The Button: America’s Nuclear Weapons and Iran

Three new warheads, each designed to make use more thinkable. A target that no conventional weapon can reach. A president at 37% with sole authority to launch – and no system to stop him.

Grüezi!

• The US is days into a war with Iran that has closed the Strait of Hormuz, and sent oil past $100 a barrel. The president’s approval rating is at its lowest point of his second term. The Epstein files are closing in.

• The one thing the war was supposed to achieve – destroying Iran’s nuclear programme – remains beyond the reach of any conventional weapon in the American arsenal.

• Three nuclear warheads now exist that weren’t available a decade ago, each engineered to make nuclear use more thinkable. The target they were built for still stands.

• And nothing in the US system – not Congress, not the chain of command, not international law – can prevent one man from ordering their use.

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1. The Legacy Strike

Donald Trump is days into a war he started without congressional authorisation, and the numbers are turning against him everywhere that matters.

Quinnipiac has him at 37 per cent approval, 57 per cent disapproval – the lowest of his second term. NPR/PBS/Marist has him one point higher, with his ratings on the economy and immigration at new lows.

There’s no rally-around-the-flag effect. War hasn’t even stabilised the bleeding.

To date, seven American service members are dead. Six were reservists at a makeshift operations centre in Kuwait hit by an Iranian drone on the war’s second day. About 140 more have been wounded.

Trump attended the dignified transfer at Dover and told ABC that the bereaved parents asked him to ‘win this for my boy.’ His War Secretary, as Pete Hegseth now styles himself, keeps declining to rule out ground troops.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files are detonating. In late February, NPR revealed the Justice Department had withheld FBI interview memos describing a woman’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her when she was thirteen.

The DOJ initially claimed the files were ‘incorrectly coded as duplicative.’ They were released on 6 March – eight days into the war. The Washington Post reported that pro-Iran propaganda accounts are now using the Epstein material, fusing it with anti-war messaging to viral effect.

And preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon – the war’s stated objective – has failed on its own terms.

Trump himself pointed to a facility under construction near Natanz buried under 100 metres of rock, Pickaxe Mountain, as evidence that Iran was rebuilding even after last June’s strikes had supposedly ‘obliterated’ its programme.

The 400+ kilograms of 60 per cent enriched uranium – enough for half a dozen or more weapons – survived both rounds of bombing. The IAEA can’t say where it is. The administration has floated special forces raids to seize it, but senior officials admit the mission’s first question is ‘where?’

So here’s the situation.

A president at historic lows. A scandal that won’t stop surfacing. A war that killed its supreme leader target on day one but can’t finish the job. And a nuclear programme that has retreated deeper underground, beyond the reach of the most powerful conventional munitions ever built.

The Truman template is sitting right there: two bombs, unconditional surrender, no invasion.

For a man who calls the war a ‘little excursion’ and tells congressional Republicans it’ll be over ‘pretty quickly,’ that logic is seductive.

And after Hiroshima? Truman’s approval rating was 87 per cent.

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2. The Arsenal Built for Now

Three nuclear weapons in the current US arsenal await a potential push of the button.

Each was engineered to make nuclear use more politically feasible. Used together they would form a nuclear double-tap designed to enforce surrender.

The W76-2 low-yield warhead entered service during Trump’s first term, carried aboard Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines. It yields around 5-7 kilotons. That’s a third of the size of Hiroshima, but almost 500 times more powerful than the largest US conventional explosive.

It is carried by Trident II missiles, launched from the ocean floor. It takes minutes from presidential order to detonation. There’s zero aircrew risk. No allied airspace permissions. No tanker coordination. No visible decision-making. The entire process is over before the world even knows. It happened.

There’s only one problem. The W76-2 can’t destroy Fordow. It is an airburst weapon with no earth-penetration capability, and it wouldn’t produce enough ground shock against a facility deep under mountain rock. It was designed to demonstrate intent, not to destroy ultra-hardened infrastructure.

To destroy deeply buried targets, you need the B61-12. It entered service in December 2024. The B61-12 can penetrate a few metres into the ground, is accurate to about 30 metres, and comes in four sizes – from 0.3 to 50 kilotons.

A 50-kiloton detonation below ground would produce a ground shock equivalent to 750 kilotons or more, more than enough to obliterate a facility at Fordow’s depth.

The Federation of American Scientists says that the B61’s design – precision guidance, selectable low yields, and integration with tactical fighters – make it ‘more usable.’

‘More usable.’ That phrase does a lot of work.

To cap it all, in May 2025 America’s most powerful precision-guided nuclear weapon, the B61-13, entered service. Its 360 kilotons are guided by the B61-12’s tail kit.

