Trump boasted that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Pete Hegseth, like a Fox News stormtrooper in civvies, called the strikes “spectacular”—the kind of language once reserved for fireworks or drone shows over NFL stadiums. Any dissenters were “politically motivated“. At a Republican fundraising dinner in Lima, Ohio, Vice-President JD Vance declared the mission a “wild success,” and the applause was warm—grateful, perhaps, that American might had once again been projected without a single US casualty. But the reality buried beneath the triumphalism is harder to bomb. According to US and allied intelligence, the bunker-busting GBU-57s hit access tunnels and above-ground support buildings. But there are doubts. The heart of the programme (the centrifuge halls at Fordow and Isfahan) lies deeper, reinforced by concrete and calculation. Not only were these core sites likely untouched, but Iranian officials had reportedly moved enriched uranium and high-performance centrifuges in the days before impact. So what was actually destroyed? A few shafts, some scaffolding, a mess facility, perhaps a propaganda target. What’s been achieved? A delay measured in months. And a fresh set of reasons for Iran to walk away from the last tatters of diplomacy.
Is the United States at war with Iran? Even the administration didn’t seem to know. JD Vance, face locked somewhere between confusion and bravado, told Meet the press they were “at war with the Iranian nuclear programme”—as if that’s somehow different. No UN mandate. No vote. No clarity. Just another act of imperial muscle memory, rushed through by a rogue Netanyahu government and rubber-stamped in Washington. Once again, American hegemony acts first and asks no questions after.
None of this matters to those who still believe power confers righteousness. Iran is cast as the villain not because of what it has done, but because of who it is: brown, Shia, defiant, outside the imperial order. Israel, by contrast, holds ninety warheads in uninspected bunkers beneath the Negev and is still treated as a responsible stakeholder. One is bombed for enriching uranium. The other is applauded for never signing the treaty in the first place. This is not non-proliferation. It’s apartheid—nuclear apartheid, enforced by bunker buster and press conference.
Israel’s bomb was never debated, never voted on, never subject to the democratic procedures we’re told distinguish civilised states from rogue ones. It was built in secret, with French reactors and American indulgence, hidden behind euphemisms like “textile plant” and “strategic ambiguity.” When Mordechai Vanunu exposed the truth in 1986, he wasn’t hailed as a whistleblower. He was drugged, abducted, caged for eighteen years. Eleven of those in solitary confinement. No IAEA inspectors ever saw Dimona. No sanctions were levied. No bunker busters fell on the Negev.
Because Israel, we’re told, is “responsible.” As if responsibility is hereditary. As if democracy is a shield that nullifies accountability. As if a Jewish bomb, forged in memory of the Holocaust, can never become the thing it was meant to prevent.
But there’s no such thing as a moral nuclear weapon. There is only capacity and impunity. And Israel’s has been indulged for so long that even to speak of it is to risk being labelled antisemitic, or unhinged. Yet the facts remain: one state in the region has nuclear weapons and refuses to acknowledge them. Another state enriches uranium under international law and is bombed for it. And we’re meant to call this peace. We’re meant to call this order.
We know all this not because of leaks or speculation, but because it’s been documented, meticulously and repeatedly. Michael Karpin’s The Bomb in the Basement lays out the full sordid chronology: how Israel, scarred by genocide and determined to never again be defenceless, struck secret deals with France, built Dimona under the cover of textile production, and institutionalised a doctrine of deception. The nuclear programme, he writes, was “not just a technological feat but a diplomatic one,” with the real genius being Israel’s ability to convince the world it was an exception.
Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option goes further, showing how successive American administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, not only tolerated Israel’s nuclearisation but subsidised it. Billions in military aid flowed even as the CIA turned a blind eye. Israeli operatives, he documents, were embedded in Africa, Europe, even within U.S. intelligence circles. The relationship wasn’t alliance; it was complicity.
Then there is Vanunu. Yoel Cohen’s Whistleblowers and the Bomb (Maybe its time for Pluto Books to bring it back into print) details what happened to the man who told the truth: drugged in Rome, smuggled to Israel, tried in secret, locked away. Vanunu saw the bomb not as salvation but as betrayal. A betrayal of the democratic promise, of transparency, of moral clarity. His crime was conscience. His punishment: silence.
Together, these accounts form a counter-archive—proof that the West’s moral panic over Iranian enrichment is not about preventing apocalypse, but about preserving hierarchy. Israel is allowed to have the bomb because Israel already has the bomb. Iran is forbidden because it might build one. That’s the rule. That’s the whole game. And it has nothing to do with peace.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the imperial order working exactly as intended. Nuclear apartheid mirrors every other form of global inequality. The same powers who drew colonial borders now draw red lines in uranium and plutonium. The same countries that armed Saddam Hussein in the ’80s now bomb Iran for researching centrifuges. The same liberal commentators who cried “Never Again” at the memory of Auschwitz cheer on bunker busters over Isfahan, so long as they’re precision-guided and come with a State Department briefing.
What we’re witnessing isn’t non-proliferation. This is imperial maintenance. A managed regime of fear, where only America and its favoured clients are allowed to wield ultimate force. Where the bomb becomes a badge of civilisation, so long as it’s in the right hands. Hands that are white. Christian. Western. Or, in Israel’s case, exceptional by historical suffering and strategic utility.
Yet the logic cannot hold. You cannot sustain a world where one state has the right to incinerate its enemies while another cannot enrich uranium. You cannot bomb a country into good behaviour while shielding your own apartheid ally from every consequence. You cannot keep drawing the moral map so that it always centres Washington and Tel Aviv.
Because others are watching. Not just in Tehran, but in Riyadh, in Ankara, in Pretoria, in Brasília. They see the double standard. They see that law is just a synonym for Western interest. They see that the bomb doesn’t protect democracies, it protects hierarchies. The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be acting out of zealotry or revenge. It’ll be following a trail already blazed in the Negev, where Israel built the bomb in secret and the West looked the other way. That’s the real precedent and everyone knows it.
The bomb in the basement never stayed in the basement. It continues to shape the world we live in now.
