By Rima Najjar
How Eroding the NPT Framework Undermines Global Security and Rewrites the Ethics of Naming, Punishment, and Strategic Immunity
Author’s Note
This essay exposes the asymmetry at the core of the global nuclear order. It confronts how legal frameworks like the NPT and JCPOA are not universally upheld but strategically deployed — punishing transparency while shielding opacity, enforcing restraint on adversaries while exempting allies. Through the cases of Iran and Israel, and the silenced testimony of Mordechai Vanunu, it argues that legality has been hollowed out — transformed from a standard of accountability into a scaffold for strategic immunity. The essay also traces the contours of escalation should juridical containment collapse: a landscape where military retaliation, proxy saturation, and symbolic disruption emerge from the erosion of the law’s credibility, the selective enforcement of its norms, and the abandonment of its protective function.
I. Compliance Without Equal Treatment: The Snapback Crisis and Iran’s Exasperation
On September 26, 2025, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Human Rights Kazem Gharibabadi announced that Iran would cancel the Cairo Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) if sanctions were reimposed. Framing the move as a response to diplomatic sabotage, he accused Western states of undermining Iran’s efforts to revive negotiations. He described the joint Chinese-Russian proposal to extend the snapback deadline as a final opportunity to prevent regional escalation, warning that any threat to Iran’s interests would be met with decisive retaliation.
Sanctions on Iran were first imposed in 2006, through UN Security Council Resolution 1737, in response to Iran’s refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. These sanctions were supported by all five permanent members — including Russia and China — and marked the beginning of a decade-long regime of expanding restrictions targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Their legal force derived from Chapter VII of the UN Charter, making them binding across member states.
Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to which Iran is a signatory, many of these sanctions were lifted in exchange for Iran’s compliance with strict limits on its nuclear activities.
But here’s the rub: the very mechanism meant to enforce compliance has been weaponized by the United States and Israel — one that formally exited the agreement, and one that was never a signatory to begin with.
A snapback mechanism embedded in JCPOA allows any signatory — such as the United States, France, or the United Kingdom — to reimpose United Nations sanctions on Iran if they believe it is violating the agreement. It was designed as a safeguard to ensure swift accountability in the event of significant non-compliance, preserving the integrity of the deal without requiring consensus among Security Council members.
Rather than upholding the integrity of the agreement, President Trump in 2020 — acting for overtly political reasons and without evidentiary basis — sought to unilaterally reimpose UN sanctions on Iran by invoking the snapback mechanism, despite the United States having formally withdrawn from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018. At the time, the US justified the withdrawal by claiming that the JCPOA failed to adequately constrain Iran’s ballistic missile program, regional influence, and long-term nuclear ambitions. Yet the decision was shaped most decisively by pressure from Israel, which opposed the deal and actively lobbied for a more confrontational stance toward Tehran.
Other signatories — including Russia, China, and key European powers — rejected the move, arguing that the U.S. had forfeited its legal standing by exiting the agreement. The attempt to trigger snapback was not acknowledged by the UN or most of the international community. Nevertheless, the U.S. declared sanctions reinstated, asserting a claim that lacked formal recognition.
Although the U.S. snapback declaration lacked juridical legitimacy, it had material consequences. The United States reimposed its own sanctions and pressured other countries and companies to comply through secondary sanctions and financial deterrence. This unilateral enforcement deepened Iran’s economic isolation, disrupted international trade, and undermined the multilateral framework of the JCPOA — effectively weaponizing non-recognition into strategic impact.
This episode laid bare the political nature of enforcement within the international legal order, revealing how mechanisms designed for collective accountability can be repurposed for unilateral coercion: legal instruments like snapback are not governed by treaty logic alone, but by strategic alignment and power asymmetry. Iran, still a formal participant in the JCPOA, remains subject to inspection and sanction threats. Meanwhile, Israel, which never signed the JCPOA or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), remains untouched by such mechanisms.
