What If Hormuz Pushes This War Into a Nuclear Scenario? |
In the winter of 588 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem. His armies encircled the city, erected siege walls, and severed every route of supply. For eighteen months, no food, no commerce, and no relief entered the walls. The famine that followed broke not only the city’s defenses but its humanity. The Book of Lamentations, written by a witness to the destruction, preserves what remains one of the most harrowing accounts of siege warfare in the ancient record: “The hands of compassionate women cooked their own children; they became their food when my people were destroyed.” That is what siege does. It does not kill with swords. It kills with time. Patience erodes. Options narrow. Decisions become emotional, desperate, reckless. The psychology of siege has not changed in twenty-six centuries. What has changed is the arsenal available when desperate leaders run out of options. Nine nuclear powers. Over 12,000 warheads, down from a Cold War peak of roughly 70,000, but more than enough to end civilization as we know it.
We have seen this pattern before, in modern history, with devastating consequences.
By the late 1930s, Imperial Japan had embarked on a campaign of territorial expansion across East Asia. Its military occupied Manchuria, waged a full-scale war in China, formed a military alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and moved into French Indochina to strangle supply routes reaching its adversaries. The United States, which had been tightening economic restrictions incrementally, responded decisively on July 26, 1941: President Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets and imposed a total embargo on oil exports. The effect was immediate and existential. Japan, which imported 80 percent of its petroleum from the United States, lost access to the resource that sustained its military and its empire in a single stroke. The Imperial Japanese Navy calculated that its fuel reserves would be exhausted within eighteen months. Diplomatic cables intercepted in the months that followed revealed what one historian described as “an atmosphere of desperation” within the Japanese leadership. Tokyo confronted a stark choice: accept Washington’s demands, withdraw from its conquered territories, and suffer an intolerable loss of prestige, or seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies by force and accept the inevitability of war with the most powerful industrial nation on Earth. Japan chose war. On the morning of December 7, 1941, 353 aircraft launched from six carriers struck the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and drawing the United States into the Second World War.
Four years of grinding conflict followed. By the summer of 1945, Japan’s cities lay in ruins from sustained firebombing campaigns, its navy had been destroyed, and its empire had collapsed. Yet its military leadership refused to surrender. American war planners estimated that a conventional invasion of the Japanese mainland, designated Operation Downfall, would cost between 500,000 and one million US casualties, based on the fierce resistance encountered at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where Japanese soldiers overwhelmingly chose death over capitulation. President Truman, unwilling to accept those losses, authorized the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in war. On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber released an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. The combined death toll exceeded 200,000. Japan surrendered on August 15.
The parallels with 2026 are uncomfortable. In 1941, the United States cut off oil to Japan. In 2026, Iran cut off oil to the world. In both cases, a regime that refused to yield weaponized an economic chokepoint until the pressure became unbearable. In both cases, negotiations failed because the core demands were irreconcilable. And in both cases, the party with the larger arsenal faced the same agonizing question: how far are we willing to go?
The question this analysis asks is whether the current trajectory could lead toward a nuclear scenario, and why the question, however uncomfortable, can no longer be avoided.
The Islamabad talks have collapsed. After 21 hours of face-to-face negotiations, the highest-level engagement between the US and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Vice President Vance announced on April 12 that no agreement was reached. “They have chosen not to accept our terms,” he said. The sticking point was, as predicted, nuclear: Iran refused to commit to renouncing nuclear weapons.
President Trump responded immediately on Truth Social: “The meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not.” He then announced that “effective immediately, the United States Navy will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” calling Iran’s control of the waterway “extortion.”
The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed despite the ceasefire announced on April 7. Iran continues to limit traffic, charge tolls exceeding $1 million per vessel, and require military coordination for passage. More than 800 ships remain stranded in the Persian Gulf. Oil prices have swung between $95 and $126 since Iran shut the strait on February 28.
The economic damage is not limited to the United States, where inflation surged to 3.3% in March driven by the largest monthly increase in gasoline prices since records began in 1967. The crisis is global. Europe faces diesel shortages. Asian economies are rationing fuel. Countries dependent on Qatari LNG through the strait, from Bangladesh to Pakistan, are experiencing power shortages. Thirty percent of the world’s fertilizer exports normally pass through Hormuz, threatening food production across the developing world during planting season in the Northern Hemisphere.
