The United States withdrew in 2018 from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Since then, Iran has taken steps that will allow it to build one or more nuclear weapons, should it choose to do so. Such a decision could lead to a series of potentially dangerous consequences, including further nuclear proliferation in the Gulf region and the potential for a wider regional war. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, in the meantime, have already begun to react to what they see as an inevitable outcome – a nuclear-capable Iran – and are reorganising their economic, military and diplomatic relations accordingly. The Gulf preference now is a coordinated policy of deterrence, containment and engagement. This opens the door for possible engagement from other states, such as the United Kingdom, to encourage further convergence among the GCC states on threat perceptions and policies to deal with Iran moving forward.This report explores the options and tools available to the United Kingdom to mitigate the threats posed by an unconstrained Iranian nuclear programme in conjunction with its regional partners, especially the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).1 The United States’ and Israel’s options for addressing Iran’s nuclear programme have been analysed in depth elsewhere, and the IISS has a separate project to examine options regarding Iran’s development of increasingly long-range, high-precision, nuclear-capable missiles. In contrast, the perspectives of the regional states and the opportunities and challenges presented by their policy preferences remain largely absent from the discussion. The report addresses this gap by focusing on the perceptions and policy preferences of the GCC states and the policy options available to the UK. IISS analysts investigated the differences between the regional partners’ respective preferences through interviews and workshops with government officials and experts in defence, foreign policy, non-proliferation and international relations from across the six GCC states, and by examining recent developments in diplomacy, military acquisitions, the growth of economic ties and the implementation of sanctions. The report maps the collected threat perceptions and policy preferences of the GCC states and identifies policy tools and likely regional reactions, given the GCC states’ emerging preferences and the regional security situation.
The following analysis is premised on the assumption that international efforts to reach a negotiated agreement to restore the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran to limit its nuclear programme will fail, and that subsequently Iran is likely to further reduce its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the verification of its safeguards obligations. The trajectory of Iran’s nuclear programme, the current status of negotiations and the changes to the political context over the past year suggest that these assumptions are warranted, albeit with a high degree of caution.
Since 2019, Iran has taken a number of steps that exceed the limits at the core of the 2015 JCPOA and violate its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement and (still unratified) Additional Protocol with the IAEA. These steps began in response to the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 and have accelerated over the past year. Iran has also refused to resolve issues raised by the IAEA regarding its past covert nuclear activities, while attempting to subsume them within unrelated safeguards questions. These unresolved issues include the IAEA’s discovery in 2019 of uranium particles at three previously undeclared facilities (Turquzabad, Varamin, and Marivan),2 Iran’s operation of a growing number of advanced centrifuges far outstripping the JCPOA limits,3 its stockpiling of everlarger quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU), and the subsequent discovery of particles of HEU with enrichment levels of up to 83.7% U235.4 Iran’s failure to answer its questions led the IAEA to conclude that it ‘is not in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful’.5 Iran’s actions have also significantly shortened the time it would take it to build a nuclear device if it took the decision to do so. In this context, Iran’s formal withdrawal from its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is not unthinkable. Significantly, in 2020, it threatened to withdraw from the NPT if its file were referred to the UN Security Council.6 Iran therefore appears to be edging closer to a nuclear breakout capability in parallel with its departure from its international obligations on limiting its nuclear programme, all of which raises the risk of conflict and regional instability, including the possibility that Israel – with possible support from the US – may decide to intervene militarily to delay Iran’s progress.
This report assumes that it is not yet inevitable that Iran will begin manufacturing, testing and deploying nuclear warheads; it posits instead that it would be desirable for Iran and the West to find a stability point short of full weaponisation as part of a strategy of nuclear ‘latency’ or ‘hedging’, if the correct inducements can be put in place. The report therefore posits the steps that the UK can take, in coordination with like-minded states in the GCC, to forestall Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, using a mixture of military and non-military instruments of power as part of a strategy combining deterrence, containment and engagement.
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