An Iranian man walks past a view of Tehran's research reactor in Tehran, Iran, on February 26, 2026, the final day of Iran-U.S. talks that take place in the city of Geneva. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

NurPhoto via Getty Images

The first direct talks between the U.S. and Iran’s new leadership, hosted in Pakistan, failed to reach any agreement. They came amidst fears that the U.S.-Israel war with Iran could ultimately result in what many hitherto believed unthinkable: that an outside power transfers nuclear weapons or technology to build them into that highly volatile region.

“The people in place might be less theocratic but also less pragmatic and more belligerent,” Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London, wrote of Iran’s new leadership in an April 8 post on X. “The race to build a bomb might be on again (with outside help) as the previous fatwas will be void after this experience.”

The Iran war started with a decapitation strike killing its long-reigning supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many believe the new leadership that survived and emerged from this war, including Khamenei’s son, will now have even fewer reservations about acquiring or building nuclear weapons.

Similar fears to Krieg’s were already recently expressed in Israeli media.

“The combination of its need for a nuclear insurance policy and the blockage of its in-house nuclear program may well lead Iran to try to obtain an off-the-shelf nuclear bomb,” Uri Bar-Joseph and Haim Tomer wrote in a March 31, 2026, editorial in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. “This scenario, which in the past seemed more suited to thrillers and Hollywood films, has become more realistic today not only because of Iran’s increased motivation to acquire the bomb, but also because since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the global taboo that prevented the proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons has weakened.”

A scenario involving Iran potentially seeking or acquiring off-the-shelf nuclear bombs from abroad previously emerged after the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, which ended after the U.S. bombed critical Iranian nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer. That same month, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, claimed in a vague post on X that “a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

Furthermore, Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert in non-proliferation and nuclear issues, wrote a piece the following November questioning whether Iran might turn again to North Korea for materials or technology, or “even a few intact warheads from North Korea’s estimated stockpile of 50-90 nuclear weapons.” Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick instantly clarified that the latter was a highly speculative scenario. Still, he was writing in the aftermath of the 12-day war. The aftermath of this latest war, or what may ultimately amount to its first phase, could convince Iran’s new leadership it needs a nuclear weapons capability, and fast.

Even an attempt by Tehran to do so could cause widespread and uncontrollable nuclear proliferation in the region, especially after Iran subjected most of its neighbors to repeated missile and drone attacks throughout the last conflict.

At present, Israel remains the sole nuclear-armed power in the region and has been for decades. There are indications that it has even developed a complete nuclear triad.

In September 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would appoint Roman Gofman as the next director of Mossad. Israel’s Ynet news website noted that Gofman had written a paper in late 2019. Titled ‘Yesterday’s Doomsday,’ it “proposed a radical solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis: selling Israeli nuclear warheads to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.”

Gofman offered this solution as part of a hypothetical scenario he outlined in which Iran had advanced toward imminently acquiring nuclear arms. “Instead of thwarting regional nuclearization through traditional military or diplomatic tools,” the Ynet article added, “Gofman’s paper envisions a highly unconventional response: a controlled transfer of nuclear weapons to three key Middle Eastern states in order to create a new multi-polar strategic balance.”

By threatening nuclear proliferation across the region, Israel would draw in the major external powers.

Of course, the whole paper was hypothetical, but Israel may now feel it’s facing a similar scenario to the one it envisaged. However, that doesn’t mean Israel is on the verge of transferring part of its undeclared nuclear stockpile to Arab countries. As Ynet underlined, “the proposal to proliferate nuclear weapons across the Middle East, even in a fictional context, could be seen as a drastic departure from Israel’s security doctrine.”

The only other nuclear weapons in the Middle East are American. Since the late 1950s, the U.S. has stationed nuclear bombs in Turkey as part of a NATO nuclear-sharing arrangement. These have always remained under American control.

In the early years of deployment, there were concerns in Washington about the security of this atomic arsenal. Declassified documents from the National Security Archive reveal, among other things, that staffers with the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy warned the State Department that leaders of an army coup in Turkey “might seize control of one or more of the inadequately protected weapons.”

