In the ongoing US attacks on Iran, nuclear weapons are serving a familiar purpose: as pretext for military action that has already been decided on. On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the attacks as an effort to limit damage from an Israeli attack that had already been decided on, and to head off a situation where Iran had “so many conventional missiles, so many drones, and can inflict so much damage, that no one can do anything about their nuclear program.”

It’s become even less clear in intervening days what role Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — the country does not have nuclear weapons, but it does have the ability to develop them — currently plays in the administration’s strategic thinking. Some recent reporting suggests that Trump is considering sending US forces into the country to remove nuclear materials, but there are other indications that directly ending the country’s nuclear program is not on the table.

This is not to say that the US and Israeli attacks on Iran have nothing to do with the politics of nuclear weapons. The status quo for nuclear weapons is in fact getting much worse, even since the attacks began: on March 2, in a speech at the Île Longue submarine base in Brittany, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that the country would be expanding its nuclear arsenal, which currently consists of about three hundred nuclear weapons. That same day, France and Germany announced that they would be collaborating more closely on military and security policy involving France’s nuclear weapons. “The next fifty years will be an era of nuclear weapons,” in the words of the French president.