In sharing nuclear secrets with Iran, Putin may have crossed his own ‘red line’

Prime minister Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington to discuss the possibility of Ukraine using longer range Western missiles against Russia was a damp squib, but the US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s charge that Russia has been sharing nuclear technology with Iran has raised the spectre of revived nuclear brinksmanship between Washington and Moscow.

For Ukrainians, the bad news is that Iran is providing Russia with new missiles with which to bombard it. For the wider world, the real alarm is that Vladimir Putin seems willing to drop the Kremlin’s decades-old opposition to nuclear proliferation.

Even at the height of the East-West Cold War, the old Soviet Union did not share its nuclear weapons technology. While the US provided Britain with the Polaris system (and more recently Trident), then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused to share nuclear technology with China, causing Mao’s split with the Kremlin in the early 1960s.

Too many Western commentators glibly charge Putin with being an old cold warrior in his geopolitical behaviour. Not so. His predecessors in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, including the great leader himself, were ruthless but cautious.

As he has got older, Putin has become progressively more willing to raise the stakes so that he can leave behind a Russia secure from the Western-sponsored threats – as he sees them – to its territorial integrity and place in the world.

Aggression has generally been a young man’s characteristic. Alexander the Great or Napoleon embarked on careers of conquest almost 50 years younger than Putin.

Let’s leave it to psychiatrists to explain elderly aggressive risk taking, but as Putin approached 70, he dumped the caution instilled in him as a young KGB officer, going rogue. Invading Ukraine in February 2022 marked his clear break with the past.

It is true that in 2008 he sent the Russian army across the border into Georgia, but only after the Georgian army had attacked the pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia, and even then Putin stopped the war after five days when his forces had routed Georgia’s. He did not go for broke by occupying the whole country.

Even in 2014, when Russia’s “little green men” swarmed out of their bases in Crimea to seize that strategic peninsula, Putin again stopped short of all-out war against Ukraine.

Now in old age, he has abandoned the international norms that he upheld after entering the Kremlin in 1999.

Back then, Putin’s Russia cooperated with the West to impose sanctions on Iran for its non-transparent nuclear programme. Why would the Kremlin reverse that policy now? Putin’s Russia also voted for UN Security Council resolutions imposing the most severe sanctions ever on North Korea, which has since flagrantly staged underground nuclear tests and launched missiles capable of reaching across the USA. Yet recently, Putin has met and dealt with Kim Jong-un, importing North Korean munitions and missiles to fire against Ukraine.

As with Iran, now the suspicion is that Russia shares its advanced nuclear and missile guidance technology with pariahs like Pyongyang and Tehran as a payoff for conventional help.

Iran in particular could speed up dramatically any ambition it has to convert its steadily enriching uranium into a viable bomb with Russian technical aid.

An ironic continuity from the hated Shah’s regime, overthrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, is the mullahs’ adoption of his three-part approach to getting a viable nuclear weapon, and what the Ayatollahs’ regime might be doing now as pressure mounts on it from Washington and Israel.

In the late 1970s, the Shah authorised three separate projects: enrichment of uranium, missile development and thirdly – an often forgotten vital component in a workable nuclear weapon – detonation technology to trigger an explosion. In a crisis with a neighbour, the USSR or Iraq, he hoped to be able to quickly bring all three together.

The Shah fell, but decades later Ayatollah Khamenei may be about to drop his Islamic theological condemnation of nuclear weapons. But he’ll be aware that an underground bomb test by Iran would cause a small earthquake, alerting Israel in particular to the imminence of Iran gaining a viable nuclear weapon.

What Russia can offer Iran is tried-and-tested nuclear weapons knowledge to bypass a giveaway bomb test, and so equip Iran’s military with viable warheads for its vast missile arsenal.

Some in the West say that Nato has crossed several of Putin’s Ukrainian “red lines” without him hitting back directly, so there is no need to worry now. Maybe the Kremlin just cries wolf, but Russian spokespeople have said that their country’s response to Western aid to Ukraine could well be “asymmetrical”.

That’s to say that Moscow could cause pain to America and its allies well away from the front line in Ukraine.

Diverting American attention from the Ukraine to the Middle East would serve Putin’s goals against Ukraine well. Already Donald Trump and his vice-presidential partner, JD Vance, are accusing Joe Biden’s waning administration of ignoring threats to US interests away from Ukraine like Iran and its proxies against Israel, and of course China on the Pacific rim.

Old Soviet leaders feared that sharing their bomb with allies could let them loose to cause nuclear havoc which the Kremlin did not want. Now the question must be how far the septuagenarian leader of post-Communist Russia is prepared to go in raising the nuclear stakes by sharing technology with rogue regimes. Alarmingly, only Putin knows.