A two-strike sequence would be pretty straightforward. Strike one: a W76-2, submarine-launched against a visible Iranian military target. Shock, compellence, proof of willingness. This is Hiroshima.

Strike two: a B61-12, delivered by aircraft against Fordow or Pickaxe Mountain, destroying what conventional weapons have been unable to reach. This is Nagasaki.

The gap between strikes could be minutes, hours, days – a week. If it were long enough, it would provide the ‘coercive space’ for Iran to surrender.

These weapons were not developed for hypothetical scenarios. They were developed for ones like this.

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3. The Conveyor Belt

President Trump has sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. Pete Hegseth’s job would only be to verify the order’s authenticity – not its wisdom. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not in the chain of command. The system is designed to be fast.

Jack Goldsmith – Harvard Law professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel – laid out the situation this week. The declaratory posture, that the US would only consider nuclear use in ‘extreme circumstances,’ is a public statement of intent. It is not a binding legal restriction.

The only domestic constraints are the president’s own judgment and the possibility of subordinate insubordination. But the nuclear launch system, as Goldsmith noted, is designed precisely to prevent that friction.

Consider who occupies the key positions.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth was confirmed 51-50, with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaker. A former Fox News weekend host, he wrote of Truman’s nuclear strikes on Japan: ‘They won. Who cares.’ He fired the DIA Director when his agency’s bomb damage assessment of the June 2025 strikes contradicted Trump’s public claims.

The Joint Chiefs? General CQ Brown was fired as Chairman via Truth Social with two and a half years left on his term. Dan Caine, a retired general who had complained vocally about DEI was brought out retirement to fill the role.

Trump told an audience that Caine had told him: ‘I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.’ Caine had to deny those words in a confirmation hearing.

The NSC? Gutted. Some 160 career aides were sidelined in January 2025; dozens more were dismissed last May with half an hour’s notice.

Congress had its chance. The Senate rejected the war powers resolution 53-47. The House by 219-212. Eight war powers resolutions have gone to a vote since June 2025. All have failed.

The people who would or could slow this down – the ones who would ask questions, request a legal review, or play for time – have been removed. The people replacing them were selected for compliance.

And the institution that was designed to check the executive’s war-making power passed the buck.

Goldsmith’s summary?

This is ‘a terrible place to be when it comes to nuclear weapons and Iran: an escalating conflict initiated and guided by a volatile risk-taking, stakes-raising president in love with his power and constrained only by his “mind” and his “morality.”’

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4. Nagasaki Logic

A tactical nuclear strike on Iran would not be an act of destruction. It would be an opening bid.

Think about Nagasaki for a moment – not the horror of it, but the structure. Hiroshima demonstrated that the weapon existed. Three days later, Nagasaki demonstrated the willingness to continue.

The gap between the two was enough for Japan to absorb the shock. It was followed by proof that refusal meant further escalation. Extreme graduated violence plus the credible threat of more.

Trump’s entire political career is built on shattering norms.

• He imposed tariffs that increased average household costs by $5,000 a year – and didn’t blink.

• He withdrew from the JCPOA.

• He struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025.

• He ordered the arrest of Venezuela’s president.

• He launched this war during live nuclear negotiations, killing Khamenei on day one.

Trump has form on following through on costly threats that damage American interests.

A tactical nuclear strike would be the ultimate expression: I will do what no one believes I would do, and then I will threaten to do it again, and you will have to decide whether to call me out on it.

And it doesn’t operate only against Iran. It operates against everyone. Allies who issue statements of grave concern have already demonstrated that they will absorb nuclear first use with more such statements.

Every subsequent American demand – NATO spending, trade terms, basing rights, diplomatic alignment – arrives with different weight behind it. Adversaries recalculate what this administration is willing to do in every theatre. The strike is a credibility investment across all fronts at once.

When Polymarket ran a market on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated by year’s end, the odds reached 22 per cent before the platform pulled it under pressure.

That some people were buying ‘yes’ tells you something about where the conversations around Trump might be headed.

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5. Tactical Success, Strategic Disaster

Here is the seductive part. It would probably work.

A B61-12 is accurate to 30 metres. At 50 kilotons, penetrating several metres below the surface before detonation, it would deliver a ground shock through the rocks above Fordow that would be quite sufficient to destroy vibration-sensitive centrifuges 80-90 metres below. The enriched uranium stockpile, wherever it sits in those tunnels, would be buried, fused, or irradiated. Pickaxe Mountain, still under construction, doesn’t have the defences to survive such a strike.

The human infrastructure is already being dismantled by other means. Israel has spent two decades assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists – Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020 was the most senior, but not the last.

