Iran’s nuclear program was started in the late 1950s with U.S. assistance. Under the deeply ironic “Atoms for Peace” program, the U.S. gave Iran nuclear research reactors, highly enriched uranium and technical assistance and training.

     However, in 2002, the program turned into an international crisis when an anti-regime, militant group revealed that Iran had nuclear facilities that could be used for a bomb.

George W. Bush administration’s primary means of avoiding a nuclear possibility with Iran was a punishing series of economic sanctions, which damaged Iran’s economy but did not do much to effectively slow the advancement of its nuclear program.

     After Bush, the Obama administration extended and deepened the sanctions, but also engaged in a full-court diplomatic outreach campaign aimed at trading sanctions relief for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. These efforts culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). — Otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. 

     The agreement gave Iran relief from the Bush-Obama sanctions, including relaxing the restrictions on its vital oil sector. In exchange, Iran agreed to an extremely tight set of limits on its nuclear activities.

However, one of the main concerns with Obama’s policy was that the administration’s sole concern was limiting Iran’s nuclear program, while — for lack of a better term — ignoring Iran’s other aggressive behaviors such as its support for terrorist groups and development of ballistic missiles. 

     Still, according to Vox.com, once Trump took over office he developed four methods to utilize when confronting Iran: First, working with allies to counter the destabilizing activity and support for terrorist groups in the region. Second, placing additional sanctions on the regime to block their financing of terror. Third, addressing the regime’s activity involving missiles and weapons that threaten its neighbors, global trade and freedom of navigation. Finally, denying the regime all paths to nuclear weapons.

     These policies would become known as the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, in which America uses aggressive economic and, if necessary, military resources to force Tehran to change in the way that the U.S. wants.

     According to The Atlantic, the term World War III has been an anxious fantasy for the three or more decades after the Cold War. It became a very specific term for a very specific kind of war: nuclear devastation. 

It is for this reason that the Cold War stayed cold. With nuclear capabilities powerful enough to level continents, unsheath nuclear winter and, perhaps permanently, poison the only planet we have, WWIII was by far unfavored by all parties involved. 

     With this viewpoint in mind — especially with the potential political and militaristic allies on both sides of the conflict — the repercussions of nuclear war have been brought to the attention of a whole new generation of young adults 18 and up (or turning 18 in the near future).

     Although receiving this hand-me-down blanket of fear is far from out of the blue, many people nationwide know nothing of the conflict apart from being of age to be able to fight overseas.

     The vast majority of Americans don’t actually realize how unlikely a draft, or even a full-scale war really is.

According to Vox, despite over 70 years of conflict between the U.S. and Iran, the most recent scramble started with President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May 2018.

     However, this did not pressure Iran in the way that the Trump administration had anticipated. There are no signs that Iran will cave to American pressure. Instead, Iran has responded with their own pressure campaign to try to force Trump to lift the sanctions. Thus includes bombing oil tankers in international waters and oil fields in Saudi Arabia, downing a U.S. military drone and attacking two U.S. military sites in Iraq.

     Background context in mind, the recent tension that sent the internet into a spiral of memes has stemmed almost entirely from Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani: an Iranian general who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force and is responsible for hundreds of American deaths in the region.

Extending back about a week before Soleimani’s death on Dec. 27, 2019, an Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq, Kata’ib Hezbollah, attacked a military base north of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing an American contractor and wounding several other U.S. citizens and Iraqis. 

     This was a significant escalation in the U.S.-Iran standoff, which so far had only seen damage done to ships, oil fields and military equipment — but not people. 

The American’s death crossed the Trump administration’s red line: any attacks on Americans would lead to a forceful U.S. response.

     Given a list of response options by the Pentagon, Trump chose to attack five sites controlled by Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria on Dec. 28, 2019, killing 25 militia members and wounding more than 50 others.

Two days later, Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that “we will take additional actions as necessary to ensure that we act in our own self-defense and we deter further bad behavior from militia groups or from Iran.”

Kata’ib Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran, Iran including Soleimani, didn’t listen. The group incited thousands — some throwing rocks and chanting, “Death to America!” — to swarm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve before the turn of the decade.

     By Jan. 2, Trump had decided it was time to send a message and chose the option to kill Soleimani. 

Since then, there have been a series of retaliatory offenses on Iran’s behalf.

Just a few hours after Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two U.S. military targets in Iraq, Flight 752 of Ukraine International Airlines, which was flying from Tehran to Kievyiv, Ukraine, crashed minutes after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all 176 people on board — half of whom were Iranian.

On Jan. 11, after initially claiming the plane crashed due to mechanical problems, the Iranian government finally admitted it shot down the airliner.

     While the killing of Soleimani and the recent direct and open hostilities between the two nations is a clear escalation from a shadow war into direct conflict, it is important to keep in mind that Congress has yet to formally declare war on Iran.

     Moreover, according to USA Today, the odds of a national draft being activated are astronomically slim, considering the last active draft took place nearly 50 years ago in 1972 for the Vietnam War. 

     In an interview with USA Today, Davis Winkie, a project archivist for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center and a serving officer in North Carolina's Army National Guard, reaffirms that “a draft is meant to be activated in an extreme emergency … even a full-scale war with Iran right now would probably not meet the necessary threshold to justify reactivating the draft … [A draft would be] militarily impractical and politically toxic.”

In addition, according to tThe New York Times, America’s military is currently an all-volunteer force, with a relatively comfortable size of about 1.2 million active-duty troops.