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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Cute.

Let me ask this a different way: if it were possible to have built a deliverable nuclear weapon within 6 months, why don't they already have one? They were off the JCPOA since Trump's first term. Or, hell, if we're to accept the Republican narrative, they were building a nuclear program the entire time they were on it. It's been 134 months since the JCPOA was signed, and 100 months since Trump backed out. You can pick either as the start date from when the Iranians began earnestly trying to build a nuke. You'll notice both are much longer than 6 months. Where are the nukes?

Or, would you argue that actually this is a process that takes years? That maybe it's a long research and development cycle, but Iran was finally getting near the end of it, and only timely action now (February) was enough to stop them from nuking Tel-Aviv or whatever by March. I believe the Netanyahu standard is about two weeks away. I mean, that's plausible. Except last summer, your dude told all of us that he had "completely and totally obliterated" iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. As he said: “We’re not at war with Iran … We destroyed the Iranian nuclear program … and we did it without endangering the lives of American pilots. That’s an incredible thing.”

So like... was he lying? Did he realize that actually he totally oversold it, and Iran's way better at building a nuclear program despite being bombed than he thought, and now we have to start a whole regional war that does get our people and lots of others killed to actually do the job he told us he did? And if that's the case, and it turns out you can spool up an entire, imminently-deliverable-bomb-producing nuclear weapons program in less than a year from "complete obliteration", I ask you again, where are all their nukes? They've had years and years of being unconstrained by our bombs or our diplomacy, and seemingly nothing to show for all their very, very active work trying to build a bomb all these many long years. North Korea managed it with an economy ten times smaller, a famine, and literally nothing that resembles Iran's scientific corpus. Where's the bombs that they should have been producing all this time, if they were actually trying to do so, like your ilk keep telling me?

I won't defend what Trump said, but you have to remember (as always) that he loves to exaggerate. Take him seriously, but not literally.

In particular, this isn't our first rodeo with Iran's nuke program. This has been going on a very long time, like since the 90s. They were strongly sanctioned by most of the world during the 2000s to try and make them stop, which didn't work, but it did at least limit their resources. We used the Stuxnet cyberattack to destroy their centrifuges, and Israel assassinated some of their nuclear scientists. That helped, it did set them back a lot, but eventually they rebuilt. The JCPOA got them to stop developing it publicly, but they were still developing it secretly, just at a slower pace. After that there were a serious of cyberattacks, covert actions, and bombing raids to disrupt Iran's nuke program. Most famously, there was Operation Midnight Hammer, where a group of stealth bombers dropped 10,000 kg MOABS on the mountain where they were hiding their centrifuges. In other words, if you actively bomb them, it becomes hard to finish a nuke, although they were objectively close to finishing one before they got bombed.

However the nuclear material is still there, it's just dispursed into the soil now. It really wouldn't be all that hard for them to dig it out and re-process it into a nuclear weapon at this point. We're not talking about a Manhattan Project style leap of engineering, it's just a lot of brute labor at this point. Like you said, North Korea managed it with a much smaller economy, because we did nothing much to stop them. As a result, they feel free to do things like launch cyberattacks or send troops to help Russia. I would prefer not to give Iran the same leverage.