Trump accelerated the timeline. Would they have eventually broken the deal 5 or 10 years down the road and announced this capability? Possibly, if not likely. But there is no doubt the timeline was accelerated thanks to the orange idiot.
Further to that, Iran was under severe sanctions beginning with the Bush administration which had no effect on halting Iran from building it's nuclear program. Once the deal was in place, Iran was complying with the deal and halted their development of a weapon, based on the IEAE verification program on the ground, 24/7. It was incredibly naïve of the Trump administration to believe throwing out the deal and adding more sanctions would stop them; he essentially gave them the green light to accelerate.
Facts that have been widely reported over the years which are at your fingertips if you choose to pursue them.
This is not as big an announcement as it sounds. Iran has long been “capable” of building a device and that’s all I read he said. They have a lot more highly enriched uranium now, so the “breakout” time is far less. That’s likely more what he means and is common knowledge. Really, unless you interdict the supply chain, you are not going to be able to stop any nation with a dedicated program. As Jeffrey Lewis often notes, the basic technology is over 70 years old. We kid ourselves if we believe that any nation state that devotes resources and is neither prevented through the supply chain nor deterred will be unable to figure it out. Now miniaturizing a warhead on a deliverable precision missile is another challenge, though we should presume they could accomplish that in short order. They have a lot of expertise in that area already but this is a new challenge
There is plenty of doubt about that. Fortunately, the whole truth won’t come out for a few years, and by the time it does that convenient political narrative can be neatly replaced by a narrative of irrelevance: “Well, what difference does it make now?”
Trust but verify. Inspectors were in country and able to “verify” Iran’s adherence to the deal. The compliance was there. When the U.S. ripped up the deal, IAEA inspectors were kicked out. It was not a secret Iran immediately resumed their program with no international inspection oversight. This is not even debatable. Sure we can speculate Iran eventually would have cheated anyway. The deal itself was only 10 years. So maybe Iran gets the bomb after 15 years. But if they complied the full 10 years their progress would have at least been stunted. Instead, they accelerated AND they didn’t even have to be the bad guy. The U.S. went on its own and ripped up the deal effectively for… nothing. Nothing except idiotic domestic political posturing. Brilliant.
wrong. they were paper sanctions with little bite for the longest time. It wasn't until late 2011, a few months before they came to the table, when real sanctions kicked in that limited their ability to get insurance on ships transporting their oil and limited their access to the int'l banking system. that brought them to the table Marine insurance: the stranglehold on Iran? | Reuters Six charts that show how hard US sanctions have hit Iran - BBC News
And I'm guessing they're likely to do more (covertly) in the near future. A nuclear Iran is unacceptable in the region.
They were before the deal, and we had inspectors on the scene monitoring the centrifuge shutdowns and the dismantling of the core. Once Trump withdrew from the agreement they kicked out the inspectors and fired everything back up again. I thought everyone knew that.
Well that's a shame, because they’ll have one. As mentioned earlier, any regime committed to it will make it. Asswipe ineptitudes sanctioned to the max like NK get it done. And as much as I’m personally not in favor, being nationally biased and all, it is prudent for them to do it. It’s just a stone cold fact that your power goes up exponentially once you’ve got it. NK fires off out of control bottle rockets towards SK and Japan weekly. But all you can do is starve their citizens because they for sure have boomers that might make it out of NK before they go off. Who knows the truth. It’s a little sketchy to me that a bunch of ME countries haven’t just simply purchased the tech. SA will give washed up Tiger Woods $1B to come limp around a golf course and shoot a round that might win the local CC championship, a financial debacle just to gain prestige. Our own citizens sell high-end secrets to bitter enemies for far less.