The global economy is under siege. And the weapon is not a missile or a warhead. It is a 39-kilometer stretch of water that Iran controls through coastal defenses, sea mines, drone swarms, and the simple fact that it sits on both sides of the chokepoint. As I argued in a previous analysis, the pre-war consensus, shared by analysts, intelligence agencies, and the US military itself, was that Iran could never hold Hormuz closed for more than a few weeks. That consensus was catastrophically wrong. Forty-three days later, the strait remains shut and the world has no credible plan to reopen it.
Why Islamabad Was Never Going to Work
The structural gap between the two sides was never a negotiating challenge. It was a doctrinal collision.
The US 15-point plan demands that Iran dismantle its nuclear capabilities, cease all uranium enrichment, restrict its ballistic missile program, and sever support to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Iran’s 10-point plan demands continued control over the Strait of Hormuz with transit fees, the withdrawal of all US combat forces from the Middle East, the lifting of all sanctions, compensation for war damages, and the right to continue enriching uranium.
Iran will never voluntarily surrender its enriched uranium. Not because of what happened to Libya or Iraq, but because without it, the regime’s foundational objective, the destruction of Israel, becomes permanently unattainable. The 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity are not a bargaining chip. They are the regime’s reason for being. For Tehran, this conflict is above all else religious before it is political. No amount of sanctions relief will alter a commitment rooted in theological conviction.
Meanwhile, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reported to be more hardline than his father. Prominent voices within the regime now openly call for nuclear weapons, arguing that the fatwa against them died with Ali Khamenei.
These are not positions that creative diplomacy can bridge.
The Narrowing of Conventional Options
Trump has claimed that “almost all military objectives” have been achieved. Over 6,000 targets have been struck. The supreme leader was killed. Nuclear facilities were bombed. The navy was largely destroyed. And yet Iran still controls Hormuz. Still launches missiles. Still refuses to yield its enriched uranium.
If nearly all objectives have been met and the strategic situation remains unchanged, what conventional options remain? Destroying civilian infrastructure would punish 88 million civilians but would not open the strait, since none of Iran’s Hormuz capabilities depend on the national power grid. A ground operation to seize the coastline would confront the same asymmetric realities that destroyed the Allied campaign at the Dardanelles in 1915. Winston Churchill, then serving as First Lord of the Admiralty, conceived an ambitious plan to force a naval passage through the narrow strait, capture Constantinople, and compel the Ottoman Empire to surrender, thereby opening a supply route to Russia and reshaping the war’s eastern front. The operation was a catastrophe. Ottoman coastal batteries, minefields, and mobile artillery turned the strait into a killing ground. The naval assault of March 18 alone cost three Allied battleships sunk and three more crippled. The subsequent land campaign at Gallipoli devolved into eight months of trench warfare that claimed over 250,000 Allied casualties. The failure cost Churchill his position and his reputation, both of which would take decades to recover. The Pentagon’s own Millennium Challenge wargame in 2002 simulated a nearly identical scenario. The simulated Iranian side won. The Pentagon restarted the exercise and changed the rules.
On April 11, two US destroyers crossed the Strait for the first time since the war began to start mine-clearing operations, without coordinating with Iran. Iran called it a ceasefire violation. But clearing mines in contested waters, under threat of mobile coastal missiles, GPS spoofing, and drone swarms, is not the same as securing the strait for hundreds of commercial vessels per day. The insurance industry, not the US Navy, will ultimately decide when Hormuz reopens for business.
Wars rarely escalate gradually into their most extreme phases. They are pushed there by singular events that change the political calculus overnight.
For President Truman in the summer of 1945, the catalytic event was not a single moment but the convergence of several. The Joint Chiefs presented casualty estimates for Operation Downfall that ranged from 500,000 to over one million American dead and wounded. The battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa had demonstrated the nature of Japanese resistance: at Okinawa alone, more than 12,000 Americans were killed, while Japanese forces fought virtually to the last man, with over 100,000 military deaths and mass suicides among civilians. Truman examined the projections for an invasion of the home islands and concluded that the conventional path forward was militarily unacceptable.
In the current conflict, such a catalytic event could take several forms: an Iranian missile striking a US aircraft carrier with hundreds of casualties; a massive coordinated attack on Tel Aviv killing thousands of civilians; intelligence confirming that Iran has assembled a crude nuclear device from its enriched uranium; or the simultaneous closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb by Iranian proxies, strangling global maritime commerce through two chokepoints at once.
Any of these scenarios would place a US president or an Israeli prime minister in the same position Truman occupied in July 1945. No political leader wants to be remembered as the one who used nuclear weapons. But no political leader wants to be recorded in the annals of military history as the one who lost a war he could have won. That pride, that refusal to accept defeat, has already led one American president to authorize two atomic bombs on civilian populations. It would be reckless to assume it could never happen again.
