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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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The JCPOA put Iran in this same position, just with more money and less bombed out bases. Likely if it was in effect the last 10 years there'd already have been a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv.

The whole point of the JCPOA was to prevent Iran from getting a nuke, which it would have done quite effectively.

Likely if it was in effect the last 10 years there'd already have been a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv.

This is just pure fantasy.

The whole point of the JCPOA was to lift sanctions on Iran so it could be a rival to Israel and Europeans could buy more oil from them. The nuclear program restrictions were a thin veneer erected on top of that framework with no enforcement options (nor did any party have any interest in enforcement as we have seen subsequently).

The point of the JCPOA was to entice Iran away from getting a nuke, in return for sanctions relief. Calling the nuke program restrictions a "thin veneer" isn't accurate -- it was the central point! The deal included quite invasive monitoring and the snapback enforcement.

Then why didn't France, the UK, etc enforce those snapback provisions at any point?

The snapback was supposed to be a threat preventing Iran from breaching the treaty unilaterally, but Trump had the US crash out of the treaty first. After that the Europeans tried to keep Iran in the deal by themselves without Iran, but eventually it became clear that Iran and the US would never come back to the deal, and they actually did initiate the snapback provisions.

They were apparently completely ineffective, again bolstering all critics of the deal

It's not fair to conclude that the JCPOA wouldn't have worked since most of its provisions were set up to prevent an Iranian breach of the deal, while in reality it was America unilaterally exiting that killed it. This was explicitly brought up when the US tried to trigger the snapback.

Another document illustrating Europe and the "international community's" inability to deal with Iran in any serious matter.

I suppose you might think JCPOA was failed by Trump and not flawed from the beginning, I vociferously disagree and think it was a failure the day it was entered into and would have done nothing to prevent Iranian arming of terrorists or progress to the bomb. I think the European response to Iranian piracy on the high seas proves me wholly correct in my assumptions as to why they entered into the deal, it was not to restrain Iran, but to profit with Iran and to restrain the US. This makes further sense because, restraining America is and was a goal of the American Democrats, and particularly the Obama administration. And even further because the Obama admin severely disliked Israel and wanted them to have less power in the region.

Is there a JCPOA-like agreement that actually could be taken seriously? Yes. Its not one the Ayatollah would ever have accepted, because steps 1-5 would be France an the UK doing the following: 1) Seizing all their Uranium; 2) Seizing all their Uranium manufacturing equipment; 3) Seizing all their ICBMs and Drones etc; 4) Setting up DMZs on Iran's borders with Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, & Armenia; and 5) Engage in a joint taskforce in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah.

Then step 6 would be doing all the things the JCPOA actually did, like lifting sanctions, imposing an inspection regime, giving back seized assets could happen after something like 5 years of compliance. Etc.

But the lifting of sanctions and empowering Iran financially was the true purpose of JCPOA, and we know that because it was the first thing that actually happened, AND we further know this because France and England and Germany are not currently bombing Iran for engaging in piracy against their vessels and vessels destined for their ports.

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That theory has them getting a viable nuke sometime between June of last year and the present. I don't think you, or anyone, can predict the timeline with that degree of certainty.

Oh no, it would have been way before that.

Then why didn't it happen? Iran's nuclear program was effectively unrestricted for nearly 8 years.

Are you forgetting the re-imposed economic sanctions and multiple operations to destroy or sabotage the nuclear program? There have been multiple killings of scientists and generals over the years. They were obviously close to breakout at the end of the Biden admin with his relaxing of sanctions. If that had been 9 years instead of 4 of pumping money into Iran, they'd obviously have had them during Biden Admin.

No but that relies on the fallacy that sanctions are an effective tool for preventing a country from getting a nuke. Pakistan wasn't under sanctions, but they got nukes in 1998 despite having an economy of approximately the same size as Iran's, and much worse per capita. North Korea got nukes despite being under US sanctions for years and being one of the poorest countries in the world. I don't see what killing generals has to do with their nuclear program. The "scientists" you're referring to are literally one guy. And he was killed by the Israelis, who weren't party to the agreement.

