The Nuclear Precipice

Two wars. One country. The same lesson, ignored twice-and now the whole world is watching the dominoes.

In the summer of 2025 and again in the spring of 2026, Israel and the United States struck Iran's nuclear sites, declared the threat "obliterated," and then discovered the one thing bombs could not reach: roughly 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU)-enough for some ten weapons-and the knowledge of how to use it. When the guns fell silent, Iran had not been disarmed. It had quietly become, in the judgment of leading technical analysts, the second undeclared nuclear-weapon state in the Middle East.

The Nuclear Precipice: Case Study Iran uses that hard fact as a window onto the most dangerous nuclear moment in history. Drawing on the physics of uranium enrichment, contemporary intelligence assessments, and the work of MIT physicist Theodore Postol, Dr. Jensine Andresen shows why a cascade capable of enriching a bomb's worth of fuel can fit in the floor space of a studio apartment and run on the power of a single hybrid car-and why, therefore, no bombing campaign could ever have worked.

But this is not only a book about Iran. Iran is the anchor for a global argument about a system coming apart at the seams: the expiration of New START, open talk of resuming nuclear testing, the collapse of the 2026 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, China's surging arsenal, a record $119 billion in annual nuclear-weapons spending, and a Doomsday Clock standing at eighty-five seconds to midnight.

At its center is the danger that gives the book its title: the nuclear domino. If Iran is permitted to keep the bomb, who is next? Saudi Arabia has all but promised to follow. Turkey and Egypt would feel compelled in turn. South Korea and Japan wait in the wings as the American security umbrella frays. Andresen maps the cascade piece by piece-and confronts the scholars who call the domino a myth, explaining why this time may be different.

Along the way, the book asks the uncomfortable question almost no one will: who profits, and who is conflicted? It follows the money into a world of captured capital, defense-industry lobbying, and the Gulf financiers whose fortunes are now fused with America's AI economy-and examines, with care, how a single figure can sit at once at the financial knot binding the Gulf to Washington and at the diplomatic knot of rapprochement with Tehran. When the dealmakers are also the diplomats, can any nation's nuclear policy be read as a clean calculation of the national interest?

Andresen does not flinch from hard recommendations-including a sober, qualified case for the one use of force aimed at the right target-but her ultimate argument is moral and unflinchingly clear: deterrence, arms control, preventive war, and even a contemplated commando raid have all been tried and have all failed. What remains untried is restraint. Drawing on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the historical precedent of unilateral cuts that worked, she makes the case that the only durable path away from the edge is to begin, deliberately, to dismantle these weapons and to eliminate the material from which they are made.

Rigorous, current, and morally urgent, The Nuclear Precipice is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how close we now stand to the edge-and how we might step back.

Praise for the argument: A bracing, deeply researched account of the Iran wars and what they reveal about a nonproliferation order in freefall-and a clarion call for a different path.