George Hazim
| Traducir—Translate! | |
| Make fonts bigger>>> | Resize text-+= |
Cornered by failure, Trump and Netanyahu are reportedly weighing a nuclear strike on Iran’s Fordow facility – a reckless step toward catastrophe.
The suggestion that a tactical nuclear weapon could be used against Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility should send a chill through the spine of anyone who understands the catastrophic implications of modern warfare. The fact that such a possibility is now on the table isn’t a sign of strength or confidence, but a sign of desperation.
It reflects a geopolitical moment in which two governments, confronted by the limits of their own military and political strategies, appear increasingly willing to contemplate the unthinkable. If such a strike is attempted, it wouldn’t merely be another Middle Eastern conflict; it would represent a historic rupture in international law and a reckless gamble with the stability of the entire global order.
The long arc of demonisation matters, because it set the stage for today’s crisis.
Decades of sanctions, covert sabotage and threats have pushed Iran to harden parts of its nuclear programme, including building the Fordow enrichment facility deep under a mountain near Qom. Analysts note Fordow’s depth and geology make it extremely difficult to destroy with conventional weapons alone; even the US GBU-57 “bunker buster” might not guarantee full destruction.
The horror of what is already happening makes this nuclear brinkmanship even more obscene. On February 28, the US and Israel launched their largest joint assault on Iran in decades, a wave of air and missile strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his own compound and decapitated parts of the country’s military and political leadership. In the same operation, dozens of other senior officials and many civilians were reported killed under the bombs.
That wasn’t “deterrence”; it was the murder of a head of state in a surprise attack that shredded any remaining pretence that Washington and Tel Aviv respect Iranian sovereignty or basic international norms.
Yet even in the face of that shock, it isn’t Iran that looks broken. Iran’s response has underlined just how far the balance of technological and psychological advantage has shifted.
Tehran has begun to field highly sophisticated hypersonic systems, centred on variants of the Fattah missile family, capable of manoeuvring at many times the speed of sound on complex trajectories that make interception by legacy systems like Patriot or Iron Dome extraordinarily difficult.
These weapons, along with Iran’s broader ballistic and drone arsenal, have already been used in waves of retaliation that forced US and Israeli planners to throw up dense defensive umbrellas and fire off vast numbers of expensive interceptors simply to keep up.
Iran is now doing exactly what it spent more than forty years preparing to do: imposing intolerable costs on a richer, more heavily armed adversary at a fraction of the price. Far from showcasing unchallengeable American and Israeli might, the 2025–26 campaign has exposed how fragile their model of supremacy has become.
US forces have already diverted interceptors and air defence assets from Europe and Asia to the Gulf and eastern Mediterranean, and military planners are warning that another few weeks of high-intensity exchanges could leave Washington facing uncomfortable choices about which ally’s skies to leave less protected. Israel, for its part, has had to admit that even after claiming to destroy hundreds of Iranian launchers, it cannot fully stop the trickle of missiles and drones that still get through, undermining the old myth that superior Western technology can simply nullify the capabilities of a sanctioned “pariah” state.
On every metric that matters in a long war of attrition, Iran is quietly winning: it’s proving its deterrent works, demonstrating that its hypersonics and precision missiles can pierce billion-dollar shields, and draining US and Israeli interceptor stocks faster than their industries can comfortably replace them.
A state that Western pundits long dismissed as backward and irrational has, in practice, out-innovated its tormentors where it counts – on the ability to hold their bases, ports, refineries and cities at credible risk.
This emerging Iranian dominance is precisely why Trump and Netanyahu are now reaching for the nuclear option: not because they are strong, but because they have discovered that every conventional lever they trusted is either blunted, overstretched or openly failing.
According to multiple reports, US defence assessments have told political leaders bluntly that while sustained conventional strikes could damage Fordow, “near certainty” of destruction would require a tactical nuclear warhead – likely after “softening” the mountain with conventional bombs. The very fact that such options are being briefed, and discussed publicly as “not off the table”, shows how normalised nuclear first-use thinking has become in Trump and Netanyahu’s orbit. They’re staring at a strategic landscape in which Iran’s hardened facilities, its missile forces and its regional networks have survived everything short of nuclear fire – and instead of admitting their promises were fantasy, they are toying with changing the very rules of war.
