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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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There are conflicting reports on if Iran was starting to concede it's nuclear stance during negotiations last week.

On the one hand, Oman said Iran was going to reduce it's stockpile.

“The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb,” said Albusaidi, describing the understanding as “something completely new” compared to the previous nuclear deal negotiated under former US President Barack Obama.

He said the negotiations have produced an agreement on “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification” by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calling it a breakthrough that makes the enrichment argument “less relevant.”

On existing stockpiles inside Iran, Albusaidi said that “there is agreement now that this will be down-blended to the lowest-level possible … and converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible.”

“I think we have agreement on that, in my view,” he added.

Wall Street Journal says the opposite though. Laurence Norman, WSJ reporter in Germany, says, "My understanding comes from non-U.S. officials close to the talks as well as what Washington has said. This is what we have from 3 people."

Iran came to Geneva on Thursday with a draft text of a few pages as it had been asked. It did not permit the U.S. or others to keep the text. It was planning to do so Monday at the technical talks. But they talked through what was in it. But the draft text was not the key text

Attached to the text was a single piece of paper, which Iran described as its 10 year nuclear plan. The text was based around the idea that as Iran's enrichment needs expanded, it's enrichment should be permitted to expand. The paper set out an ambitious set of targets or expanding its civilian nuclear program. The new version of the Khondab reactor (formerly known as Arak heavy water reactor) would be completed. A number of other long-planned, never-built research and power reactors would be put into operation.

In order to fuel those supplies, Iran would need to run 30 cascades of IR-6 advanced centrifuges Tehran said. That's more than 5,000 advanced centrifuges. Iran would need to be able to enrich up to 20% to meet the demands. That is what Iran was proposing.

Let's compare that for a moment to JCPOA. For the first decade under that accord, Iran was permitted around 6.000 IR-1 basic centrifuges. For 15 years, its enrichment purity cap was 3.67%. In other words, Iran was saying the enrichment deal shld be weaker than the Iran deal.

Overall, I don't think we can take it for granted that Iran was capitulating during talks.

Is there any way for Iran to credibly promise not to get a nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future?

It strikes me that with each Israeli-USA attack on Iran, it becomes more obvious to any Iranian that a nuclear weapon might be a useful thing to have. The bombings might set back the physical process, but they increase the motivation.

If a bunch of guys come to my house several times and kick in my door and beat me up and break my furniture and tell me "you better not get a gun, if you get a gun we'll get really angry!" My first thought, and I would think any man's first thought, is "I better get a gun."

I just can't see a way for Iran to credibly make a promise that they don't want a nuclear weapon in a world where they quite obviously should want a nuclear weapon.

Is there any way for Iran to credibly promise not to get a nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future?

Lots of countries make their facilities open to IAEA inspectors. South Africa was declared to have fully dismantled its nuclear stockpile upon inspections. The USSR and USA inspected each others' facilities as part of arms reductions treaties. Etc.

South Africa was a strange, strange case. The collapse of apartheid meant that the former government was suddenly very motivated to remove its nuclear capabilities. Not sure those circumstances are present in Iran. Good video about it here.

That said, I agree that nuclear (or WMD) inspection is at least theoretically possible. The industrial capacity isn’t as dual-purpose as something like a chemical plant, right?

That said, I agree that nuclear (or WMD) inspection is at least theoretically possible.

I always wondered about that in the case of highly industrialized nations (or nations aided by one of those). How hard would it be to secretly build a large centrifuge stack and then obtain either a lot of ore or a bit of high assay low-enriched fuel (basically 20% U-235)? With tight integration, you could spin that into a bomb in a week.

Are the fourteen eyes really that good? Will their spies notice and report inconsistencies in, I don't know, centrifuge bearing part inventory and then locate where exactly those ended up in time? If you keep pouring state grants into small modular reactor startups (there's over 100 of those today) and two dozen of those companies end up needing 20% enriched fuel right around the same time, and all those fuel shipments get confused at the post office and they end up getting U-238 pellets by accident... will the fourteen eyes see?

The classic nuclear threshold states are pretty clear, I guess. If Japan or South Korea want the bomb, the time window to stop them will be tight. Still, I'd be curious if all their centrifuges are accounted for (and if there's bunker busters on the shelf that already have those coordinates pre-programmed). But could Australia or Canada cook the books at their mines and start a little stockpile on the side? Could Germany repurpose all that fuel just sitting in those mothballed reactors on the down low?

Fine post, but tangentially you have me wondering how many feds have discovered this place due to keyword flagging and stayed to lurk our conversations out of personal interest.

We have several actual intel operatives posting here, do you think that we’re not being monitored to begin with? Dean and Ashlael probably can’t post to a My Little Pony forum without everything being analyzed by palantir.

This is a common theme among all forum users. I've been on plenty of tiny forums where a relatively obscure topic is discussed in an effortpost and then it appears on the world stage some time later.

I don't necessarily think its being collected or monitored, but it could be a case of multiple discovery.

That being said, I have seen some strangely professional counterposts on here and other forums by obscure lurkers trying to downplay certain lines of thinking against strong logical arguments, so who knows.

Related: a few (former?) forum regulars have gone on to national-level profiles via Substack or Twitter.

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