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Chandigarh: The enduring five-week-long US-Israel bombing campaign against Iran, aimed at extinguishing its nuclear programme, seems to have triggered the opposite effect: a hardened, more adversarial, even defiant Tehran increasingly views nuclear weapons as the only credible guarantor of regime survival, say a wide range of Western security analysts.

They are of the view that rather than suppressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the sustained strikes– delivered in part by US Air Force B-2 stealth bombers employing ‘bunker-buster’ munitions of over 1000 lbs and more, against deeply buried facilities – appear to have reinforced them, turning Iran’s recessed deterrence into a strategic necessity that it may now be likely to actively pursue.

These experts, who had even earlier warned of precisely this outcome, also maintain that the ongoing bombing campaign has significantly strengthened hard-line factions within Tehran, which advocate a decisive shift towards nuclear weaponisation.

Their underlying logic is brutally simple: vulnerability invites attack and only nuclear capability can prevent it – a conclusion reinforced by North Korea’s survival under prolonged pressure and Pakistan’s ability to deter India despite conventional asymmetry. In Iran’s own strategic logic, forswearing the nuclear option – whether by force or through imposed agreements – had rendered it vulnerable to attack. These attacks have only reinforced the conviction some had that a latent or actual bomb is the ultimate safeguard against foreign aggression.

Moreover, the ongoing air campaign has not – arguably, cannot – eliminate the most vital component of any nuclear weapons programme anywhere: knowledge.

Uranium enrichment facilities and centrifuges can be destroyed, but the human capital underpinning Iran’s nuclear effort – its army of scientists, engineers, technicians and decades of accumulated expertise – remains largely intact. This........

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