Iran’s threatened withdrawal must be understood not as a rejection of diplomacy, but as a response to its juridical exhaustion. When compliance yields only surveillance and sanction — while opacity is rewarded with immunity — exiting the framework becomes a form of strategic survival. In this context, escalation is not simply a breach of order; it is a symptom of its collapse.
The consequences are not confined to legal abstraction. Iran’s deepening nuclear cooperation with Russia — described by Iranian Atomic Energy Chief Mohammad Eslami as “historic” — signals a recalibration of alliances in the face of eroded multilateral legitimacy. The acceleration of joint planning, personally endorsed by President Putin, reframes Iran’s posture not as isolationist, but as strategically realigned. Treaty erosion does not merely weaken global security — it reconfigures it, shifting the axis of legitimacy from juridical consensus to bilateral coordination.
The shape of escalation, in this landscape, is not just military — but if it were, it would be asymmetrical, fragmented, and regionally entangled. Iran cannot match Israel’s air superiority or nuclear capability head-on. Instead, escalation would likely unfold across multiple theaters: proxy activation in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen; missile and drone salvos targeting strategic infrastructure; cyberattacks on critical systems; and symbolic strikes designed to fracture the illusion of Israeli invulnerability. These acts would not aim for parity — they would aim to expose the fragility of a system that punishes transparency and protects silence.
In such a world, the erosion of legal containment does not just invite confrontation — it removes the buffers that once distinguished diplomacy from retaliation. The architecture of global security, once scaffolded by treaties and inspections, begins to collapse under the weight of its own asymmetry. What remains is not law, but alignment. Not accountability, but immunity. And not deterrence, but the threat of unbuffered escalation.
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II. What Happens When Israel’s Nuclear Secrets Are Exposed
Iran’s recent intelligence leak about Israel’s nuclear arsenal did not shock the international community — it confirmed what had long circulated as an open secret: that Israel possesses a substantial and operational nuclear arsenal. This tacit understanding was thrown into sharper relief when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in a widely reported statement from July 2025, declared that Israel must be ready to “use its full power” against existential threats — a phrase widely interpreted as a public invocation of nuclear capability.
Smotrich’s remarks broke from Israel’s long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity, shifting its posture from silence to threat. His statement did not merely signal deterrence — it gestured toward deployment. In doing so, it transformed opacity into escalation. The Iranian leaks, which detailed warhead counts and site-specific infrastructure, did not introduce new knowledge; they gave form to what had long been denied juridical recognition. Smotrich’s rhetoric gave it urgency. The danger was no longer in possession — it was in the willingness to name and invoke.
This shift — from ambiguity to assertion — exposes the fragility of the global system that protects Israel from scrutiny. Strategic opacity, once justified as a stabilizing force, becomes a tool of provocation. And when exposure is met not with accountability but with rhetorical escalation, the architecture of legal coherence begins to fracture.
According to Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib, the leaked cache includes thousands of classified files, images, and recordings tied to Israel’s nuclear sites and global defense ties. These documents function less as revelations than as formal acknowledgments of what has long been known but never officially admitted. They do not rupture the archive — they confirm it.
The impact of the leak was not juridical — it was symbolic. Israel’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) means there is no formal mechanism to investigate or penalize its nuclear activities. The leak did not prompt inquiries or sanctions. Instead, it was framed as an act of espionage. The focus shifted from the content of the archive to the motives of the exposer. Iran was cast not as a witness, but as a destabilizing force. The archive became a threat, not a testimony; the leaker, a provocateur, not a truth-teller.
This rhetorical inversion protects Israel’s opacity by delegitimizing the act of exposure itself. It reinforces a system where transparency is punished and secrecy rewarded — especially when secrecy aligns with the interests of powerful allies. The significance of the leak lies not in what it revealed, but in how the global order responded: by shielding power from consequence and treating testimony as provocation.
This pattern extends beyond state-level exposure to the treatment of individuals who break strategic silence. Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, exposed the scale of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal in 1986, sharing photographs and technical details with the British press. His revelations suggested Israel possessed up to 200 nuclear warheads. In response, Israeli intelligence abducted Vanunu in Rome, secretly returned him to Israel, and tried him behind closed doors. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, including 11 in solitary confinement.
