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Some others have hit on this but it's worth emphasizing - it's very possible the plan was to get nukes and then start bombing SA/Israel/Europe and/or closing Hormuz with a nuclear backstop.
Iran is not a rational actor. It is not North Korea. NK just wants to be left alone and engage in enough international crime to stay solvent. Iran has serious regional and religious goals it is willing to pursue at absurd cost.
It can't be allowed to have the bomb.
Iran has behaved consistently rationally throughout the whole affair. Non-US-aligned regimes seeking to acquire a nuclear deterrent if possible is survival 101 since Libya, and arguably since Iraq.
The only players in this conflict who, as a matter of sincere religious conviction, base their foreign policy on a desire to accelerate the fulfilment of their religion's end-time prophecies, are the Christian Zionists in the US.
Iran has not behaved consistently rationally. Random firing at nearby civilian targets is rational in the sense that it could be part of their strategic posture and pure evil, but some of the attacks (like on Azerbaijan and Diego Garcia) are clearly unfocused nonsense with negative benefit.
At absolute best they are irrational in the sense that degradation of their command and control has impaired their ability to coherently follow their war plan.
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This is just noble savage nonsense, like everyone else who takes a stand against Christianity while blithely ignoring the egregiously worse comparisons from Islam. Are you really contending that religion has no influence on the behavior of a explicitly religious fundamentalist totalitarian government?
No - I am making a specific claim about an unusual aspect of American evangelical theology, which is that some US evangelicals think there is useful advice about present-day geopolitics to be found in Biblical end-times prophecies. ISIS apparently thought the same, but most religious fundamentalists don't, including Al-Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs.
The more normal religious fundamentalist approach to geopolitics is to think that if you get the country right with God you will be rewarded with worldly power. This is fundamental to both Saudi Salafism and Pakistani Deobandism, and appears to be how the Iranian mullahs think as well - I have never researched Shia theology so I can't comment in detail. It is also the more common stream of American evangelical thinking - the "let's immanentise the escheaton with an aggressive war in the Middle East" crowd are a minority.
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