9 September 2025

The North Korean Way of Proliferation

Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi

In the months since Israel and the United States’ 12-day war with Iran in June, analysts and intelligence agencies have widely debated the extent of the damage to the Iranian nuclear program and regime. It is still unclear how much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has survived and how quickly, if at all, it can be reconstituted. On a strategic level, however, the effect of the war is indisputable: it marks the eclipse of a nuclear strategy that the Islamic Republic had pursued, often successfully, since the 1980s.

For decades, Iran was the quintessential nuclear hedger. It sought the

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