New Delhi: For over three decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has incessantly alleged that Iran is on the brink of building a nuclear bomb and that there's just one way to stop it – bomb them before they get the bomb.

On Friday (June 13), Israel finally greenlit this long-held solution. Missiles rained across Iran and F-35 jets were reportedly deployed, killing at least 78 as per Tehran – including 20 children, some top Iranian military officials and key nuclear scientists. Israel called these strikes ‘pre-emptive’.

This was followed by an unprecedented retaliation from Tehran, with ballistic missile strikes on multiple sites across Israel, killing three on Friday night as per Israel.

The latest escalation marks the most hostile confrontation yet between the two arch-adversaries in West Asia. And it came amid nuclear deal negotiations between the US and Iran – a move that Israel opposed.

Until recently, many observers had anticipated that Iran and the US would finally come to an agreement, but then headlines surfaced that Israel was likely to launch a large-scale attack on Iran.

Israel attacked Iran right after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) accused Iran of secret nuclear activities, a charge that Tehran denied. Iran accused the IAEA of colluding with the “Zionist entity”.

Until then, Donald Trump had publicly maintained that Israel should not derail the nuclear deal.

The New York Times reported that Iranians had anticipated an Israeli attack but not at a moment when they were engaging with America on a nuclear deal.

A brief timeline

Iran’s nuclear programme began in 1957 with aid from US President Dwight D. Eisenhower under the ‘Atoms for Peace’ Program. The Pahlavis, whom the US saw as dependable allies against the Soviets, joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970.

India is not a signatory of the NPT and views it as discriminatory since it gives only the P5 – the five recognised nuclear powers – the right to have nuclear weapons.

The fallout with the US started when Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Pahlavi regime in 1979 during the Islamic revolution. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since 1980. They have accused each other of waging proxy wars and attacks, and on many instances have come close to a direct conflict.

Bush, Obama and Trump

The next nuclear escalation started with Iran’s enrichment of uranium in the early 2000s, simultaneously with the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, after two years of heightened tensions, in 2004, Iran signed the Paris Agreement with France, Germany and the UK to suspend its enrichment process. Not long after, the talks were stalled and Iran resumed enrichment under one of its most anti-West presidents, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, leading to sanctions from the UN Security Council.

Iran argued that it was well within its rights under the NPT to develop peaceful nuclear technology, while the Bush administration questioned its real intentions.

In 2015, the Obama administration, along with China, France, the UK, Russia and Germany, brokered the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal with Iran. The Iranians agreed to significantly downsize their nuclear stockpiles and bring down the uranium enrichment level to 3.67%. The nuclear sanctions were lifted in return, and the Iranians were supposed to regain access to frozen assets worth $100 billion.

This was so important to the common Iranian that former foreign minister Javid Zarif suddenly became the most popular figure in Tehran. Young Iranians paraded on the streets of Tehran with Zarif’s portrait. President Hassan Rouhani got huge nationwide support.

For a decade, Iran’s economy had crippled under severe sanctions. The JCPOA was widely accepted in Iran despite a vocal yet prominent minority of hardliners being against the deal. It was one of the biggest successes for Western diplomacy with Iran.

According to the White House, the following were achieved:

1. About 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium were moved from Iran
2. Two-thirds of its centrifuges were dismantled and removed
3. Iran provided unprecedented access to its nuclear facilities

Iran had a “large stockpile of enriched uranium and nearly 20,000 centrifuges, enough to create eight to ten bombs”. If Tehran rushed to make a bomb without the deal in place it could ready enough enriched uranium in two or three months and “left unchecked … that stockpile and that number of centrifuges would grow exponentially, practically guaranteeing that Iran could create a bomb – and create one quickly – if it so chose.”

But the deal “[removed] the key elements needed to create a bomb and [prolonged] Iran’s breakout time from 2-3 months to one year or more if Iran broke its commitments”, per Washington.

A comment on the document from American national security experts noted that if the deal was broken, the US would only be left with just military options.