To expand upon the sanctions point: they are useful in dissuading countries from attempting to obtain nukes since they do cause economic damage. If a country, for whatever reason, is dead set on getting a nuke then the sanctions would not stop them or meaningfully slow them down.

All that being said, this war seems to make it clear that the JCPOA was probably the best deal the US could've gotten without being willing to use more force than any US government could politically muster. It seems to get a better deal involves the US being willing to use more force than it's actually willing to.

Yes I agree that ultimately nothing short of continued and ongoing bombing would have prevented or could prevent Iran from getting nukes. My point is JCPOA makes that much harder as Iran would have been much richer letting it have more and better military equipment and more money to invest in the nuclear program.

Iran had plenty of enriched uranium that it could have proceeded to build a bomb with at any time. The reason it didn't do so was because of the political calculation they made that having a bomb wasn't worth the costs. At best, US + Israeli attacks could lengthen the breakout time (the time from making a decision to go for a bomb to actually possessing one) from a few weeks to a few months/years, but they were never going to destroy or permanently disable Iran's ability to get a bomb.

The only cost to an autocracy getting nuclear warheads is that, if you don't stay personally in charge of them, your successors can be as tyrannical as they want and nobody will come save you from them. This is more than counterbalanced by the benefit that, if you do stay in charge of them, nobody will come try to "save" anyone from you. North Korea won't be getting the Venezuela or Iran treatments any time soon.

Getting highly-enriched uranium without continuing on to turn them into warheads, on the other hand, just pisses everybody off without giving you any leverage, and the next thing you know your successors are in charge anyway. Even if you have a weaker bomb program and give it up before the airstrikes escalate, moving far enough in that direction may already have crossed the "sodomized to death by a bayonet eight years later while the world chuckles" point of no return. This is just not a place where you stop your nuke program because your political calculations are going well; it's a place where you stop because your engineering calculations aren't going well enough. A successful test explosion is a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card; a test fizzle is a "Kill Me Now Before It's Too Late" request.

You're right that nuclear weapons massively deter outside intervention, but you're incorrect that the only cost in getting them is "successors can be as tyrannical as they want and nobody will come save you from them". If that was the case then basically every state would have an incentive to grab them ASAP as a get out of jail free card from outside powers. Because of this incentive, the international community (but really dominated by the great powers that already have nukes) have established sanctions, the NPT, and a bunch of informal pressure to ensure this doesn't happen to the extent possible. North Korea was already a hermit state so it didn't care. This is why Israel's official nuclear policy is one of ambiguity. Iran also didn't want to take on the diplomatic consequences, so the Ayatollah hoped the middle ground would be the sweet spot -- enough for implicit deterrence and to act as a potential bargaining chip, but not enough to become a permanent pariah like North Korea. He was just wrong about this.

Enough intel is public that we know Iran had a bunch of nearly bomb grade enriched uranium, but that they just stopped at that point and made no further effort to weaponize.

a bunch of informal pressure to ensure this doesn't happen to the extent possible

This is a good point. The trouble is that world leaders act like they're big Causal Decision Theory fans, and once a state has nukes it's hard to go back in time to make that not have happened, so whatcha gonna do? We try to keep ICBM tech from leaking to Pakistan, but we hardly turned them or India into pariah states for having the warheads. Maybe Iran would get worse treatment because they signed on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would be violating it whereas non-signatories weren't?

Enough intel is public that we know Iran had a bunch of nearly bomb grade enriched uranium, but that they just stopped at that point and made no further effort to weaponize.

Ignorant question: how confident are we of that? It looks like Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia, at more than double the range of anything we publicly knew they had (and if we knew privately that they were violating ICBM restrictions, that would have been a great cassus belli to bring up to Europeans uninterested in joining this war, so I'm betting we didn't), in which case they've at least been managing to keep some aspects of their weapons development programs secret.

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