THE United States and Israel’s strikes, which were aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear program, had failed to accomplish their objectives during June 2025.
Despite the military aggression of the U.S. and Israel, the Iranian ruling elite has expressed its firmness to continue its civilian nuclear program as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly expressed reservations about Tehran’s cooperation with its nuclear safeguards.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticised elements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, and announced that Iran would not budge to President Donald Trump’s pressure on Iran’s sovereign right of Uranium enrichment. On September 23, 2025, he said, “The American side has been adamant that Iran must not have (uranium) enrichment. We did not surrender and we will not. We did not and will not yield to pressure in this matter or any other matter.” He categorically stated that Iran would not give in to pressure to abandon its enrichment of uranium. It was a clear warning of Tehran’s preparedness to exit JCPOA.
The JCPOA was signed by the United States, Iran, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany in 2015 to prevent Tehran from acquiring weapons-grade fissile material capability. The JCPOA was an appropriate arrangement to keep Iran within the NPT framework and prevent it from accumulating weapon-grade fissile material clandestinely. For instance, JCPOA resulted in the dismantling of two-thirds of Iran’s nearly 20000 uranium centrifuges, its entire plutonium facility and relinquished about 97% percent of its almost eight tons of low-enriched uranium stockpile. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors received unprecedented powers to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities in perpetuity.
The Security Council, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, adopted the JCPOA unanimously. It was legally binding on all the United Nations member states. Therefore, the US and European states’ reimposition of sanctions explicitly lifted under the JCPOA will constitute a violation of Security Council resolutions and international law. Tehran’s improving diplomatic, economic and technological cooperation with Beijing and Moscow indicates that China and Russia will veto any future move in the United Nations Security Council against Iran.
On 18 October 2025, Tehran made a momentous announcement — the termination of the JCPOA. The Western parties’ non-compliance and sustained pressure had pushed Iran to the brink, resulting in the termination of the decade-old agreement. Iran’s Foreign Ministry declared, ‘As of now, all provisions of the 2015 deal, including the restrictions on the Iranian nuclear programme and the related mechanisms, are considered terminated.’
The critical analysis of the JCPOA collapse reveals that Iran’s decision to withdraw from the deal was the culmination of years of US and European members’ failed commitments, especially the US unilateral withdrawal from the agreement and the reimposition of severe sanctions on Iran on May 8, 2018. In addition to the American sanctions, France, Germany and the United Kingdom are also threatening to reinvoke the “snapback” mechanism to reimpose UN sanctions. Notably, the snapback provision allows the rapid, automatic reimposition of all UN sanctions lifted under the deal if Iran were to violate its nuclear commitments significantly. Accordingly, the snapback sanctions were levied on termination day (October 18), precisely 10 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.
The Western signatories to the deal threatened to impose sanctions on Iran for its decision to withdraw from it. Ironically, the United States, the primary originator of the deal, already exited the deal in 2018. Since then, Iran has been in a state of partial compliance with the agreement, primarily by increasing its uranium enrichment potential and stock.
Trump, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated.” In reality, the Iranian nuclear potential has remained intact. The International Atomic Energy Agency claimed that Iran retains most of its high-grade enriched uranium stockpile. It was reported that Tehran has been working on another underground tunnel that could hold more centrifuges. The collapse of the JCPOA could potentially trigger a regional nuclear proliferation crisis. Internationally, the nuclear arms race is rapidly spiraling out of control. Russia and the United States, which together possess 87 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, have scrapped nearly all their bilateral nuclear arms control agreements. Both states had extended the New Start Treaty in February 2021 for five years, but it has been suspended since February 2022 due to the Ukrainian war.
The US has announced a staggering $1.7 trillion to modernize its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, all nine nuclear powers (Russia, the United States, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) are upgrading their nuclear arsenals. The alarming development is the weakening of the nuclear taboo—a normative inhibition against the first use of nuclear weapons. The leaders of nuclear-armed states—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Kim Jong Un and Benjamin Netanyahu — repeatedly threatened to initiate nuclear war.
To conclude, the weakening of the nuclear taboo and the nuclear signalling of nuclear-armed states intensifies the security dilemma of militarily insecure non-nuclear-weapon states. It could compel the latent nuclear weapon states, including Iran, South Korea, Germany, etc to leave NPT and develop their own nuclear deterrence capability.