U.S.-Turkey relations reached a low point after Turkey’s 1974 intervention in Cyprus. Washington halted military aid to Turkey over its use of American weapons for that invasion. Ankara moved to close American military bases in Turkey in retaliation. The U.S. feared for the security of its warheads in Turkey if relations continued to deteriorate. It was also worried about the potential consequences of removing them since Turkey viewed their presence as its main deterrent against the neighboring Soviet Union. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved without a major rupture in relations.

Years after the Cold War ended, the U.S. nuclear arsenal in Turkey consisted of approximately 50 B61 nuclear bombs stored at the southeastern Incirlik airbase. In 2019, amidst a new crisis in relations over Turkey’s purchase of strategic Russian S-400 missile defense systems and a cross-border Turkish operation in Syria, there were renewed calls for the U.S. to remove these gravity bombs.

The U.S. nuclear deployment in Turkey obviously differs from what Iran may pursue, which is a complete transfer of nuclear weapons for its independent possession or possible use. Iran has long remained wary of allowing foreign forces bases on its territory, even those of allies. Consequently, Tehran may not welcome any offer by Russia or China to station nuclear weapons on Iranian soil in a similar arrangement that America has long had with its western neighbor. (Of course, Beijing and Moscow are highly unlikely to make such an offer in the first place.)

For decades, it was speculated that Pakistan could potentially introduce additional nuclear weapons to the Middle East by deploying some of its bombs to aid Saudi Arabia under certain circumstances.

In September 2025, after Israel took the unprecedented step of targeting Hamas political leaders in an airstrike on neighboring Qatar, Riyadh entered into a defense pact with Islamabad. The move immediately raised questions about whether this technically put the Saudi kingdom under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella.

A Belfer Center analysis by Rabia Akhtar scrutinized this notion, pointing out that previous Pakistani defense pacts didn’t include nuclear guarantees and there was no reason to believe this one would be any different.

“Nothing in the stated pact magically converts Pakistan’s India-centric nuclear doctrine into a Middle East umbrella,” Akhtar wrote. “There is no evidence that Islamabad has now re-targeted its strategic forces on Iran or Israel on Riyadh’s behalf.”

The same month, a Royal United Services Institute analysis by Tim Willasey-Wilsey noted that Saudi Arabia had helped fund the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program. It was understood that Pakistan would provide the use of these weapons if Saudi Arabia were threatened.

“The details of the agreement were always opaque,” he wrote. “A brief insight came to the author in 2010 when he was informed that two nuclear-armed aircraft (probably Mirage IIIs at the time) with Pakistani air and ground crews would be placed at the disposal of the Saudis at moments of crisis.”

Willasey-Wilsey added that a November 2013 report by the BBC, which stated that “nuclear weapons made in Pakistan on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery,” also “broadly rings true.”

Pakistan’s present role in helping defuse the Iran crisis through hosting negotiations may partially stem from a desire to avoid such an unwelcome and potentially catastrophic outcome.

Unsurprisingly, there were recurring fears during the Cold War of nuclear weapons transfers to the Middle East.

In 1984, Syria’s then-defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, made some eye-raising comments to the German magazine Der Spiegel. If Israel ever deployed nuclear weapons in a conflict with Damascus, he claimed, “the Soviet Union has assured us that under such circumstances it will place atomic weapons at our disposal (that are) capable of responding to such a devastating blow.”

In October 1985, Tlass repeated this claim to Al-Ittihad newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, declaring that: “We in Syria have enough courage to press the button.” A Soviet official merely dismissed these claims as “sheer nonsense.”

Shortly after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the United States came to believe that the Soviet Union may have moved nuclear warheads into Egypt at the height of that war. In November of that year, The New York Times reported that Washington had suspicions that Moscow delivered weapons amidst hostilities and may have retained some there under its control.

Decades later, in 2016, declassified CIA papers revealed that the U.S. went into high DEFCON III alert during the war due to the intelligence indicating the Soviet ships were delivering nuclear weapons to Egypt.

Present fears that some country may transfer nuclear warheads to Iran may ultimately prove as overstated or unfounded as some of these historic ones. Either way, the fact that the possibility is even being raised underlines how precarious the present situation in the region, already infamous for its perennial volatility, has become.

And there may well be no apt historic precedent to indicate what happens next.