The June 2025 strikes targeted scientific experts alongside facilities. It takes years of specialised training to build and operate centrifuges, to convert yellowcake into UF6, and to carefully manage the cascade process. That expertise is not rebuilt from manuals. Every physicist killed extends Iran’s capability gap and the timeline for reconstruction.

A nuclear strike on the hardened facilities, combined with the ongoing elimination of scientific personnel, would not merely set back Iran’s programme.

It would effectively end it as a near-term threat. The conventional strikes of June 2025 set the programme back by months, perhaps years. A nuclear strike would set it back by a generation.

This is precisely what makes it catastrophic. Because the question was never really whether a nuclear weapon could destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. The question is what happens to everything else.

If it works – if the target is destroyed, if Iran’s programme is finished, if the regime capitulates or collapses – then what academics call ‘nuclear compellence’ will have been proven as a tool of statecraft for the first time since 1945.

Every future confrontation with a threshold nuclear state would have a template. Every country that might one day attract ‘unwelcome attention,’ as the Union of Concerned Scientists put it, would draw the same conclusion. The only defence against a nuclear-armed superpower willing to use its weapons is to nuclear-arm yourself.

Neither Russia nor China, who have been providing Iran with intelligence and materiel, can afford to let nuclear compellence succeed – because they know it will eventually be applied to them or their allies.

A strike would work against Iran. But…

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6. To Russia With Love

European Council President António Costa said it plainly this week:

‘So far, there is only one winner in this war – Russia. It gains new resources to finance its war against Ukraine as energy prices rise. It profits from the diversion of military capabilities that could otherwise have been sent to support Ukraine. And it benefits from reduced attention to the Ukrainian front.’

Every consequence of the war on Iran benefits Moscow. Oil prices have surged past $100, filling Russia’s war chest. Putin told a Kremlin meeting that Russian energy companies should ‘make use of the current moment’ and suggested that Europe, which has been reducing dependence on Russian energy, might rethink ‘long-term, stable cooperation’ with Moscow. The discount on Russian oil has been shrinking since the Iran crisis began.

Now extend this to the nuclear scenario.

If the US uses a tactical nuclear weapon against Iran, Russia is validated. Every argument Western governments have made against Russian tactical nuclear use in Ukraine – the taboo, the norms, the consequences – transfers directly.

Putin’s November 2024 doctrinal update lowered Russia’s threshold for nuclear use from threats to ‘the very existence of the state’ to ‘a critical threat to sovereignty and/or territorial integrity.’

Analysts called that doctrine a manipulative and cynical move to frighten Europeans rather than a blueprint for employment. But that assessment assumed the taboo held. If the taboo breaks, the doctrine could become operational.

Whether Trump intends to serve Russian interests is beside the point. The outcome is identical either way.

The ugly ambiguity between ‘inadvertent’ and ‘deliberate’ is the story of this presidency – and the beneficiary has no interest in resolving it.

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7. The Weapon That Destroys Its Own Architecture

The nonproliferation order has been the most effective instrument of American dominance since 1945. Francis Gavin’s foundational work demonstrated that nonproliferation has been a central pillar of US grand strategy – a tool to maintain US freedom of action by keeping nuclear-armed states few and far between.

Barry Posen’s ‘command of the commons’ – US dominance of sea, space, and air – works only because most rivals and adversaries lack the arsenals that would create escalation ceilings.

In a world with five nuclear states, carrier strike groups are decisive instruments. In a world with twenty, they are targets.

The most important lesson has already been learned. Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for paper promises from Russia, the United States, and the UK. Russia invaded it.

The US is now pressuring it into giving up territory. And the war currently funding Russia’s campaign against Ukraine is the one the United States just started in Iran. Every government watching draws the same conclusion.

Iran stayed in the non-proliferation treaty and got bombed. North Korea withdrew and is untouched. Iraq gave up its WMD programmes and was invaded. Libya surrendered its nuclear ambitions and its leader was killed.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS: if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, ‘we will follow suit as soon as possible.’ He signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Pakistan in September 2025.

South Korean public support for their own nuclear weapons stands at 76 per cent. An anonymous senior Japanese security official told reporters in December 2025 that Japan should possess them too.

Turkey’s Erdoğan: ‘Several countries have missiles with nuclear warheads… but they tell us we can’t have them. This I cannot accept.’

Forget non-proliferation. Every example reinforces the same conclusion: nuclear weapons are the only reliable security guarantee. A nuclear strike would prove it.

A weapon designed never to be used could finally destroy the architecture that has underwritten American military dominance for eighty years.

A president at 37 per cent, with the authority to use a weapon that would change the world – and there’s no one and nothing to stop him.

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Thanks for reading.

Best,

Adrian