Brahma Chellaney’s recent essay in The Hill raises a legitimate and important concern. The United States applies nuclear non-proliferation norms with troubling inconsistency. On this narrow point, many scholars of arms control would agree. Yet the argument he constructs to make that case rests on a series of legal misreadings, strategic false equivalences, and selective historical omissions that ultimately undermine rather than strengthen the critique. A more rigorous examination of the Iran-Pakistan comparison reveals not a simple double standard but a genuinely complex policy landscape—one with real failures and real strategic logic in uneasy coexistence.
However, there are three contestable points, which are put in simple terms: Iran and Pakistan are not legally parallel cases, and the attempt to treat them as such is not rigorous analysis but the abandonment of it. The image of Iranian compliance that Chellaney has verified is a very biased one. And his version of the A.Q. Khan episode, the climax of his indictment, is, as it appears on the documentary record, inaccurate in material respects.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pakistan is not. If you remember only one fact from this response, let it be that one. It is not a technicality. It is not a procedural footnote. It is the entire foundation upon which the legal and moral architecture of nuclear non-proliferation is built, and Chellaney’s argument requires you to forget it.
Iran, under NPT Articles I, II, and III, gave binding, sovereign, voluntary commitments: never to possess nuclear weapons and to place its nuclear program under comprehensive IAEA protection. It then broke those promises. In September 2005, the IAEA Board of Governors made a formal declaration of Iranian non-compliance with its Safeguards Agreement. It was a declaration so grave that it led to referral to the United Nations Security Council, which reacted with Chapter VII resolutions imposing compulsory international sanctions.
The Fordow enrichment plant, located under a mountain near Qom, was not revealed by Iran as per its safeguard requirements. In 2009, American and British intelligence services exposed it, several years after it had been initially disclosed by a dissident organization in 2002. Iran had been hiding it over the years when it was under active treaty obligation to declare it.
Pakistan, which never signed the NPT, did not make any such commitments. It is in a categorically different legal stance. A call to consistency is not to treat a non-signatory in the same way as a party to a treaty in documented violation. It is a request that legal differences be erased in favor of a rhetorical analogy—which is exactly the sort of gesture that, were it to be conceded, would complete the liquidation of whatever is left of the normative power of the NPT.
Article IV of the NPT, the so-called inalienable right to peaceful enrichment, is also invoked by Chellaney to suggest that the demand of zero Iranian enrichment is more than what the international law demands. In this case, his reading is tendentious. Article IV begins with a clear conditional: “Nothing in this treaty shall be construed to have any bearing on the inalienable right of all the parties to the treaty. The operative clause is “Parties to the Treaty”—states in compliance with Articles I, II, and III. A state that has been discovered in formal non-compliance, has hidden facilities, and has enriched uranium to 84 percent purity, a level that has no conceivable civilian purpose, is not in the same league as Germany, Japan, or Brazil, which Chellaney casually uses as points of reference. The right is real. It is conditional as well. Chellaney quotes the former and leaves out the latter.
Chellaney appeals to the history of JCPOA compliance of Iran as a moral focal point, the picture of a law-abiding, cooperative state unfairly victimized by a whimsical Washington. The historical account is much more complex, and the readers of Chellaney have a right to be informed of that.
A confidence-building tool was the JCPOA, which was signed in 2015. It was not a clean bill of nuclear health. It was specifically designed to avoid the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) file of the IAEA, the dossier of plausible evidence that Iran had engaged in activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device until 2003 and, the agency estimated, perhaps beyond. The fact that Iran was adhering to the quantitative limits of the JCPOA implied that it was adhering to an agreement that had already put aside the most significant question: whether Iran had already developed, or tried to develop, a bomb. That is no exoneration. That is a negotiated silence.
Since April 2019, Iran has systematically lifted the limits of the JCPOA: enriching uranium to 60% and then 84%, much more than any civilian limit; installing banned numbers of advanced IR-6 centrifuges; and eliminating IAEA monitoring cameras on declared facilities. In 2022, IAEA Director-General Grossi claimed that his agency had been seriously compromised in its knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program.
Chellaney introduces the idea of American withdrawal of the JCPOA as an irrational punishment of a compliant state. A more holistic view reveals a state that exploited the sunset provisions of the agreement to maintain a latent breakout capability, never resolved its weaponization past, and then, when the strategic situation changed, quickly surpassed all the limits that the agreement had placed on it. Zero enrichment is a maximalist bargaining stance that can be criticized by reasonable analysts. However, it cannot be fairly judged without this context, and Chellaney fails to give it.
Here we come to the gravest difficulty with the essay of Chellaney, since here is where the distance between his argument and the documentary record is greatest. He describes the American response to the A.Q. Khan proliferation network as silent complicity—a humiliating lack of action that Washington sheepishly took. There are four counts upon which this characterization is erroneous.
