Fears over western 'double standards' are no reason to let Iran build nuclear weapons

19 June 2025, 11:35

By Edmund Fitton-Brown

Accusations over the West's 'double standards' for Israel and Iran's nuclear capabilities ignore the reality of non-proliferation.

The West is often accused of "double standards", whether in the field of human rights or foreign interventions, environmental targets or nuclear proliferation. I have had to answer this charge with monotonous regularity throughout my diplomatic career in the Arab World and my five-year stint with the United Nations.

The accusation that concerns me here is that we have no moral right to prevent countries like Iran from seeking a nuclear capability when Israel has had nuclear weapons for at least half a century and is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Why are we not trying harder to challenge that? Surely we should insist on the whole Middle East becoming a nuclear weapons-free zone? And, in any case, how can we be so sure that Iran doesn't simply want nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian purposes, as it says it does?

The short answer is that our calculations are complex. First of all, the principle of non-proliferation is to prevent a problem from spreading. Much effort has been put into reducing nuclear arsenals, and, in an ideal world, one would wish to see some nuclear-armed states renounce their capability and disarm. But the reality is that it is more realistic to dissuade or prevent states of proliferation concern from crossing the nuclear threshold and further complicating the geometry of nuclear deterrence.

The West might wish that Russia would disarm but that is not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Likewise, we all become that bit more anxious when India and Pakistan come to blows, as they did a few weeks ago, because we can imagine the consequences if the conflict went nuclear. But persuading either country to give up its nukes is obviously impossible.

So we focus on countries like Iran and North Korea, where it is not too late to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear warhead and the capability to fire it against an enemy. Both aspects are critical, so counter-proliferation work focuses on both nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile technology.

The third factor is intent. This is another key difference between Iran and Israel. Put simply, Iran has regularly stated its ambition to annihilate the State of Israel. Israel cannot be credibly accused of harbouring such intent towards Iran and its tiny size means that a single nuclear strike could truly annihilate it without Iran facing mutually assured destruction because of its vast land mass.

Given the avowed religious governing principles of the Islamic Republic (especially the rising cult of Mahdism in the IRGC) such a destructive and self-destructive step is not something that Israel can afford to rule out over time, even if it looks unlikely to us at our safer distance.

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Edmund Fitton-Brown is a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project. He formerly served as British ambassador to Yemen and as a coordinator of the UN Security Council’s Monitoring Team for ISIS, AQ, and the Taliban.

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