For three decades, the real strategic story of West Asia has not been oil, terrorism or even ideology. It has been nuclear prevention.
From Iraq to Libya and now Iran, Western policy—sometimes coordinated, often improvised—has revolved around a single objective: to stop the spread of nuclear weapons capability in one of the world’s most volatile regions. What has changed, over time, is not the goal, but the method and the lessons drawn by those on the receiving end.
The story begins with Iraq.
In 1981, Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in a pre-emptive strike. A decade later, after the Gulf War, UN inspectors dismantled what remained of Iraq’s nuclear programme. The message seemed clear: nuclear ambition in West Asia could be stopped by force.
That lesson was reinforced, and arguably overdrawn, in 2003. The US-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part by the claim that Saddam retained weapons of mass destruction. None were found. But the precedent had already been set. As President George W Bush put it at the time, Iraq was accused of seeking “the most lethal weapons ever devised”. The implication was unmistakable: such ambitions would not be tolerated.
Libya drew its own conclusions.
By 2003, Muammar Gaddafi had a nascent nuclear programme, much of it acquired through the black-market network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist who built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and later operated a clandestine proliferation network supplying centrifuge designs and components to countries including Iran and Libya. That same year—and in the shadow of the Iraq invasion—Libya abruptly agreed to dismantle its programme and open its facilities to international inspection.
When US, British and International Atomic Energy Agency teams entered Libya’s facilities in early 2004—including sites linked to the Tajoura research centre near Tripoli—they found key elements of the enrichment effort still in a rudimentary state. Centrifuge components sourced through the Khan network were in some cases only partially assembled, and in others still in shipping crates, underscoring how early-stage the programme remained.
The episode was widely presented as a triumph of coercive diplomacy. Yet, the longer-term lesson was more ambiguous. Eight years later, Gaddafi was overthrown with Western backing. In Tehran and elsewhere, the conclusion was stark: surrendering strategic deterrence did not guarantee regime survival.
So Iran, unlike Iraq or Libya, has proceeded more cautiously—and more deliberately.
Its programme is also in a different league. Both Iraq and Libya remained dependent on external supply networks and never mastered the full nuclear fuel cycle. Iran, by contrast, has developed an extensive and largely indigenous enrichment capability, operating advanced centrifuges and producing uranium enriched to levels close to weapons-grade. What was once a covert project has become a dispersed, technically-mature infrastructure. It is this depth of capability, rather than any single facility, that makes Iran far harder to stop.
Since the exposure of its enrichment facilities in 2002, Iran’s nuclear programme has been the subject of sanctions, sabotage and negotiation. The 2015 nuclear agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—was designed not to eliminate Iran’s capability, but to constrain it. As President Barack Obama explained, the deal would “cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon”.
From Iran’s perspective, the lessons of Iraq and Libya were already clear. Move too fast, and you invite attack. Give up too much, and you risk collapse. The result has been a strategy of calibrated ambiguity—advancing technical capability while avoiding an overt decision to build a bomb.
Recent events have brought this long trajectory into sharper focus. Iranian missiles have struck southern Israel, including the area around Dimona—home to Israel’s undeclared nuclear facility—underlining how close the region has come to direct confrontation around its most sensitive sites.
Israel’s Dimona complex, built with French assistance in the late 1950s and operational since the early 1960s, houses a small heavy-water reactor designed to produce plutonium from natural uranium, predominantly Uranium-238. Widely believed to be the source of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, it is also understood to include facilities for reprocessing spent fuel to extract weapons-grade plutonium. Unlike a power reactor, it is optimised for weapons production and has operated for decades under conditions of strict opacity.
Unlike the Soviet reactor at disaster site Chernobyl, Dimona is smaller and more stable, and a direct hit would not trigger a nuclear explosion. But a sufficiently precise strike—particularly on fuel or waste facilities—could release radioactive material, creating a localised but politically explosive contamination risk.
The deeper roots of Iran’s nuclear ambition, however, go back further.
In my 1988 book Nuclear Rivals in the Middle East, I recorded a striking account from Fereidun Fesharaki, a former energy adviser to the Shah. He recalled being told by one of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s senior emissaries: “It is your duty to build this bomb. Our civilisation is in danger and we have to do it.”
Whether universally shared or not, the remark captures something essential: from the outset, Iran’s nuclear ambitions were framed not simply as strategy, but as civilisational survival.
Others are watching across the region. Saudi Arabia has signalled that it would follow if Iran acquires a bomb. Turkey has hinted at similar ambitions. The risk is not simply an Iranian weapon, but a wider cascade. What began as a series of discrete interventions—Iraq, then Libya—has evolved into a more complex and uncertain effort to manage, rather than eliminate, nuclear risk.
Each stage has produced its own unintended consequences. Iraq demonstrated the reach of military force. Libya cast doubt on the value of compliance. Iran has absorbed both lessons—and adjusted accordingly.
It is a theme I return to in my novel The Quiet Correspondent, where the nuclear question surfaces not as policy but as conviction: that without ultimate deterrence, states—and even civilisations—remain exposed.
West Asia is not yet in a nuclear arms race. But it is closer than it has ever been.
(Views are personal)
Read all columns by Shyam Bhatia
Shyam Bhatia
London-based author of India’s Nuclear Bomb, Nuclear Rivals in the Middle East and Brighter than the Baghdad Sun