And then Trump unilaterally broke the deal in 2018 even as its other members remained committed to it. He said,

“The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behavior, including its sinister activities in Syria, Yemen and other places all around the world.

In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime – and it’s a regime of great terror – many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash – a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.”

Trump’s decision was criticised by the remaining P5 partners but he reimposed sanctions on the Iranian oil industry. Subsequently, in 2020, the Americans assassinated Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief General Qasem Soleimani, the second-most important man in Iran.

Soleimani’s significance in Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s inner circle and his threat to American interests in West Asia can be understood from the fact that under his leadership, Iran developed what came to be known as the ‘axis of resistance’ – the Alawite regime in Syria, the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, IRGC-trained Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. They also developed a clandestine missile and drone programme.

His assassination caused US-Iran relations to plummet to a new low. Tehran abandoned the deal's enrichment limits. Some said this move also killed any hope of reviving the deal.

Iran attacked two US air bases in Iraq in retaliation. Talks remained suspended for a long time but recent events in West Asia have altered Iran’s security situation and perhaps made it more desperate to buy time to rebuild and live to fight back another day.

Why now?

The revival of the nuclear threat and the narrative around weapons of mass destruction follows a familiar script. Until March 25, 2025, Iran possessed no imminent nuclear threat if American intelligence is to be believed. Briefing the senate select committee on intelligence gathering on the US's annual threat assessment, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had said, “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”

Although she also said that discussions on seeking nuclear weapons were no longer a taboo in Iran and its enriched uranium stockpiles had reached unprecedented levels for a country without nukes, this imminent threat only came up last week following Israel’s and the IAEA's latest accusations.

Latest negotiations between Washington and Tehran were stuck on one condition – Iran did not want to abandon its nuclear technology completely. Khamenei said that doing so would betray thousands of the country's nuclear scientists and researchers.

However, close to two years of Israel’s war on Gaza has depleted what remains of the ‘axis of resistance’. Iran fears a scenario that could entail a fall of the “Iranian empire” as Trump put it – which might be perceived by the IRGC as a not-so-veiled threat for regime change. And there are recent precedents.

The Alawite regime in Syria has been overthrown. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s most trusted ally, is dead. Hezbollah, the closest threat to Israel, has been battered and has not indicated that it will take part in Iran’s revenge on Israel.

In hindsight, Tehran might lament that its policy of ‘strategic patience’ was a failure. It kept losing all its first lines of defence – Hezbollah and others – and now finds itself walking a tightrope.

Meanwhile, Israel has shown little restraint in carrying out high-profile assassinations within Iran. It now wants to expand its operations and make Iran its primary target. In the past, it killed Hamas chief Ismael Haniyeh on Iranian soil, infiltrated the IRGC and has shown that it can take out its top line of command when and where it wants.

Several strategic experts on Iran had noted that Tehran and Washington were close to striking a deal. Up until now, it was being reported that Trump was unhappy with Netanyahu’s escalation, but Israel’s official stand on the strikes and Trump’s reaction to it make it clear, they say, that the Americans were in the loop all along on Israel's latest strikes. Even if there's no public admission, common Iranians will see it as betrayal.

What lies ahead?

Tehran is left with few options. With its ballistic missile strikes on Tel Aviv, it has chosen defiance over Trump’s proposal to surrender to the deal. But the Iranians have been careful to not touch American assets to avoid a direct conflict.

On the other hand, Israel continues to cross all redlines and says this is just the beginning of its operations. With Israel's latest attack on its oil fields, Iran retaliated with strikes on the Haifa port and Tel Aviv, raising the death toll to ten.

Can Iran block the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow strategic route between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf that controls almost one-fifth of global oil trade and is of extreme importance to the US – if pushed to the edge? Will that bring it into a direct conflict with the Americans? We don't know yet, but it is not an impossible scenario anymore.

What we do know is that war clouds and uncertainty loom large over the whole of West Asia. It is almost certain that any possibility of a US-Iran nuclear deal has been bombed – at least for now. Iran has threatened to withdraw from the NPT. It may pursue nukes more aggressively than ever, if not out of security compulsions, then due to the mounting anger on its streets.

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