Editor’s Note: Ludovica Castelli (Ph.D.) is Project Manager of the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium Project, at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). In this role, she manages the Programme’s activities within the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium (EUNPDC) and leads research on non-proliferation and disarmament. She has written for Stimson in the past about Iran’s nuclear posture and strategy.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
The U.S. and Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28 has already gone far beyond the 12-day campaign conducted in June 2025. That earlier war inflicted substantial damage on Iran’s core nuclear infrastructure, reportedly degrading enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz and destroying key metallurgy installations at the Isfahan nuclear complex.
Whereas Operation Midnight Hammer concentrated on central enrichment capabilities, the current campaign appears directed at a broader spectrum of institutional, military, and technological assets associated with Iran’s nuclear and missile enterprises. Reports suggest that targets have included senior leadership nodes, missile production sites, military installations, administrative hubs, and dual-use scientific research facilities as well as oil refineries. Unconfirmed accounts indicate that the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran in Tehran may have been struck, alongside the explosive research and testing facility at Parchin and additional components of the Isfahan nuclear complex. Such targeting would reflect an effort not merely to degrade centrifuge capacity, but to dismantle elements of the wider bureaucratic and scientific infrastructure that sustains Iran’s nuclear project.
President Donald Trump has listed a variety of aims for what has been dubbed Operation Epic Fury, among them preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroying its missile arsenal and production sites, degrading its regional proxy networks, sinking its navy, and overturning its regime or at least its current leaders. The strikes were framed as a preventive counterproliferation measure and as a direct consequence of Iran’s refusal to renounce its nuclear ambitions despite three rounds of negotiations. Yet the preventive logic was subsequently downplayed by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi and by the Pentagon itself, introducing ambiguity regarding the primary rationale for the operation.
This ambiguous framing — preventive counterproliferation combined with an expressed desire for political transformation — raises a set of analytically distinct but interrelated questions. Preventive counterproliferation rests on the logic of capability denial: It assumes that timely and decisive force can delay or foreclose a state’s path to nuclear weapons acquisition. The invocation of regime change, by contrast, rests on a different premise: The nuclear trajectory is intimately linked to the ideological commitments of the ruling order, and only political transformation would recalibrate or dissolve those ambitions.
The convergence of these logics has reopened a fundamental debate about the relationship between regime type and nuclear intent in the Iranian case. Is Iran’s nuclear program best understood as an ideological artifact of the Islamic Republic, such that its removal would substantially alter the country’s nuclear posture? Or does the nuclear project reflect deeper and more enduring conceptions of sovereignty, status, and technological modernity that would persist across political transition? In a post-war or post-regime scenario, would Iran move toward accelerated weaponization, strategic recalibration within a threshold posture, or a redefinition of its nuclear ambitions altogether?
These questions acquire particular urgency in the present context. The prospect — however uncertain — of regime destabilization, combined with the systematic degradation of nuclear infrastructure, invites reassessment of the political foundations of Iran’s nuclear enterprise. Much contemporary policy discourse proceeds from the implicit assumption that the “Iran nuclear problem” is coterminous with the Islamic Republic itself. Yet historically, Iran’s nuclear program predates the current regime and has been embedded within successive and ideologically distinct state projects.
One of the pivotal contests that has permeated Iranian political discourse in the twentieth century has been an ideological one, in which different factions have fought for the right to define Iranian history. The nuclear project must be situated within this longer semantic struggle.
Nuclear technology and its associated infrastructure (commonly referred to as a nuclear power program) have long served as loci of meaning, identity, and power in global politics. In Iran, across radically different political orders, nuclear technology has functioned as an endeavor of ideological self-definition, through which successive regimes have re-signified nuclear technology to articulate competing visions of Iranian identity. In other words, the ideational meanings of the Iranian nuclear program have been reinterpreted to fit the pillars of the regime’s self-projection and interpretation of Iran’s identity as a global actor. Therefore, the history of the Iranian nuclear program reveals remarkable plasticity and adaptability. It has never belonged exclusively to the ideational repertoire of a single regime but has instead become a resilient component of modern Iran’s multiple and contested identities.
Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch overthrown in 1979, nuclear power was embedded in a developmentalist and nationalist imagery. In this sense, nuclear power functioned as an extension of the Shah’s broader project of positive nationalism — a modern, progressive Iran, capable of standing on equal footing with the world’s great powers. It was less an infrastructural choice than a statement about Iran’s place in history. By the early 1970s, when all five permanent members of the UN Security Council possessed nuclear weapons, nuclear technology had become a shorthand for modern statehood itself. Control over the fuel cycle was framed not merely as a matter of energy economics, but as an assertion that Iran would not remain structurally dependent on foreign suppliers for strategic technologies. For the Shah, mastery of the fuel cycle was non-negotiable, a material inscription of sovereignty.
Under the Islamic Republic, nuclear technology was neither straightforwardly inherited from the Pahlavi state nor rejected as a relic of Westernised dependence. Instead, it was subject to an intensive process of symbolic reworking, through which it was embedded within a revolutionary grammar that privileged autonomy, resistance, and moral sovereignty. Importantly, these elements were not wholly alien to the Pahlavi-era nuclear imagination: Autonomy, independence, and sovereign control were precisely the principles on which the Shah’s civilian nuclear program was deemed non-negotiable.
The rupture, therefore, did not lie in the vocabulary itself, but in the national identity within which these terms were articulated and made meaningful. This process of re-signification did not require a technological rupture. Instead, it depended on a narrative capable of rendering nuclear capability Islamic, indigenous, and emancipatory — rather than derivative or subordinate.
These dynamics are directly relevant to the nuclear issue because they condition how advanced technology and international oversight are interpreted in the first place. When sovereignty is discursively tied to dignity and when autonomy is moralised as non-domination, nuclear policy becomes legible not only as an instrument of security or development but as a site where historical injury, recognition, and political authenticity are continuously negotiated.
It is precisely at this juncture that contemporary critiques of Iran’s nuclear latency strategy require careful scrutiny. A number of analysts have argued that Iran’s long-standing threshold posture has revealed its strategic insufficiency — that it has generated ambiguity without deterrent credibility. From this perspective, the present strikes are interpreted as evidence that remaining below the weaponization threshold produces vulnerability, whereas overt nuclearization would have imposed prohibitive costs on external actors.
While such arguments are intelligible within a classical, largely Western-centered deterrence framework, they rest on an assumption that warrants interrogation – namely, that the primary function of Iran’s nuclear program has been to secure military deterrence in the narrow sense. This assumption abstracts the program from its historical and ideological embedding and reduces it to an instrument of retaliatory capability.
Yet, as the historical trajectory outlined above suggests, Iran’s nuclear project has never been solely — or even primarily — a prospective deterrent device. To declare latency a strategic failure because it did not prevent coercion is therefore to measure it against a metric it was not exclusively designed to satisfy. The Iranian leadership’s calculus has historically encompassed an array of elements — recognition, autonomy, sovereignty, and political dignity — alongside security considerations.
Moreover, framing the current crisis as proof that only an operational nuclear arsenal guarantees immunity from coercion would also accelerate precisely the dynamic preventive counterproliferation seeks to forestall.
The more fundamental question, therefore, is not whether latency “worked” in a narrow deterrence sense, but how the nuclear project will once again be re-articulated within a reconstituted political identity, and how it will reposition in relation to the outside world and the hierarchies of the international order.
Any transition phase — whether gradual or abrupt — will likely revolve less around centrifuges than around the struggle to redefine what the atom means for Iran’s political identity and its place in the international system.
Header image: Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General, delivers his remarks which the IAEA has received news informing the military action launched by Israel which includes attacks on nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran at the opening of the 1771st Board of Governors meeting held at the Agency headquarters in Vienna, Austria. 13 June 2025. By Dean Calma / IAEA.
