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Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.
Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.
It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.
The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.
Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.
Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.
So, in conclusion:
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
The current Supreme Ayatollah declared a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons
Now, obviously, the degree of adherence to this is obviously not strict (why else have such facilities capable of it?) but the Islamic clerics may not know to what precise degree their nuclear program is progressing, or have the technical know-how to really understand it. So it's hard to say if Iran 'knows' anything, or to ascribe rational-actor motives to them, if only because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. How much information is the IRGC relaying to the clerics that supposedly rule the country?
I suppose only the Mossad really knows what is actually happening.
Look, I have more of a theory of mind for highly clerical religious prohibitions- there’s disassembled bombs held by the IRGC. Maybe ‘disassembled’ is the wrong word- it’s something that’s technically more of a lump of HEU but can become a bomb in about an hour, with a technician-not-engineer level of expertise.
Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.
No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.
In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?
Hamas's actions were causal for Hezbollah's decision to open the northern front artillery campaign after Oct 7, which in turn led to foursignificant strategic setbacks for Iran that made their recent performance in the 12 day war possible.
First, it drove and culminated in the bushwhacking of Hezbollah's leadership via the pager and other campaigns, neutering Iran's premier proxy-ally-extension in the region. Hezbollah is a direct partner of Iran's IRGC, which is Iran's primary power-projection force, and this lost an ally whose reason for existing (from the Iranian backing perspective) is to help out in the kind of conflict that they just did not.
Second, because Hezbollah (and non-trivial amounts of its Syria-based infrastructure) were whacked by Israel, Iran lacked a proxy militia to stabilize Assad in Syria, allowing the momentum building that saw Iran's primary state-ally/client/main supply route into Lebanon cut while Iraqi-based militia groups were trying to drive over the desert. The loss of Syria was a loss of not just an ally, but a decade of significant investments in trying to establish and protect that interest.
Third, because Assad fell, the Syrian air corridor between Israel and Iran opened up. Israel was able to access previously denied airspace with vulnerable but capability-extending aircraft (like tankers and slower drones) that enabled the air war over Iran that led to Iran losing control of its own airspace. Israel would not have been able to generate as many air sorties over Iran as it did were Asad still in power.
Fourth, because the anti-Hezbollah campaign was being coordinated from an annex of the Iranian embassy in Syria, when Israel struck that in response, the Iranian response-response was the missile campaign between Israel and Iran. Not only did this deplete a considerable share of Iran's missile force, it also led to the Israel strikes on the Iranian air defense systems that also contributed to Iran's recent not-so-great showing.
As for Hamas's incompetence, that depends whose theory you want to subscribe to. Allegedly, Sinwar (the departed head of Hamas in Gaza who led the Oct 7 attack) was planning on reaching the West Bank and sparking a general uprising / Intifada. This not only did not happen, but the West Bank was so uninvolved that Hamas' only 'direct' allies in the conflict they wanted to make into a race war were... Hezbollah (who paid a high price) and the Houthis (who blockaded most of the Arab states from benefiting from of the primary Arab ethno-nationalist interests, the Suez Canal).
In so much that Sinwar's Plan B for the conflict was to have Gaza be pummeled in hopes the world would take the Palestinian's side, he certainly got Gaza pummeled, and the actual benefits for the Palestinians are sure to manifest any
dayweekmonthyear now.A common thread I saw on the gazanow telegram channel (now deleted) was that Hamas was uploading their livestream of civilian massacres not for goreporn likes, but to prove the IDF was a hollow shell without the USA and that the entire rotten edifice was kicked open so the rest of the arab world, especially West Bank but Hezbollah and Syria too, could roll in to clean out the yahudi with no effort. I still don't know if this was a particularly inspired attempt to justify the gleeful livestreamed executions and rape aftermaths as serving some strategic reason, or if it was a sincerely held belief that Israel was nothing without the USA and Hamas had struck the singular crippling blow, or y'know, both.
The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.
Maybe trading bodies for international sympathy could work as a viable end state wild card, but previous trends don't really bear it out. The intifadas didn't result in a materially improved ground condition for the Palestinians and for all the hatred Israel gets it still has a growing population and economy. If that is losing for Israel, I'm sure Israel will collapse immediately like most of the world wishes it would.
'The entire rotten edifice will go down with one good kick' ranks up there with 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight' in my personal list of 'big indicators of really bad strategy.' There are historical examples of it happening, and you can even identify trends that make it more likely to happen, but strategies that bet on it happening, as opposed to factor in the possiblity, tend to be poor strategies.
This presupposes that they didn't have as much of a greenlight as could be expected, with the patron parties distancing themselves from Hamas's decision after it became clear it wasn't going to spark the regional bonfire. Which, from my memory of those first few weeks, was pretty apparent in the first day(s). Hezbollah in particular had a pretty big anticlimatic drawdown in which they spun up the media organs like they were going to directly enter the conflict, demurred, and then 'quietly' began the artillery campaign after a bit later.
Though to be fair to past considerations, I am on record as believing that Iran has kind of lost the plot on managing its proxy warfare strategy. The curse of the deep state / cult of the offense strikes again, conflating strategic means with strategic ends and over-leveraging a strategic asset (the proxy network) beyond diminishing returns and into outright counter-productive tendencies.
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