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Chandigarh: The escalating confrontation between Iran and the US-Israel combine has revived a far wider and more dangerous question: how many other countries might now seek nuclear weapons of their own as the ultimate insurance against attack by more powerful adversaries.

At first glance, the enduring war against Iran appears narrowly focused on its nuclear and long-range missile ambitions. Tehran is believed to have enriched – and stored – uranium to about 60% purity, a level far beyond civilian energy requirements and uncomfortably close to the 90% threshold needed for weapons-grade material. US and Israeli intelligence assessments suggest Iran could theoretically produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb within a short span, if it chose to cross the line.

Yet the strategic significance of Iran’s programme lies less in the technical details of enrichment than in the political signal it sends to the rest of the world: if a country under sustained military pressure can approach the nuclear threshold and thereby complicate the calculations of far stronger adversaries, other states may draw an obvious conclusion – that possessing nuclear weapons, or at least the ability to rapidly produce them, offers the most reliable insurance against attack.

Anxieties in East Asia

The broader danger, therefore, lies in what strategists describe as “nuclear hedging” – the deliberate cultivation of technological, industrial and scientific capabilities that allow a state to rapidly build nuclear weapons should the strategic environment deteriorate. This approach stops short of openly violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, but quietly erodes the spirit of the global non-proliferation regime. Several technologically advanced states already sit at this threshold, possessing the civilian nuclear infrastructure, fissile material stockpiles and long-range missile technology that could be converted to weapons use within a short span.

In East Asia, this logic has gained particular traction as regional security anxieties deepen.

In South Korea, for instance, public debate over acquiring nuclear weapons has become increasingly mainstream, with opinion polls periodically showing majority support for an indigenous strategic deterrent. Although Seoul remains formally protected under the US’s  nuclear umbrella, doubts occasionally surface over whether Washington would risk American cities in response to a nuclear strike on the Korean peninsula from rival Pyongyang. 

Similar strategic calculations quietly resonate in Japan, even though Tokyo continues to adhere to its long-standing non-nuclear principles, shaped by the........

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