Op-ed

The Bomb as Passport: Do Nuclear Weapons Remain the Ultimate Guarantee of Sovereignty?

Festo Mulinda

March 6, 2026

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The most dangerous lesson of modern geopolitics is also its simplest: countries that possess nuclear weapons do not get invaded. Countries that lack them frequently do. This uncomfortable truth sits quietly beneath the current tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran.

Strip away the rhetoric about democracy, regional stability or collective security, and the strategic logic becomes stark: nuclear weapons fundamentally alter the rules by which international politics operates. They do not make states virtuous, nor do they guarantee peace, but they do make states extraordinarily difficult to attack. The question, then, is not whether nuclear weapons are desirable in any moral sense.

It may feel awkward to make a case, even an analytical one, in favour of nuclear weapons. Their history is catastrophic by any measure. They carry a devastation that is not merely theoretical — they have been used, and the consequences endure in memory, in bodies and in the architecture of international law.

The real question is whether the world as it actually exists — rather than the world as we might prefer it to be — rewards those who possess nuclear weapons and punishes those who do not. The evidence, examined honestly, suggests it does. And the implications of that evidence are ones that no serious analyst of international relations can afford to ignore.

The nuclear peace

Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 — the first and, to date, only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict — these weapons have imposed a strange and terrifying stability upon international politics. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed fiercely across virtually every theatre of global conflict, from Korea to Afghanistan, yet never fought each other directly.

Strategists have long attributed this restraint to nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction — the understanding that any nuclear exchange between the two superpowers would result in catastrophic, unsurvivable retaliation for both sides.

The political scientist Kenneth Waltz, one of the most consequential scholars of nuclear strategy in the twentieth century, famously argued that nuclear weapons may in fact promote stability precisely because they raise the cost of war to levels that no rational leadership would willingly accept.

The mere possibility of annihilation, in Waltz’s framework, compels leaders to exercise a caution that conventional military superiority alone cannot produce. In his formulation, nuclear weapons make war among nuclear-armed states “difficult to start.”

Consider the question of Iran through this lens. Were Iran a nuclear-armed state today, the calculus facing Washington and Tel Aviv — both presumed nuclear powers — would be fundamentally different. North Korea provides the more instructive precedent: a state of negligible conventional military reach beyond its immediate region, yet one that no major power seriously contemplates invading precisely because of its nuclear capability.

The logic is not pleasant, but it is consistent. A nuclear-armed Iran would, by this reasoning, mean no war in the Gulf. No war would mean no closure of the Strait of Hormuz, no disruption to global energy supplies, no cancelled flights across Gulf states and, most critically, no loss of life.

Whether or not one finds Waltz’s framework congenial, its predictive power in this instance is difficult to dismiss. The pattern it describes is not an aberration — it is a structural feature of the international system as it has functioned since 1945. Perhaps Waltz was right all along.

Defenceless without deterrence

The vulnerability of non-nuclear states is not a matter of conjecture — it is a pattern inscribed across the past half-century of international history. In the last fifty years alone, numerous non-nuclear countries have been subjected to invasion or military intervention: Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan in 2001, Georgia in 2008, Serbia during the NATO bombing campaign of 1999, Libya in 2011, and earlier conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia. The common thread is not ideology or geography — it is the absence of a nuclear deterrent.

Ukraine offers perhaps the starkest contemporary illustration of this dynamic. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal — a stockpile larger than those of Britain, France and China combined at the time. Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, it agreed to relinquish those weapons in exchange for security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.

The signatories pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to refrain from the threat or use of force against it. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. In February 2022, it launched a full-scale invasion.

The security assurances proved hollow; nuclear deterrence, had it been retained, might not have been. The lesson that many governments drew from Kyiv’s predicament was not lost on Pyongyang, Tehran or any other capital weighing its strategic options.

Libya offers a second, equally instructive case. In December 2003, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi announced the dismantlement of his country’s weapons of mass destruction programmes, including a nascent nuclear capability, as part of a negotiated agreement with Western governments.

Eight years later, a NATO-backed military intervention brought down his regime, and Gaddafi was killed. The strategic lesson was unmistakable to those watching: disarmament had removed the one shield that might have made intervention unthinkable.

Countries nobody invades

North Korea stands as the most unambiguous case study in the protective logic of nuclear deterrence. It is one of the most heavily sanctioned states on earth, subject to sustained international condemnation and near-total economic isolation. Yet no major power seriously entertains the prospect of military action against it.

Its nuclear arsenal, estimated at roughly fifty warheads as of 2025, fundamentally alters the risk calculation for any potential adversary, regardless of that adversary’s conventional military superiority. The protection it affords is not a function of North Korea’s diplomatic standing or its economic weight — it has neither. It is a function of the bomb alone.

Pakistan provides a further example. Despite decades of acute political instability, a history of military coups, and chronically tense relations with neighbouring India, Pakistan’s nuclear capability makes large-scale military intervention against it extremely unlikely. The same logic applies in reverse: India’s nuclear arsenal constrains Pakistani adventurism in ways that conventional forces alone could not.

The two countries have fought wars; they have not fought a nuclear war, and the distinction matters. Even the United States — by a considerable margin the world’s most powerful conventional military force — has historically avoided direct war with nuclear-armed rivals, including the Soviet Union, China and Russia.

This pattern reflects what scholars describe as the “nuclear revolution”: the proposition that nuclear weapons fundamentally transformed the nature of interstate conflict by making conquest between major powers prohibitively costly.