Upon his release in 2004, Vanunu faced sweeping restrictions: barred from leaving the country, forbidden from speaking to foreigners, and repeatedly re-arrested for minor parole violations. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience; human rights advocates praised his courage. He received the Right Livelihood Award and was hailed by figures like Daniel Ellsberg as a hero of the nuclear era. Yet despite international recognition, Israel continued to treat him as a traitor. His punishment was not just legal — it was symbolic. It signaled that internal exposure of nuclear secrets would be met not with protection, but with isolation and erasure.
Unlike Vanunu, Iran’s revelations— whether about its own program or Israel’s — are state-led. They lack a singular figure whose dissent can be framed as moral testimony. Iran’s transparency has taken institutional forms: declarations to the IAEA, public statements, compliance reports. Its retaliatory leaks are treated as geopolitical maneuvers, not ethical acts. The difference is not just in how these exposures are received — it is in their form. Israel punishes the individual to preserve ambiguity; Iran performs exposure through the state and is punished collectively — through sanctions, isolation, and suspicion.
In both cases, the system defends itself not by disproving the content, but by discrediting the form. When exposure comes from within, as in Vanunu’s case, it is framed as betrayal. When it comes from a rival state, it is cast as provocation. Either way, the architecture of strategic opacity remains intact — shielded by a global order that treats testimony as threat and silence as stability.
Yet Israel’s refusal to join the NPT does not place it beyond the reach of international law. As a member of the United Nations, Israel is bound by the UN Charter and has ratified key human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the Geneva Conventions. These treaties prohibit arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and the targeting of civilians — principles routinely violated in the context of occupation and military operations.
While none of these instruments directly regulate nuclear weapons, they offer juridical pathways for challenging the conditions under which nuclear secrecy is maintained. For example, the ICCPR’s protections for freedom of expression and against cruel and inhuman treatment could be invoked in cases like Vanunu’s prolonged solitary confinement and speech restrictions. Likewise, the Geneva Conventions — designed to govern the conduct of war and protect civilian populations — intersect with the strategic implications of nuclear capacity when that capacity is shielded from scrutiny and potentially deployed in occupied territories. In such contexts, opacity about nuclear weapons is not just a diplomatic posture — it becomes a legal concern, especially if the threat or use of such weapons undermines civilian protections guaranteed under international humanitarian law.
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III. Strategic Retaliation and the Collapse of Legal Containment
Iran’s threatened withdrawal from treaty frameworks — whether the Cairo Agreement, which outlines principles for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which obligates non-nuclear states to forgo weapons development in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology and international safeguards — signals more than diplomatic fatigue. It marks the potential collapse of a system that once mediated conflict through verification, inspection, and juridical restraint. When legal containment no longer offers protection, retaliation becomes not a breach but a form of strategic survival.
In this recalibrated landscape, where legal frameworks no longer constrain and alliances replace accountability, the question emerges: if containment fails, what shape might retaliation take?
The shape of escalation, in this context, is not merely military — it is layered, asymmetrical, and regionally entangled. Iran cannot match Israel’s air superiority or nuclear capability in a conventional head-to-head confrontation. But escalation, if it comes, will not be symmetrical. It will unfold across multiple theaters, each calibrated to fracture the illusion of strategic immunity and expose the vulnerabilities that lie beneath the architecture of deterrence.
Proxy Activation and Regional Saturation:
Iran’s most immediate lever is its regional network of non-state actors — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and Houthi forces in Yemen. These groups form a distributed web of influence capable of opening simultaneous fronts. Their operations would likely target Israeli assets, U.S. military installations, and critical Gulf infrastructure. The goal would not be decisive victory, but saturation: a persistent, low-intensity conflict that stretches resources, destabilizes logistics, and dramatizes the cost of regional entanglement.
Missile and Drone Salvos:
Iran has already demonstrated its capacity to strike deep into Israeli territory, including urban centers and strategic sites. Future salvos could be calibrated to target oil refineries, airbases, and maritime chokepoints like the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz. These strikes would not only signal reach but disrupt global energy flows, transforming regional escalation into a global economic tremor.
