignty and development in a country with an explicitly anti-American foreign policy. Iran opted to find a way to enrich uranium itself. This is often cited in Western media as the first evidence of Iran’s pursuit of a bomb.

In 2002, the American representative for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) announced that he had credible reports of a secret Iranian nuclear site in Natanz. The NCRI was a front for MEK, which was closely linked to Mossad and used by them to launder information to the IAEA. The press coverage around it was, as Porter writes, “a carefully constructed bit of political theater” orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel’s ongoing efforts to influence media coverage of Iran’s nuclear program. By 1997, Benjamin Netanyahu had launched his campaign to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

An IAEA report from around that time found Iran had had a “clandestine enrichment program” for years. Porter argues that Iran had reasons to withhold disclosure: for one, Iran wasn’t technically obligated to notify the IAEA about Natanz at that stage, although the secrecy had more to do with concerns from China, who supplied Iran’s uranium and hoped to avoid retaliation from the United States, as well as fear of an attack on its nuclear energy site. Iran had built Natanz quietly because, had they notified the IAEA, officials later said, “‘the United States definitely would have prevented the completion of the construction of the project.’”

In 2004, American intelligence came into possession of over a thousand pages of documents they claimed were from an Iranian research program on nuclear weapons acquired from an Iranian nuclear scientist they’d recruited to spy on Iran. Or, depending on which story you read, from a nuclear researcher’s stolen computer. The contact was unsurprisingly part of MEK. (Israeli sources later took credit for procuring the documents directly, in what appeared to be driven by “a need . . . to boast of a role in what has been a big political success against Iran.”)

The IAEA’s role was clearly in supporting American claims only to renege once the damage was done. In the 2000s, the agency functionally served as an arm of the United States’ “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Mossad had started to share its intelligence against Iran with the IAEA as early as 2003. Around this time, the United States found an ally in IAEA’s deputy director general Olli Heinonen, who later worked for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Bush administration shared some of the laptop documents with the IAEA and requested that they be kept from Iran. Heinonen initially obliged and took to asking Iran clarifying questions—Iran was guilty except where, when prompted, it could prove its innocence. In 2008, the IAEA issued a report claiming that, per Porter, “Iran had not done enough to respond to the documents, ‘particularly in light of the fact that, as acknowledged by Iran, some of the information contained it was factually accurate.’” A lot of mileage is being gotten out of that “some.” In 2011, after Heinonen left the agency, Porter writes, the IAEA acknowledged “the brazen misrepresentation of Iran’s position.” WikiLeaks cables later revealed that the agency’s safeguards division had worked closely with the United States to convince the world that Iran wasn’t complying with their investigation.

In recent years, Iran has begun to increase its the purity of the uranium it enriches, beginning with the 3 to 5 percent sufficient for fuel but lately increasing as high as 20 percent for some medical and research applications. Since 2021, Iran has pushed purity to as much as 60 percent. The BBC reported on June 12 that the increase brought the country close to the enrichment levels required for nukes. But closer is not close; nukes require 90 percent enrichment. It is plausible that Iran was increasing its enrichment under the supervision of the IAEA to give it more chips at the negotiation table, especially as the Trump administration’s threats mounted. After the United States targeted three of Iran’s nuclear sites, the head of the IAEA asked to be allowed to assess the damage. Iran refused; its parliament voted to suspend cooperation with the IAEA. After the vote passed, members took to chanting, Death to America, Death to Israel.

Israel alleged its initial strikes against Iranian military leadership and scientists went after its nuclear program. It didn’t take long for their target to shift from Iran’s nuclear program to its missile program and then to ending the Iranian threat once and for all. Donald Trump announced the American bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites had “completely and totally obliterated” them. Yet on the day of the ceasefire, PBS ran the headline, “New U.S. intelligence report suggests Iran’s nuclear program only set back by months after strikes.” That wouldn’t be good enough, not for the majority of Americans who consider Iran a danger to America.

The convenient thing about the Iran threat is that the problem is intangible: Israel does not claim that Iran is in possession of nukes. The threat is in the future, and Israel is going after it today. Israel has attacked nuclear sites in the Middle East before, including this past June. The year was 1981 when it launched a “preemptive strike” on a research nuclear reactor in Iraq in what was dubbed Operation Babylon. The strikes set a precedent, then folded into the Begin Doctrine, an explicit Israeli military policy of “anticipatory self-defense” that declared the nuclear sites of “any enemy” suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction a fair target. (Interestingly, the Israeli attack against Iraq, a United States ally, was condemned by the Times as an “inexcusable and short-sighted aggression” because, “contrary to its official assertion,” in reality, “Israel was not in ‘mortal danger’ of being outgunned.”)