This is not to suggest that nuclear deterrence is infallible or that it eliminates conflict altogether. Proxy wars, covert operations and economic coercion have continued unabated throughout the nuclear age.

But the specific phenomenon of direct, large-scale invasion — the kind that ends regimes and erases sovereignty — has been conspicuously absent from the experience of nuclear-armed states.

Iran’s rational fear

Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be understood within precisely this strategic context, rather than through the narrower lens of regional aggression or ideological extremism.

Iranian leaders watched what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq — a non-nuclear state that had once possessed chemical weapons but was invaded and dismantled by a coalition led by the world’s pre-eminent nuclear power. They observed what happened to Gaddafi in Libya after he voluntarily surrendered his weapons programmes.

They saw what became of Ukraine’s security assurances once its nuclear weapons were gone. From Tehran’s perspective, the pursuit of nuclear capability is less a matter of prestige or regional dominance than of regime survival. The lesson that many governments have drawn from Libya is explicit: surrendering nuclear weapons can be fatal.

Whether one agrees with Iran’s domestic governance or its foreign policy, the strategic incentives driving its nuclear calculations are neither irrational nor difficult to comprehend. Today’s global nuclear regime rests on a paradox that its architects have never satisfactorily resolved.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970, seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons whilst simultaneously committing the existing nuclear-armed states to pursue eventual disarmament.

Yet those states — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — continue to rely on their arsenals as the bedrock of their security strategies, modernising and expanding them even as they demand restraint from others.

This creates what many analysts describe as a two-tier nuclear order: a world in which some states enjoy permanent, self-reinforcing security whilst others must depend upon promises that history has repeatedly shown to be fragile. The asymmetry is not incidental to the system — it is structural.

The radical question

The nuclear order raises an uncomfortable, radical and yet logically coherent question: what if the safest world is not one in which only a handful of states possess nuclear weapons, but one in which all states do?

The idea will strike most readers as alarming, and the instinct is understandable. Yet it echoes a long-standing argument within strategic studies that has never been fully refuted.

Waltz himself suggested that limited nuclear proliferation might actually strengthen deterrence by making aggression universally dangerous. Even a modest arsenal — what strategists describe as “minimum deterrence” — could, in theory, be sufficient to prevent invasion.

If every state possessed a credible nuclear capability, any act of conquest could trigger catastrophic retaliation, rendering wars of aggression not merely costly but existentially irrational.

The argument is not an endorsement of proliferation as policy. It is, rather, a recognition that the current system’s logic contains a contradiction it cannot resolve: it demands that weaker states accept vulnerability in exchange for assurances that the stronger states have shown themselves unwilling to honour. That contradiction does not disappear simply because it is uncomfortable to acknowledge.

This is the deeper crisis of the nuclear order — not the danger of proliferation per se, but the danger of a system that incentivises it whilst claiming to prevent it. The Budapest Memorandum was not an aberration; it was the system working precisely as designed, offering assurances in lieu of guarantees, and leaving the weaker party to bear the consequences. Until that structural flaw is addressed, the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons will persist.

The terrifying trade-off

Universal nuclear deterrence carries risks of a magnitude that cannot be minimised. Accidents, miscalculations, cyber interference and unauthorised launches represent genuine and potentially civilisation-ending dangers.

The spread of nuclear technology also increases the probability that non-state actors — terrorist organisations, for instance — might eventually acquire catastrophic capabilities.

These are not hypothetical concerns; they are the considered judgements of arms control specialists and security analysts who have spent careers studying the problem. The risks of a more proliferated world are real, and they deserve to be taken seriously. No honest account of the deterrence argument can omit them.

Yet the current system carries its own dangers, which receive less attention than they deserve. A world in which only a small number of states possess nuclear deterrents, whilst the majority remain defenceless, may actually encourage instability by removing the constraints that deter aggression against weaker states.

The invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of Libya are not ancient history — they are recent events whose strategic lessons are being absorbed by governments around the world right now.

As long as that imbalance persists, the incentive for more countries to seek nuclear protection will remain powerful. Should Iran emerge from its current confrontation with its sovereignty intact, the most straightforward strategic inference is that it will intensify, rather than abandon, its pursuit of nuclear capability. The logic is not admirable; it is, however, comprehensible.

The real choice

Ultimately, the international community faces two credible long-term paths, and the space between them is narrowing. The first is genuine, universal disarmament — every nation surrendering its nuclear weapons under enforceable international supervision, with binding commitments and robust verification mechanisms.

The second is gradual proliferation, as more governments conclude that nuclear deterrence is the only reliable guarantee of sovereignty in a world that has not yet found a better one.

The first option would require a degree of trust and cooperation among the great powers that the current international environment conspicuously lacks. The NPT’s own architects acknowledged that disarmament depended upon good faith from the nuclear-armed states — good faith that has not been forthcoming in the six decades since the treaty was signed.

The second path may simply reflect the brutal, self-reinforcing logic of a system in which security is ultimately self-provided.

Until the world commits seriously and verifiably to eliminating nuclear weapons altogether, the uncomfortable truth endures: in a world where power remains the final arbiter of sovereignty, the surest way to avoid invasion may be to possess the ultimate deterrent.

That is not an argument for the world as it should be. It is a description of the world as it is.

Festo Mulinda is a political analyst and freelance columnist focusing on international relations and geopolitics. He can be reached at mulindafesto@gmail.com or on X as @fmulinda_III. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.