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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.
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.
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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