By Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick
The U.S. and Israeli war on Iran has put into sharp relief the vulnerability of the region to civilian devastation, given just how much Israel and the Gulf states depend on targetable industries for basic needs, including water. But more than that, the war has also exposed just how threatening such a multi-layered conflict is to the future of humanity in the age of nuclear weapons.
The continuation of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran risks not just a nuclear exchange that could result in millions of people dead across the Middle East, but even a wider nuclear war that could wipe out humanity. Whether such attacks would be initiated due to a deliberate decision—by President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu or both—to attack Iran with a nuclear weapon, or an accident in the fog of war, as a result of faulty intelligence or a cyberattack for example, does not matter. What matters is that nothing less than life on our planet is at stake.
Instead of continuing to plunge the region into darkness, despair, and further violence, the U.S. and Israel must renounce their wars of aggression in both Iran and Lebanon and seek a new policy of peace for West Asia, including by pursuing a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone at last.
Today, nine states (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) possess approximately 12,500 nuclear weapons, with US and Russia’s arsenals accounting for nearly 90% of the total number. The first five states on the list – having acquired these weapons of mass destruction by 1968 – were recognized as Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the premier United Nations (UN) treaty that has been in force since 1970, and that is meeting in New York starting this week for its Eleventh Review Conference. According to Article 6 of the NPT, the five NWS have a responsibility not just to disarm their nuclear arsenals, but to pursue general disarmament. Of the remaining four states, Israel, India, and Pakistan, never joined the NPT, while North Korea left the treaty in 2003, prior to its first nuclear test in 2006. All must be brought into a framework for disarmament, lest we blow ourselves up.
When the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1995, the treaty’s Review Conference passed a Resolution on the Middle East, with a goal of establishing a regional Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ), modeled after similar efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean, South Pacific, and Southeast Asia. All three of those regions had already become Nuclear Weapon Free Zones (NWFZ). The Middle East effort, initiated by Egypt and Iran in 1974, and embraced by the new Iranian regime following the 1979 Revolution, was bolstered by the added international focus. And yet, little progress has been made in turning this WMDFZ into reality.
Over the last several years, the UN has hosted conferences on this process, which Israel has not attended, and the U.S. has largely boycotted. Perhaps if the U.S. and Israel are so concerned about Iran’s nuclear program, a regional zone free of nuclear weapons would be the place to start?
Why does any of this matter? Aren’t nuclear weapons in the “right hands” a good thing? Haven’t we gone through more than 80 years of the nuclear age without blowing ourselves up? And don’t we have to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands so that we can in fact prevent the dreaded nuclear war?
To state the obvious, the right or wrong hands is clearly a matter of perspective. While the West has generally been a steadfast supporter of Israel and an adversary of Iran, many of U.S.’s NATO allies, like Spain and Italy, have condemned this conflict and refused to take any part in it. But even more importantly, as Ban Ki Moon, the former UN Secretary General, stated, “there are no right hands that can handle these wrong weapons.” Israel and the U.S.’s possession of nuclear weapons is what is putting the world at risk of nuclear war right now. And it has for decades.
We know from U.S. declassified documents that we have been far too close to nuclear war in the past, and not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There have been several instances in which U.S. and Soviet officials received false information about incoming missile attacks and chose to not follow protocol, thereby saving the world from a nightmare beyond reckoning.
To say that nuclear war would destroy human civilization and possibly all of life on the planet is not an exaggeration. Whether we’re talking about the hundreds of millions of people who would die from the heat, blast, and radiation the nuclear explosions would create, or the billions who would die from starvation due to nuclear winter that would ensue from enormous amounts of soot in the atmosphere, or the impacts on all forms of life from the resulting ozone layer destruction, nuclear Armageddon is real. We don’t want to play this game. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said as much in Geneva in 1985: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But today there’s a resurgent school of nuclear experts who believe that nuclear war can be won and should be risked and some, very likely, have Donald Trump’s ear.
And perhaps the saddest thing about this conflict, besides the heartbreaking suffering of innocent civilians who did nothing to bring about the current slaughter, is that at a time when we should be pursuing nuclear disarmament and strengthening non-proliferation, the lesson nations will draw from what is going on is the exact opposite. The lesson that nations will draw is that the only defense against being invaded by Trump and his sycophants and allies is having nuclear weapons.
This is not the first time this message has been communicated to the world. North Korea drew this conclusion explicitly after watching Saddam Hussein’s Iraq get invaded and their leader executed. It is the lesson the world drew after watching Gaddafi get murdered and sodomized with a bayonet in Libya. It is the lesson that the world drew after watching the U.S. invade Venezuela, kidnap the Maduros, and steal that country’s oil. And it is also the lesson that the Europeans drew after the Trump regime threatened to invade Greenland and other countries.
The U.S. and Israel are right to say that Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons. But that statement must have an addendum: the U.S. and Israel should pursue the dismantlement of their own nuclear arsenals. The U.S. should pursue its obligations of nuclear disarmament according to Article 6 of the NPT, and support the Middle East WMDFZ wholeheartedly. Israel should negotiate a lasting solution for Palestinian statehood, establish a Middle East WMDFZ by eliminating its nuclear arsenal, and join the NPT as a Non-Nuclear Weapons State.
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate existential threat to all of humanity. Only by pursuing nuclear disarmament can we ensure the safety of the nations of the world and the future of life on the planet. The Middle East is the right place to turbocharge these efforts before it is too late.
23 June 2026
Source: nuclearinsanity.substack.com