Nuclear Arsenals Failed to Compel in Three Wars
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- The United States fought two wars with Iran in roughly a year — first joining Israel to strike Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025, then a larger campaign that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — yet American nuclear superiority failed to prevent Iranian retaliation against Israel, a US air base in Qatar, Persian Gulf bases, and regional energy infrastructure.
- Iran escalated conventionally rather than capitulating, dismissing Trump's demand for "unconditional surrender" and closing the Strait of Hormuz, with lawmaker Alireza Salimi declaring "the Strait of Hormuz is more valuable to us than a nuclear bomb."
- The United Kingdom during the 1982 Falklands War removed nuclear depth bombs from its naval task force and never seriously contemplated nuclear use against non-nuclear Argentina, which calculated British leaders would be restrained by their own nuclear policies.
- Russia has repeatedly brandished its nuclear arsenal since invading Ukraine in 2022 — placing forces on a "special regime of combat duty," issuing repeated threats through officials like former President Dmitry Medvedev, expanding its nuclear doctrine, and conducting strategic-force exercises in May 2026 — without compelling Ukraine to surrender or blocking NATO military aid.
- US intelligence assessments concluded Moscow would most likely cross the nuclear threshold only if the Russian state or regime faced an existential threat, meaning Russia's nuclear threats bought time at the margins but did not transform the conventional character of the war.
- Iran's post-war lesson is likely that remaining a nuclear-threshold state preserves latency while avoiding the diplomatic and economic costs of openly building a weapon, with Tehran's most effective wartime leverage having come from disrupting Hormuz shipping rather than from any nuclear capability.
Why it matters: Across both US-Iran wars, Iran's most effective wartime leverage came from closing the Strait of Hormuz — a conventional move, not nuclear capability. Trump's demand for unconditional surrender was met with escalation, and the article argues nuclear arsenals place a ceiling on escalation but offer no leverage over an adversary fighting for survival, a pattern spanning the Falklands to Ukraine.
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