Nuclear arsenals rarely compel in conventional wars
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- The United States fought Iran twice in roughly a year — first joining Israel in June 2025 to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, then a far larger campaign the following year that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of Iran's senior military leadership — yet America's nuclear superiority failed to prevent Iranian retaliation or compel capitulation.
- Tehran responded to the second US-Israeli campaign by attacking Israel, US bases across the Persian Gulf, and regional energy infrastructure, then closed the Strait of Hormuz, with Iranian lawmaker Alireza Salimi declaring "the Strait of Hormuz is more valuable to us than a nuclear bomb."
- Britain removed nuclear depth bombs from its Falklands naval task force in 1982 and never seriously contemplated nuclear use, allowing non-nuclear Argentina to calculate that the UK would be restrained by its own nuclear policies.
- Russia's repeated nuclear threats since invading Ukraine in 2022 — including placing deterrent forces on a "special regime of combat duty" and expanding its nuclear doctrine — generated Western hesitation over long-range missile supplies but did not compel Ukraine to surrender or prevent NATO from providing advanced capabilities.
- US intelligence concluded Moscow would cross the nuclear threshold only if the Russian state or regime faced an existential threat; none of the three wars placed the nuclear-armed state's own survival in jeopardy.
- Iran may emerge from the conflict focused on making conventional forces more survivable, expanding missile and drone capabilities, and strengthening maritime denial in the Strait of Hormuz — treating nuclear latency as less valuable than usable wartime tools.
Why it matters: Across three nuclear-armed powers' conventional conflicts, nuclear arsenals provided no battlefield or diplomatic leverage when the nuclear state's survival wasn't at stake. For Washington, the Iran war dismantles the assumption that nuclear superiority translates into coercive power in limited wars — suggesting trillions invested in arsenals buy deterrence, not victory.
Ask SkimNews
