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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.
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