Modern Diplomacy:

Sidra Shaukat is working as a Research Officer at Strategic Vision Institute Islamabad 

For twelve consecutive days, Israel has waged an intense aerial campaign against Iranian nuclear and military sites. On June 22, the United States joined the offensive, striking three major nuclear facilities Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow. The military aggression, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims is meant to prevent an “existential threat,” has killed hundreds, injured thousands, and caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. But beyond the immediate physical devastation, this coordinated assault may have far more consequential fallout: the collapse of Iran’s commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and with it, the unravelling of the global non-proliferation regime.

Iranian lawmakers have made no secret of their growing frustration. The head of Iran’s Parliament Foreign Policy Committee, Abbas Golroo, invoked Article 10 of the NPT, which allows a state to withdraw if “extraordinary events have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi also echoed this sentiment and warned that all options were now on the table to defend Iran’s sovereignty and security. With both the U.S. and Israel now openly attacking nuclear sites that were under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, and without evidence from the IAEA that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, Iran’s threat to withdraw from the NPT is no longer a bluster. It is an inflection point in nuclear diplomacy.

Iran’s nuclear program has long existed under the scrutiny of the IAEA and the international community. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), though abandoned by the Trump administration in 2018, had curbed Iranian enrichment activities and placed rigorous monitoring mechanisms on its nuclear infrastructure. According to the IAEA, “there remains no definitive evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.” Even so, Tehran has faced military aggression, first from Israel, and now from the United States.

Article 10 of the NPT stipulates that a member state may withdraw from the treaty if extraordinary events related to the treaty jeopardized its supreme interests. From Iran’s perspective, the coordinated military strikes by a nuclear-armed, non-NPT state (Israel) and an NPT-signatory (the United States) against its safeguarded facilities met that threshold. These attacks are not mere warnings or acts of deterrence, they are strategic, pre-emptive attempts to obliterate Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure under the presumption of future weaponization, not current violations.

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