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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?
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.
I mean, the US did try to pressure Pakistan away from having a nuke through the Pressler sanctions, the Glenn framework, and by getting the UNSC to condemn the practices. But Pakistan had the benefit of bordering Afghanistan which the US had an interest in 1) for defeating the Soviets during the 80s, and 2) for the GWOT after 9-11. Most of the sanction efforts came in the 90s when neither of those were relevant, but they stopped like 2 weeks after 9-11. And America was AFAICT the only state that made a major effort to stop Pakistan + India from getting nukes, so when it stopped bothering the effort withered.
Fairly confident. Not 100% mind you, but US intelligence penetration of Iran goes deep enough that it could assassinate the (justifiably) paranoid Ayatollah the minute he poked his head out. I'm not sure whether the US knew of Iran's longer-range missiles before they were fired, but keep in mind that Iran has already done the hard parts of making a bomb. Getting the fissile material in the first place is by far the hardest part, and the next hardest part is building a delivery device which Iran has plenty of experience in given its conventional ballistics program. It strains credulity to think Iran could do the hard parts of making the bomb, but then simply couldn't do the easier parts after years of the JCPOA being dead. This is why I buy the declassified US intelligence that the main bottleneck is Iran's decision not to go for the bomb rather than some technical bottleneck being the key driver.
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