Nuclear hypocrisy: Allies shielded, adversaries demonised

US President Donald Trump’s vacillation over negotiations with Iran—setting harsh conditions and insisting Tehran must never be permitted to pursue nuclear development—necessitates revisiting bitter truths. The nuclear age was born in secrecy, theft and coercion. Paradoxically, the nations that pioneered nuclear weapons through clandestine means—the United States and Israel—are treated as legitimate custodians of atomic power, while Iran, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that has repeatedly declared its opposition to nuclear arms, is vilified for pursuing peaceful nuclear technology. This contradiction exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of global nuclear politics. The United States’ nuclear program was not a purely domestic achievement. At the close of World War II, Washington launched Operation Paperclip, forcibly relocating German scientists—many of them former Nazi engineers—into American laboratories. These scientists, including Wernher von Braun, advanced missile and nuclear technologies. Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” had deep academic ties to Germany, studying at Göttingen under Max Born and collaborating with Werner Heisenberg. German physics shaped his leadership of the Manhattan Project. Built on espionage and appropriated European research, the project culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Over 200,000 civilians perished, inaugurating an era where nuclear weapons were justified as instruments of deterrence despite their catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Israel’s nuclear program followed a similar clandestine trajectory. Determined to acquire nuclear weapons, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, secured covert French assistance to construct the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert. By the mid‑1960s, Israel had the capacity to produce weapons‑grade plutonium. Israeli intelligence agency LEKEM scoured the globe for nuclear materials, while Mossad orchestrated covert