Here’s where the desperation shows. For years, Netanyahu has built his political identity on the claim that Iran’s nuclear programme is an existential threat that must be stopped, not just contained. Trump has wrapped himself in the language of absolute resolve, promising that Iran will “never” obtain the means to break out to a weapon and boasting about the destructive power of US munitions. Together, they’ve told their publics they will not tolerate a hardened, resilient Iranian capability under a mountain.
Now, confronted with expert warnings that the most powerful conventional bomb may not finish the job, and with the spectacle of Iranian hypersonics eroding their aura of invincibility, they face a choice: admit their maximalist promises were fantasy, or clutch at the ultimate weapon to avoid looking weak.
That isn’t strategic thinking; it’s political cowardice – the behaviour of men who would rather move the world’s red lines than confess they were lying about what could be achieved by force.
The technical argument for a nuclear earth-penetrator at Fordow is coldly simple: only a nuclear blast can guarantee destruction of deeply buried halls and redundant systems.
The moral and strategic argument against it is even simpler: detonating a nuclear device against a non-nuclear state’s hardened facility, in a region already saturated with conflict, would smash an 80-year taboo and invite nuclear arms races from Riyadh to Ankara and beyond.
To even consider that step is to declare that preserving US–Israeli hegemony – maintaining the prerogative to decide who may enrich uranium, where, and under what rock – is worth more than preserving the basic firewall that has kept nuclear weapons unused in war since 1945. It says, in effect, Iranian lives, regional stability and the integrity of the non-proliferation regime are expendable props in two men’s struggle to avoid electoral humiliation and loss of status.
The consequences won’t stop at Iran’s borders. Even the 2025 conventional strikes on Iranian facilities jolted global energy markets and exposed how vulnerable oil and gas infrastructure is to conflict over the nuclear file.
A nuclear strike would almost certainly trigger Iranian retaliation short of its own nuclear threshold: mining or threatening the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on Gulf export terminals and pipelines, and proxy operations against tankers and regional infrastructure.
Such a chain reaction could send crude prices soaring, disrupt shipping and insurance, and tip already fragile economies toward recession. Families far from Qom – from Adelaide to Accra – would feel the shock in fuel prices, food costs and employment, while Trump and Netanyahu retreat behind motorcades, spin and security cordons.
Viewed against Iran’s modern history, the hypocrisy is staggering. In 1951, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh moved to nationalise the country’s oil industry, arguing Iranians should benefit from their own vast reserves rather than the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP. For that act of economic self-determination, Britain and the United States orchestrated a covert coup in 1953 – Operation Ajax/Boot – that toppled Mosaddegh and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as an authoritarian monarch. Western governments then armed and backed the Shah’s repressive security apparatus for decades, prioritising “stability” and oil over Iranian democracy.
The 1979 revolution, whatever its later trajectory, was rooted in a popular revolt against that dictatorship and foreign manipulation. Iranians chose to oust a ruler installed and sustained by London and Washington, and they have lived ever since under a barrage of Western propaganda that paints their country as uniquely irrational and dangerous. Yet throughout, Iran has remained a complex, literate, historically rich society, home to a sophisticated urban culture and political debates that rarely make it into Western headlines.
Viewed against this modern history, the hypocrisy is staggering. A country that tried, under Mosaddegh, to control its own oil was punished with a coup; when it overthrew the Shah, it was punished with sanctions and isolation; when it hardened facilities to protect them from attack, it was threatened with nuclear annihilation. Through it all, Iran has remained a complex, cultured society whose worst crime, in Western eyes, was to refuse subservience.
Trump and Netanyahu’s reported willingness to contemplate a tactical nuclear strike at Fordow is the logical end point of that mindset: a belief that some nations are so dispensable, and some leaders so indispensable, that even nuclear fire is an acceptable tool to keep them in line. It is a damning reflection of their desperation and their unfitness to steward the nuclear age.
If there is any sanity left in Washington, Tel Aviv and the wider international community, it must be mobilised now – not later – to shut this door completely. Nuclear first use against Iran cannot be allowed to become just another “option”. It would not secure peace.
It would confirm, for Iranians and for the rest of the world, that the people who broke their democracy in 1953 and backed their dictator until 1979 are still prepared to sacrifice Iranian lives and global stability rather than accept a more equal world.
BEFORE you leave, PLEASE pay attention to this alert.
[t4b-ticker id="1"]
Print this article [bws_pdfprint display=’print’]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