First, the dismantling of the network was to a large extent the result of long-term American intelligence efforts. Since at least the mid-1990s, the CIA had been monitoring aspects of the Khan network. In October 2003, in cooperation with British intelligence, the United States intercepted the BBC China, a German-flagged ship carrying centrifuge parts produced to the specifications of the Khan network and bound for Libya. This was not mere observation. It was a proactive, working counterproliferation achievement that had been months ahead of the publicity of Khan, and it was the direct cause of Libya later deciding to give up its weapons programs altogether.
Second, Washington imposed tangible sanctions. In 1998 and once more in August 2003, prior to the public confession of Khan, the United States sanctioned Khan Research Laboratories, in particular, proliferation-related activities. These sanctions had actual expenses on the main nuclear plant in Pakistan. They are not mentioned in Chellaney’s account.
The A.Q. Khan network was the main channel by which Iran obtained the P-1 and P-2 centrifuge designs and parts that developed its enrichment program. It is the network that produced the Iranian capability Chellaney is simultaneously invoking as a legitimate nuclear right that has produced the network that indicts American passivity. The argument cannot be run in both directions simultaneously.
Third, and most importantly, the Bush administration demanded direct investigative access to Khan and was denied. Any such demand was seen as an infringement of Pakistani sovereignty over a national hero by the government of Musharraf. The result, a pardon administered by a Pakistani, was not what Washington wanted. It was the non-negotiable red line of Islamabad, which was issued at a time when the administration had estimated that destabilizing a nuclear-armed state in the middle of active combat operations in Afghanistan had existential risks that were more than investigative access. It can be said that this calculus was incorrect. That is a valid argument. However, to describe it as silent compliance is not the right way to describe what happened, as though Washington merely shrugged and accepted impunity without a fight or complaint.
Fourth, and here Chellaney is most conspicuously silent—Iran was a beneficiary of the proliferation services of the Khan network. Even the centrifuge designs that are at the heart of the Iranian enrichment program were made possible by Khan. This implies that the proliferation failure that Chellaney uses as an example of American hypocrisy towards Pakistan is also the process that provided Iran with its weapons-capable enrichment infrastructure. These facts cannot be surgically divided to be used in two arguments in the same essay. The evidence does not allow it.
Chellaney dismisses the argument that Iran and Pakistan represent different kinds of nuclear risk as geopolitical rationalization in the guise of strategy. It is not. The difference is analytically clear.
The nuclear threat of Pakistan is a state-weakness threat: the risk that internal disintegration, civil-military disintegration, or subversion of command-and-control systems by non-state actors would undermine an arsenal that, structurally, is in a bilateral deterrence relationship with India—a relationship that has, despite its horrifying nearness to warfare, lasted more than 20 years. It is a danger that requires vigilance, involvement, and exactly the type of embedded security collaboration that an adversarial relationship precludes.
The nuclear threat of Iran is a force-projection risk of a different nature. The Islamic Republic has not only tolerated proxies. It has built a transnational military system—the IRGC Quds Force—that has killed American military personnel directly in Iraq and Syria, equipped the Houthi movement with ballistic and cruise missiles to attack commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure, and maintained Hezbollah as a strategic deterrent to a close American ally. Its top management has openly and severely demanded the destruction of Israel. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by a state with such an operational architecture and with these stated objectives does not simply pose a threat to the stability of the region. It jeopardizes the whole logic of deterrence on which the Middle Eastern order is based.
“To flatten this distinction in the name of formal symmetry is not analytical courage. It is analytical abdication—and in a domain where miscalculation can be irreversible, it is a dangerous one.”
The real lesson of the Iran-Pakistan divergence is not that the two cases should be equalized downward—that because Pakistan’s violations went insufficiently punished, Iran’s should be treated more leniently. That logic, applied consistently, would unravel every remaining constraint in the international nuclear order. The correct lesson is the opposite: that treaty obligations must be enforced with the seriousness they warrant; that strategic partnerships must carry explicit and enforceable non-proliferation conditionalities; and that the failure to hold Pakistan fully accountable for the Khan network was a real institutional failure that demands reform—not a precedent to be extended.
The international non-proliferation regime is imperfect, inconsistently applied, and under serious strain. Chellaney is right about all of that. But the answer to an imperfectly applied legal framework is not to dissolve the legal distinctions that make it function. It is to apply them better. The NPT’s authority rests on the premise that treaty commitments mean something—that the state that accepts binding obligations and then violates them faces different consequences than the state that declined to accept them at all. Abandon that premise in the name of formal symmetry, and you do not get a more consistent non-proliferation order. You get no order at all.
That is not a conclusion any serious analyst of nuclear security should be comfortable reaching, regardless of how rhetorically satisfying the road to it might appear.