You can’t disprove intention. Iran has to prove it doesn’t want a nuke, and the more it is attacked, the less convincing its assurances will be. So, ironically, the more Israel attacks Iran, the more justification it has to do so in the minds of Israel and the propagandized American public.

There is a strong ideological basis for Iran’s decision not to pursue the bomb. Based on Porter’s collation of the existing evidence, and despite the United States’ claims, Iran did not use chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. In fact, the pro-Saddam United States had an “institutional interest in deflecting as much of the blame for chemical warfare atrocities away from Iraq to Iran as they could.” Ayatollah Khomeini had insisted against their use because the radius of so-called collateral harm against innocents outweighed the military advantage. Weapons of mass destruction were, he said, “dangerous to the future of humanity.” Early revolutionary leadership still associated nuclear weapons with the two global superpowers and their willingness to destroy the world between them.

Khomeini’s successor, Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has historically been against the militarization of Iran’s nuclear program. As the threat of foreign attack on Iran mounted, he issued a religious decree against the production, possession, or use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic’s ideological aversion to nuclear weapons might be as strong as Israel’s ideological draw. In The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, the historian Avner Cohen details Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s obsession with their acquisition. In 1960, he claimed that Dimona, the site of Israel’s nuclear research center, was being used for peaceful purposes, which was never true. In a meeting with President Kennedy in 1961, he insisted that, “for the time being, the only purposes are for peace. . . . But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.” In 1963, a suspicious Kennedy pushed for regular American inspections of Dimona, and threatened to withdraw funding if Israel didn’t comply. Ben-Gurion replied that the issue would have to wait until after Passover, two weeks later. By 1967, Israel had the bomb. It is not a signatory to the NPT, nor does it allow the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites. It neither confirms nor denies. Instead, it issues vague, menacing threats of devastating destruction.

As Israel’s enemies have grown more formidable, Israel has resorted to a projection of naked volatility: madman theory as political ideology. After an Iranian missile damaged Soroka Hospital in June—the Iranians claimed they successfully targeted one of the military assets encircling the hospital while Israeli and American media called it a “direct hit” on the hospital—Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir presented himself at the site. He invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his promise to exact revenge on Iran. After the ceasefire went into effect, he tweeted two emojis: a boom and what Arabs will recognize as a “you’ll see” hand.

Have you heard of the Samson Option? In the scenario that Israel feels it is going down, it will use everything it has, nukes included, to take the region down with it. Mutually assured destruction. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in June 2025, after his country attacked Iran, “If God forbid we fall—and this will not happen—but if we fall, many parts of the world will fall with us.”

“Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1,” an Israeli professor and former Mossad agent was quoted as saying in a 1992 New York Times article. The piece goes on to state that “if other countries in the region start acquiring ‘the bomb’ . . . the balance will be lost.” Israel’s notion of “balance” is ruthless dominance. Israel’s existence, today as in 1948, hinges on a people’s elimination. It is a reality that must be imposed by force. Iran must explain itself and its pursuit of nuclear energy, when the United States, a country that has used nukes against civilians, has never felt similarly obliged. When Iran insists on its right to a nuclear program, as political analyst Amal Saad wrote on X, “its defensive war is not merely over nuclear rights or even sovereignty.” Instead, she continues, Iran’s is a fight against “the colonial logic of permission,” and an extension of the war against Lebanon, against Syria, against Yemen, against Palestine.

The day after Israel’s initial attacks on Iran, Iranians took to the streets. One woman with a red keffiyeh around her shoulders caught the camera’s attention, possibly because her hair was not covered. “These scoundrels spent a year and a half killing half a million people,” she said, gesturing expressively with her hands. “Now an attack [on Iran]—we want an atomic bomb. Why not an atomic bomb?” The former CIA director Robert Gates once said that “the only moderate Iranian is one who has run out of bullets.” “Moderate” here means aligned with American interests. We seem to have forgotten, or decided we don’t care, who fired the first shot.