Cyber Warfare and Infrastructure Disruption:
In the digital domain, Iran could pursue strategic retaliation without direct confrontation. Cyberattacks on Israeli power grids, water systems, and financial networks would weaponize invisibility — eroding civilian confidence, sowing chaos, and demonstrating that deterrence does not shield against the intangible. These operations would blur the line between war and sabotage, dramatizing the porousness of modern infrastructure.
Naval Threats and Gulf Disruption:
Iran’s naval doctrine emphasizes asymmetric tactics: fast boats, sea mines, and mobile missile platforms. These assets could be deployed to threaten commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. Even limited disruption — an attack on a tanker, a mine near a key strait — would spike global oil prices and dramatize the vulnerability of maritime commerce. The message would be clear: strategic immunity is a fiction when the arteries of global trade are exposed.
Symbolic Retaliation and Strategic Messaging:
Beyond tactical targets, Iran may strike symbolic sites — intelligence hubs, command centers, or civilian infrastructure — not to achieve parity, but to rupture narrative control. These strikes would be designed to fracture the illusion of Israeli invulnerability, to dramatize the cost of opacity, and to reassert Iran’s capacity to shape the terms of confrontation. In this theater, symbolism is strategy, and retaliation becomes a form of storytelling.
Such escalation would not aim to win a war — it would aim to expose the fragility of a system that punishes transparency and protects silence. In this landscape, the erosion of treaty frameworks does not just invite confrontation — it removes the juridical buffers that once distinguished diplomacy from retaliation.
Iran’s threatened exit from the NPT would dismantle the inspection regime and remove the legal distinction between suspicion and proof. Without treaty participation, accusations of non-compliance no longer require verification; retaliation can be justified by narrative alone. In such a system, opacity becomes a weapon, and testimony becomes a threat.
This is the collapse of legal containment: a shift from regulated deterrence to unbuffered escalation. It reveals a global order in which law is not a shield but a sieve — applied to adversaries, withheld from allies. Strategic immunity is not earned through compliance; it is engineered through exemption.
If global security is to be rebuilt, it must begin with a reckoning — not just with the weapons we fear, but with the silences we protect. The architecture of immunity must be dismantled. The ethics of naming must be defended. And the archive must remember what the law refuses to hold.
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Conclusion: Testimony, Legality, and the Ethics of Naming
The crisis at the heart of the global nuclear order is not simply about weapons — it is about the architecture of law, narrative, and accountability. Iran’s threatened withdrawal from treaty frameworks exposes a system that enforces rules selectively, punishes transparency, and rewards silence. Israel’s undeclared arsenal, shielded by strategic ambiguity and political exemption, reveals how opacity can be engineered into immunity. And the treatment of whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu shows that testimony itself is criminalized when it threatens the architecture of silence.
Withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Cairo Agreement would offer Iran strategic latitude: freedom from inspections, juridical restraint, and the asymmetrical burden of compliance. The NPT obligates non-nuclear states to forgo weapons development in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology and international safeguards; the Cairo Agreement envisions a nuclear-free Middle East, a vision undermined by Israel’s non-signatory status and undeclared arsenal. Exiting these frameworks would dramatize Iran’s rejection of a system that demands restraint from some while exempting others. Yet the cost is steep: diplomatic isolation, intensified sanctions, and the forfeiture of legal legitimacy. It would mark a shift from defiant compliance to open provocation — a move that may signal strategic survival, but also accelerate confrontation.
Together, these dynamics fracture the legal coherence of nonproliferation regimes. They reveal a world in which legality is not a universal standard but a strategic tool — applied to adversaries, withheld from allies. If global security is to be rebuilt on ethical foundations, it must begin with a reckoning: not just with the weapons we fear, but with the silences we protect.
The archive must remember that those acts, absences, and asymmetries that fall outside juridical recognition remain central to the story of power, survival, and resistance.
Note: First published in Medium
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
27 September 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
