Zero Enrichment

What made the most dramatic military operation since the Iraq invasion feel, to its architects, not like a choice but like an inevitability?

In Zero Enrichment, veteran Middle East scholar James R. Caldwell dissects the February 2026 U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran with the analytical rigor of three decades of fieldwork and the urgency of a scholar writing while the smoke is still rising.

Caldwell traces the seventy-three-year road that led to Operation Epic Fury through revolution, hostage crisis, proxy warfare, nuclear negotiations, and the systematic dismantlement of the Axis of Resistance. He examines what 900 strikes in twelve hours actually destroyed (and what they may not have), who benefits from Iran's trillion-dollar reconstruction economy, how China's $400 billion strategic partnership was eliminated in an afternoon, and why the neoconservative policy infrastructure that planned this outcome for twenty-five years finally got what it wanted.

Zero Enrichment is not a book about whether the war was right or wrong. It is a book about why it happened: the oil, the dollar hegemony, the domestic politics, the ideology and what comes next for a region, and a world, that will live with the consequences for a generation.

Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the conflict that is reshaping the twenty-first century.