The Pakistan Nuclear Mistake America Can’t Afford to Repeat in Iran
Just 60 years ago, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared the country’s intention to become a nuclear power. “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. The Christians have the bomb, the Jews have the bomb and now the Hindus have the bomb. Why not the Muslims too have the bomb?,” he declared.
He was prophetic: Pakistan built not only a nuclear bomb but also an arsenal. The Pakistani leadership—including under Bhutto who would become prime minister and president—ran the Pakistani economy into the ground to such an extreme that many Pakistanis do eat grass to survive.
Just 60 years ago, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared the country’s intention to become a nuclear power.
The United States, for all its stated opposition to nuclear proliferation, conveyed the opposite to Pakistani authorities. Pakistan’s nuclear drive is America’s original sin. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program provided Pakistan with its first nuclear reactor, the basis for its subsequent nuclear weapons development. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger embraced Pakistan and gratuitously dismissed India both because of personal animosity toward Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and because of its effort to ingratiate himself to the People’s Republic of China.
Today, the legacy of Bhutto’s nuclear drive is clear. The late Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan proliferated his nuclear weapons to other rogue actors for two reasons: First, due to his own greed and corruption. Second, he sought to promote Islamism at the expense of the West and India. Pakistan also viewed its own nuclear deterrent as a shield to protect itself from retaliation as it launched attacks on India by its Kashmir and Khalistan terrorist proxies.
Army Chief Asim Munir may have believed he could rally Pakistanis around the flag of religion or nationalism to distract them from his own corruption and the Pakistani government’s failings and not pay a price, but India proved him wrong. Pakistani terrorists set off a conflict that has escalated to the brink of unrestricted war, with the ceasefire still more theoretical than real. For all Islamabad sought plausible deniability for the actions of its terror proxies, the Pakistanis shed any pretext that the terrorists acted independently. Not only did the Pakistani army came to their defense when India turned its guns on them, but uniformed Pakistani army officers also attended the funerals of militants from terrorists group designated by the United States and officially deemed illegal under Pakistani law.
Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio may have helped mediate a ceasefire agreement, but absent Pakistani agreement to sever all ties with terrorist groups and extradite all those responsible for the Pahalgam massacre, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and every other terrorist attack against India or the United States, then war becomes inevitable, if not now then after a future similar terrorist attack. Essentially, with his ceasefire efforts, Rubio now seeks to replicate the efforts that predecessors Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Antony Blinken each made with regard to Israel and the terror threats it faces from Hamas and Hezbollah. The problem with ceasefires is that they allow terrorists to regroup and fight another day.
When ceasefires collapse and terrorists attack Israel, those that suffer in any Israeli retaliation are limited in territory.
There is a huge difference, though: When ceasefires collapse and terrorists attack Israel, those that suffer in any Israeli retaliation are limited in territory. What has happened in Gaza is tragic for Palestinians, but it is limited to them. Because India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers, the stakes are far larger. Casualties from any nuclear conflagration would be counted in tens of millions, not tens of thousands.
That is why the Trump administration’s approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran today is so bizarre. Iran has enriched uranium for more than two decades, but it still imports fuel for its Bushehr nuclear reactor. This suggests that the entire purpose for Iran’s nuclear program is military. So too does the fact that the Iranian regime enriches to levels beyond that needed for a civilian energy or even medical purposes.
The Trump administration’s negotiators are a dream team for Tehran. Not only do lead envoy Steven Witkoff ties to Qatar represent a conflict of interest, but neither Witkoff nor his staff have meaningful experience with Iran. Iranian officials believe Witkoff is naïve and they can both tie him down in minutiae and outmaneuver him on important details. This is one reason why the deal he proposes increasingly looks like little more than President Barack Obama’s flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Iranians also seek advantage from Witkoff’s tendency to freelance. They have observed in Afghanistan, Korea, and Iraq how adversaries outplayed both Zalmay Khalilzad and Christopher Hill when those two U.S. allies left aides aside and believed they alone could craft a deal behind closed doors.
The recent announcement of yet another Iranian secret nuclear site suggests Tehran’s true ambitions. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is playing Trump for a fool. The 86-year-old Khamenei wants to see nuclear weapons acquisition, the fruition of a decades-long ambition, in his lifetime. Khamenei also continues to embrace terrorist proxies. Hamas and Hezbollah are both down, but they are not out. Nor are the Houthis, who now see a greenlight to attack Israel since Trump cut a separate deal with them, Israel, meanwhile, will not stop defending itself.
A fight between two nuclear powers should highlight just how dangerous allowing Iran’s acquisition would be.
This raises the inevitability if Iran continues down its nuclear path, for a direct confrontation between a nuclear-armed Iran and Israel, much like the current conflict between India and Pakistan. Such a confrontation between Iran and Israel would be more likely to go nuclear than between India and Pakistan for a simple reason: Because of Israel’s small size, Iran believes it can win a nuclear war much easier, perhaps with a single bomb or perhaps at most with three.
Israel could certainly retaliate against Iran with a doomsday device—Israel drives more German submarines than the Germany Navy does—but the Iranian leadership knows Israel will not wantonly kill millions of civilians.
Even if Israel did launch nuclear weapons at Iran, the Iranian leadership believes it can absorb the blow. This is not mere speculation: Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani laid out this logic directly in December 2001.
The India-Pakistan war should be a wake-up call, but not only because of the possibility of a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent. Rather, a fight between two nuclear powers should highlight just how dangerous allowing Iran’s acquisition would be. The stakes are simply too high for a haphazard approach or Witkoff-style amateur hour.
Published originally on May 11, 2025.