A Scenario Nobody Wants to Discuss
In any war room, planners are required to map extreme scenarios. This is one of them.
In June 1945, as the Manhattan Project neared completion, a group of scientists led by Nobel laureate James Franck submitted a classified report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The document, which came to be known as the Franck Report, argued against the use of the atomic bomb on a Japanese city without prior warning. The committee proposed instead a demonstration detonation on “a barren island or desert,” conducted before representatives of the United Nations, so that the power of the weapon could be established without the moral burden of mass civilian death. The scientists warned that an unannounced attack on a populated city would shatter any possibility of postwar international control of atomic energy and trigger an arms race. The report reached the Interim Committee, which rejected the proposal. Secretary Stimson and his advisors concluded that a demonstration carried unacceptable risks: the bomb might fail, Japan might move Allied prisoners to the target site, and a mere display of force might not compel surrender. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.
As an analytical exercise, the Franck precedent raises a question that applies to the current impasse. If conventional options have been exhausted and the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian coercion, could a nuclear demonstration, not on a city, but in an uninhabited area, alter the regime’s calculus?
Iran’s Dasht-e Lut, the hottest and most lifeless desert on Earth, stretches 480 kilometers across southeastern Iran. Parts of it are devoid of all life, including bacteria. Its center has no permanent settlements. A low-yield detonation in such an environment would produce no civilian casualties while delivering a message that no conventional bombing campaign can communicate: that what comes next is qualitatively different from anything that has come before.
While it is unlikely that the initial use of nuclear weapons by the United States, breaking the nuclear taboo for the second time in history and the first since World War II, would target a civilian population, one cannot rule out the use of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons against military objectives relatively far from population centers. The White House communications team has dismissed the suggestion that nuclear use is being contemplated. Yet when asked directly whether the president was prepared to use nuclear weapons, Press Secretary Leavitt did not rule it out: “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.” And Vice President Vance publicly stated that the US has “tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”
In the language of nuclear deterrence, what is left unsaid matters as much as what is said.
The Chain Reaction Beyond Iran
Even a demonstration in an uninhabited desert would not occur in isolation. A nuclear detonation on Iranian soil by the United States, regardless of whether it strikes a population center or an empty desert, could trigger a response from Iran’s nuclear-armed allies. Russia, China, Pakistan, and North Korea each maintain their own nuclear arsenals and their own strategic calculations. Any American nuclear use could be interpreted by these powers as a precedent that legitimizes their own nuclear options in their own conflicts and spheres of influence. The result would not be a single event but a chain reaction of proliferation, posturing, and potential escalation with consequences that no government on Earth could predict or contain.
This has always been the fundamental danger of breaking the nuclear taboo. The bomb that falls on one country does not stay in one country. It reverberates through every capital that possesses the same weapon.
Two Crises, One Equation
The 440.9 kilograms of enriched uranium hidden beneath Iran’s rubble remain an existential threat primarily to Israel. Netanyahu stated it on April 8: “The enriched material that still remains will leave Iran. It will leave either by agreement or through a renewal of the fighting.”
But the permanent closure of the Strait of Hormuz is an existential threat to the global economic order. Twenty percent of the world’s oil. Twenty percent of its liquefied natural gas. Thirty percent of its fertilizers. Every nation on Earth that depends on energy and food imports is paying the price.
Washington will not allow Hormuz to remain permanently under Iranian coercion. Tehran will not relinquish the most powerful weapon it has ever possessed. And the regime’s objectives are not political positions subject to negotiation. They are theological commitments rooted in the foundational doctrine of the Islamic Republic since 1979. For Tehran, the annihilation of Israel is a sacred obligation, even if it means the destruction of the Palestinian population it claims to defend, a cost that neither the Palestinians nor the global anti-Israel movement seem willing to contemplate.
This Is a Scenario, Not a Prediction
How this ends, no one can say with certainty. Not the negotiators who just failed in Islamabad, not the commanders clearing mines in the strait, not the analysts mapping scenarios from their screens.
This is an analytical exercise, not an advocacy. I am tracing the logic of elimination to a conclusion that I hope proves wrong. Scenarios exist precisely because the unthinkable has a way of becoming thinkable when all other options have been tried and found wanting.
But one thing should be clear to every government involved: in a world where the Strait of Hormuz has become a siege weapon against the global economy, where thousands of nuclear warheads exist across nine nations, and where conventional options are narrowing day by day, no leader on any side can credibly dominate the narrative. The hunger is real. The patience is finite. And the weapons have never been more lethal.