On 23 March, three weeks into the US-Israel war with Iran, Kim Jong Un delivered what amounted to a victory speech at the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang. The US was “committing state terror and acts of aggression all over the world”, the North Korean leader declared, with the rights of sovereign nations “trampled upon by unilateral coercion and tyranny”. Yet his country was now protected by its “nuclear shield”, vindicating the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons despite the sanctions and international isolation this had wrought. “Today’s reality clearly demonstrates the legitimacy of our nation’s strategic choice and decision to reject the enemies’ sweet talk and permanently secure our nuclear arsenal,” Kim said. It was as close as he could get to saying I told you so.
Since coming to power following the death of his father almost 15 years ago, Kim has prioritised developing nuclear weapons – and the missiles needed to deliver them – channelling the country’s scant resources into a formidable weapons programme. North Korea is estimated to have 40-50 nuclear warheads, along with enough fissile material to build around 40 more. In recent weeks, Kim has shown off the country’s other military capabilities, presiding over a vast military parade in Pyongyang alongside his daughter and potential successor Kim Ju Ae, who is thought to be around 13. Father and daughter stood together on the rostrum wearing matching black leather trench coats. They have also been pictured overseeing missile tests from a warship off the coast of North Korea, firing rifles at a weapons factory, and driving a tank during military exercises.
Unlike the Iranian leadership, which stopped short of developing nuclear weapons, Kim’s relentless pursuit of the bomb appears to have delivered regime security alongside three high-profile meetings with a US president, achievements that eluded his father and grandfather. The danger, warn non-proliferation experts, is that other American adversaries – and perhaps some allies too – compare the fates of Tehran and Pyongyang and conclude that Kim chose the more prudent approach.
“From the North Korean perspective, what’s happening in Iran reflects their world-view,” explained Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon. “This is a country that has been studying the American way of war very closely since 2003, when they watched the United States invade Iraq and attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of that war. So, everything the North Koreans have done has been trying to buttress their security against threats to their regime.”
North Korea’s diplomats have long listed the examples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as evidence of what happens to countries that do not have nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Trump’s then director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, acknowledged in 2017 that Kim had watched “what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have”. The unfortunate lesson was this: “If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.” The subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine (which gave up its Soviet-era nuclear warheads in 1994) and now the Iran war have only strengthened that argument. The cumulative effect of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran last year and the current conflict “will increase interest globally in the possession of nuclear weapons”, Panda told me. “I hope the North Koreans don’t become trend-setters in the 21st century, but they are continuously being cited as the case that really stands apart from Iraq, Iran, Libya, and so on.”
Another lesson that Tehran and others may draw from this war is the futility of engaging in diplomatic negotiations with the US. “Iran tried to negotiate twice with the United States, and during those negotiations they were bombed,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. “So, what credible assurance can the US offer that negotiations will be respected? That credibility deficit is going to shape Iran’s thinking and at some point it may conclude that it is paying a very high price for nuclear weapons it does not have, and that crossing the threshold [to weaponisation] would provide more security.”
This does not mean that we should expect an immediate dash for nuclear weapons at the end of this war. But assuming that some iteration of the Iranian regime survives, Davenport warned that the conflict would strengthen those elements that have long argued nuclear weapons would deter future attacks. “At the end of this war, Iran will still retain the knowledge to build a bomb, and they will likely have key materials and technologies, so the question is how much this conflict is going to influence Iran’s political decision-making about nuclear weapons.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, given the extensive capabilities the US and Israel have already demonstrated during this war, Davenport argued it had also illustrated the limits of American conventional military power, which remains unable to target the most deeply buried Iranian facilities. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Iran take some steps to reconstitute parts of its programmes deeper underground,” she said, “in hardened and fortified facilities that the US cannot destroy from the air.”
Panda, too, warned that the severity of the damage to Iran’s conventional capabilities during this conflict could make the surviving leadership only more determined to pursue nuclear weapons. “Three conditions are likely at the end of this conflict: some version of an Iranian revolutionary regime remains in charge, without a very robust conventional deterrence capability, and with 400 kilograms or so of highly enriched uranium and centrifuge components,” he said. “This is a perfect storm for a case of breakneck proliferation.” Instead of putting a definitive end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he warned that this war could have precisely the opposite effect, by “creating, essentially, an Iranian North Korea”.
Tehran’s path to the bomb would still be complicated. While North Korea was developing its nuclear weapons it retained substantial conventional capabilities, which, thanks to the geography of the Korean Peninsula, enabled Pyongyang to threaten massive retaliation against the South Korean capital, Seoul, to deter potential attacks. The Iranian regime is unlikely to emerge from this war with a similar capacity, although it has demonstrated the ability, and willingness, to target shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and leverage the global economic fallout.
Beyond Iran, Davenport sees another “perfect storm” for wider proliferation as countries around the world extract their own lessons from the war and the broader geopolitical context. “Allies and adversaries no longer have confidence that the US is going to act in good faith, not only when it comes to negotiating non-proliferation agreements, but also when it comes to security guarantees, and extended nuclear deterrence commitments,” she explained. Another factor is the growing division among the five recognised nuclear weapons states, China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. “For decades they were relatively united in prioritising non-proliferation, but that unity has now almost completely shattered,” she said, noting that both Iran and North Korea had already demonstrated “how a state can exploit divisions between the major powers to mitigate the consequences of advancing towards the nuclear threshold”.
“Nuclear weapons are back at the centre of international security in a way that we haven’t seen since the Cold War,” Panda said. “We’re seeing these dramatic changes in the nuclear order along multiple axes and there’s just tremendous uncertainty about how the dust settles here.” That uncertainty has been compounded by the fractious nature of US domestic politics and the volatility emanating from Washington. “Our allies are smart people and if the US is the cornerstone of your country’s national defence – you could be Estonia, you could be Japan, you could be Spain, any one of America’s treaty allies – you can’t look at what is happening in Washington and see a country that will be predictable going forward, so I think our allies are going to do a lot more to hedge against uncertainty.”
That process is already happening in parts of Europe, where American allies have had to grapple with Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, his threats to seize Greenland, and his ongoing scepticism towards Nato and the European Union, alongside Russia’s war on Ukraine. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, announced on 2 March that his country had entered talks with France and other European allies on “advanced nuclear deterrence”. As he explained the decision in a social media post, “We are arming up together with our friends so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” Germany plans to join French nuclear exercises later this year and has also embarked on talks on shared deterrence. Unlike the UK, which relies on American support for the maintenance of its Trident missiles, France’s nuclear arsenal is fully independent of the US.
“Even if the United States elects an internationalist, pro-alliance, Democratic president in 2028, I don’t think that fixes this,” Panda said. “We don’t go back to the world as it was in 2024, and we certainly don’t go back to the world as it was in 2015, before Trump’s first term. When it comes to the global nuclear order, there is no turning the clock back.”
On this last point, at least, US allies and adversaries alike would presumably agree. Standing in front of Le Téméraire, a new nuclear-powered submarine, at a naval base in Brittany earlier this month, the French president Emmanuel Macron declared that the world had reached a “geopolitical tipping point fraught with risks”. France would therefore adopt a new doctrine of “forward deterrence”, which would include building up the country’s arsenal of nuclear warheads for the first time in decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.”
[Further reading: The battle for the Strait of Hormuz]
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