After Operation Epic Fury: Debating the Future of Iran’s Nuclear Project
By Ludovica Castelli
Middle East & North Africa
Editor’s Note: Ludovica Castelli (Ph.D.) is Project Manager of the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium Project, at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). In this role, she manages the Programme’s activities within the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium (EUNPDC) and leads research on non-proliferation and disarmament. She has written for Stimson in the past about Iran’s nuclear posture and strategy.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
The U.S. and Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28 has already gone far beyond the 12-day campaign conducted in June 2025. That earlier war inflicted substantial damage on Iran’s core nuclear infrastructure, reportedly degrading enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz and destroying key metallurgy installations at the Isfahan nuclear complex.
Whereas Operation Midnight Hammer concentrated on central enrichment capabilities, the current campaign appears directed at a broader spectrum of institutional, military, and technological assets associated with Iran’s nuclear and missile enterprises. Reports suggest that targets have included senior leadership nodes, missile production sites, military installations, administrative hubs, and dual-use scientific research facilities as well as oil refineries. Unconfirmed accounts indicate that the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran in Tehran may have been struck, alongside the explosive research and testing facility at Parchin and additional components of the Isfahan nuclear complex. Such targeting would reflect an effort not merely to degrade centrifuge capacity, but to dismantle elements of the wider bureaucratic and scientific infrastructure that sustains Iran’s nuclear project.
President Donald Trump has listed a variety of aims for what has been dubbed Operation Epic Fury, among them preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroying its missile arsenal and production sites, degrading its regional proxy networks, sinking its navy, and overturning its regime or at least its current leaders. The strikes were framed as a preventive counterproliferation measure and as a direct consequence of Iran’s refusal to renounce its nuclear ambitions despite three rounds of negotiations. Yet the preventive logic was subsequently downplayed by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi and by the Pentagon itself, introducing ambiguity regarding the primary rationale for the operation.
This ambiguous framing — preventive counterproliferation combined with an expressed desire for political transformation — raises a set of analytically distinct but interrelated questions. Preventive counterproliferation rests on the logic of capability denial: It assumes that timely and decisive force can delay or foreclose a state’s path to nuclear weapons acquisition. The invocation of regime change, by contrast, rests on a different premise: The nuclear trajectory is intimately linked to the ideological commitments of the ruling order, and only political transformation would recalibrate or dissolve those ambitions.
The convergence of these logics has reopened a fundamental debate about the relationship between regime type and nuclear intent in the Iranian case. Is Iran’s nuclear program best understood as an ideological artifact of the Islamic Republic, such that its removal would substantially alter the country’s nuclear posture? Or does the nuclear project reflect deeper and more enduring conceptions of sovereignty, status, and technological modernity that would persist across political transition? In a post-war or post-regime scenario, would Iran move toward accelerated weaponization, strategic recalibration within a threshold posture, or a redefinition of its nuclear ambitions altogether?
These questions acquire particular urgency in the present context. The prospect — however uncertain — of regime destabilization, combined with the systematic degradation of nuclear infrastructure, invites reassessment of the political foundations of Iran’s nuclear enterprise. Much contemporary policy discourse proceeds from the implicit assumption that the “Iran nuclear problem” is coterminous with the Islamic Republic itself. Yet historically, Iran’s nuclear program predates the current regime and has been embedded within successive and ideologically distinct state projects.
One of the pivotal contests that has permeated Iranian political discourse in the twentieth century has been an ideological one, in which different factions have fought for the right to define Iranian history. The nuclear project must be situated within this longer semantic struggle.
Nuclear technology and its associated infrastructure (commonly referred to as a nuclear power program) have long served as loci of meaning, identity, and power in global politics. In Iran, across radically different political orders, nuclear technology has functioned as an endeavor of ideological self-definition, through which successive regimes have re-signified nuclear technology to articulate competing visions of Iranian identity. In other words, the ideational meanings of the Iranian nuclear program have been reinterpreted to fit the pillars of the regime’s self-projection and interpretation of Iran’s identity as a global actor. Therefore, the history of the Iranian nuclear program reveals remarkable plasticity and adaptability. It has never belonged exclusively to the ideational repertoire of a single regime but has instead become a resilient component of modern Iran’s multiple and contested identities.
Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch overthrown in 1979, nuclear power was embedded in a developmentalist and nationalist imagery. In this sense, nuclear power functioned as an extension of the Shah’s broader project of positive nationalism — a modern, progressive Iran, capable of standing on equal footing with the world’s great powers. It was less an infrastructural choice than a statement about Iran’s place in history. By the early 1970s, when all five permanent members of the UN Security Council possessed nuclear weapons, nuclear technology had become a shorthand for modern statehood itself. Control over the fuel cycle was framed not merely as a matter of energy economics, but as an assertion that Iran would not remain structurally dependent on foreign suppliers for strategic technologies. For the Shah, mastery of the fuel cycle was non-negotiable, a material inscription of sovereignty.
Under the Islamic Republic, nuclear technology was neither straightforwardly inherited from the Pahlavi state nor rejected as a relic of Westernised dependence. Instead, it was subject to an intensive process of symbolic reworking, through which it was embedded within a revolutionary grammar that privileged autonomy, resistance, and moral sovereignty. Importantly, these elements were not wholly alien to the Pahlavi-era nuclear imagination: Autonomy, independence, and sovereign control were precisely the principles on which the Shah’s civilian nuclear program was deemed non-negotiable.
The rupture, therefore, did not lie in the vocabulary itself, but in the national identity within which these terms were articulated and made meaningful. This process of re-signification did not require a technological rupture. Instead, it depended on a narrative capable of rendering nuclear capability Islamic, indigenous, and emancipatory — rather than derivative or subordinate.
These dynamics are directly relevant to the nuclear issue because they condition how advanced technology and international oversight are interpreted in the first place. When sovereignty is discursively tied to dignity and when autonomy is moralised as non-domination, nuclear policy becomes legible not only as an instrument of security or development but as a site where historical injury, recognition, and political authenticity are continuously negotiated.
It is precisely at this juncture that contemporary critiques of Iran’s nuclear latency strategy require careful scrutiny. A number of analysts have argued that Iran’s long-standing threshold posture has revealed its strategic insufficiency — that it has generated ambiguity without deterrent credibility. From this perspective, the present strikes are interpreted as evidence that remaining below the weaponization threshold produces vulnerability, whereas overt nuclearization would have imposed prohibitive costs on external actors.
While such arguments are intelligible within a classical, largely Western-centered deterrence framework, they rest on an assumption that warrants interrogation – namely, that the primary function of Iran’s nuclear program has been to secure military deterrence in the narrow sense. This assumption abstracts the program from its historical and ideological embedding and reduces it to an instrument of retaliatory capability.
Yet, as the historical trajectory outlined above suggests, Iran’s nuclear project has never been solely — or even primarily — a prospective deterrent device. To declare latency a strategic failure because it did not prevent coercion is therefore to measure it against a metric it was not exclusively designed to satisfy. The Iranian leadership’s calculus has historically encompassed an array of elements — recognition, autonomy, sovereignty, and political dignity — alongside security considerations.
Moreover, framing the current crisis as proof that only an operational nuclear arsenal guarantees immunity from coercion would also accelerate precisely the dynamic preventive counterproliferation seeks to forestall.
The more fundamental question, therefore, is not whether latency “worked” in a narrow deterrence sense, but how the nuclear project will once again be re-articulated within a reconstituted political identity, and how it will reposition in relation to the outside world and the hierarchies of the international order.
Any transition phase — whether gradual or abrupt — will likely revolve less around centrifuges than around the struggle to redefine what the atom means for Iran’s political identity and its place in the international system.
Header image: Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General, delivers his remarks which the IAEA has received news informing the military action launched by Israel which includes attacks on nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran at the opening of the 1771st Board of Governors meeting held at the Agency headquarters in Vienna, Austria. 13 June 2025. By Dean Calma / IAEA.
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