Iran claims they are now capable of building a nuclear weapon

Very good movie in a vacuum from a nostalgia standpoint. This one was much shorter on the realism scale than the first one.

 

right? if only it were so simple, because it's not.

 

True, but it's not just that. For example, that stunt they show with Maverick splitting two planes in a tight abreast formation at speed. If that were tried in reality, the result would either be a "fireball" killing everyone, or if he somehow pulled it off his C.O. would have ripped his wings off his chest and revoked his flight status the moment he landed.

Sorry, I work with a ton of former pilots so I ended up viewing the movie through their lens

 

Not a hell of a lot shorter. The first one was pretty dumb, too, in terms of military realism.

 

Eh, it was actually much closer. Granted you're not likely to be in a dogfight within a few feet of your partner (never be anywhere near someone the enemy is trying to shoot down) and I'm sure the lifestyle was more than a bit hollywood'ed up (that dopey volleyball scene). The flyby would actually have gotten him chewed out (which it did) and the "head on a swivel" in the cockpit was pretty true to form.

 

Iran's breakout time in 2015 was what, 3 months? If they had been materially cheating on the deal, they'd already have a bomb.

 

My favorite part was Jennifer Connelly standing by a sweet Porsche at the end

 

Chances are they already do.

 

Well, that’s excellent news. That means there is no “whole story” to come out later. There will never be a moment where Israel releases its intelligence in full along with the names of everyone in the Biden Administration they shared it with and when. There will never be Congressional hearings where, say, the CJCS and DCI have to state under oath what they knew and when they knew it as well as what the Administration’s key personnel, such as Jake “Hope as a Strategy” Sullivan, said when confronted with the intelligence. There will never be a moment where you are forced to choose between three unpalatable options:

1. Confession. “Okay, so Trump is still evil incarnate, and I still hope he dies of Parkinson’s in prison. But even if he was wrong on everything else, he apparently stumbled into being right about Iran when he decided to stop paying them to play us false.”

2. Denial. “Liars! They’re all lying! The Chairman! The Head of the CIA! The Mossad! The Saudis! Lock them in a room, and throw away the room!”

3. Indiscreet Shift of Narrative. “Well, so what? Iran was always going to get the bomb anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if they were playing us for short-term economic relief that they in turn used to develop arms. Obama meant well, and that’s what matters most. And, like, what’s your problem with Iran having nukes anyway? Because they’re not white? Check your privilege, man!”

 

That bomb looks exactly like the one Netenyahu showed to Congress a decade or so ago.

 

This issue has always been as confusing as hell. During the Obama admin Netenyahu and republicans were yelling a screaming that this was THE number one foreign policy risk in the world. Then we negotiated an imperfect deal that measurable reduces the risk, and they opposed it, wanting a “better deal”. Once the deal was implemented, by all accounts it temporarily and measurably reduced the risk. Netenyahu stopped running around with bugs bunny bomb pictures. The IAEA said Iran was in compliance. Everybody breathed a bit easier. But Trump got in, he nixed the deal, no better deal came, and now we are back to where we started, except this time everybody’s mostly just shrugging it off.

I don’t know what to make of it. I will say at this point SA and other Arab nations are starting to at least play nice and talk to Iran, which is probably reasonably smart for them to do. But once again Israel will be in the cross hairs.

 

I get you're passionate about this, but I don't see how any of this is really responsive.

Pre-JCPOA, everyone (including Israel) seemed to think it would only take Iran 2-3 months to create the fissile material necessary for a bomb. If their plan was to take the cash and build a bomb anyways, they would have been able to do that by early 2016 at the latest. It's now 2022, and still no bomb (although maybe soon).

The thing is, JCPOA was never sold as a permanent solution. It was to delay Iran's progress, and it seems to have done just that. Heck, the optimistic goal was to push Iran's breakout time out to 12 months. Considering it's now 4 years post our withdrawal, and 2 and a half years post-Iran's withdrawal, that goal seems to have been achieved.

So what is the intelligence that you seem confident exists going to show? That Iran maintained its 2-3 month breakout time during the deal, but still decided not to build a bomb? That might be interesting, I guess, but not all that material given the underlying objective of the deal (Iran not building a bomb while the deal is in effect, and for at least 12 months after it ends) was still achieved.

Really, it seems like you're criticizing the deal for not achieving what you wanted (permanently disabling Iran's nuclear capability) vs what it actually was (pushing their breakout time back out to 12 months).

 

I still believe that Iran never had any intention of not developing nuclear weapons and the missile delivery systems and the world was wrong to accept the deal that we did.

Can a Credible Nuclear Breakout Time With Iran Be Restored? - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Raphael Grossi highlighted the growing challenge in Iran. “A country enriching at 60 percent is a very serious thing — only countries making bombs are reaching this level,” Grossi noted. “Sixty per cent is almost weapons grade, [while] commercial enrichment is 2, 3 [per cent].” Although he acknowledged that it was Iran’s “sovereign right” to develop its nuclear energy program, he added that “the degree of ambition, sophistication that Iran has” in its nuclear program is at “a degree that requires a vigilant eye.” Iran also has resumed conversion of uranium into metal, which is a key step for producing cores for nuclear weapons, and has no credible civilian purpose.

Additionally, the most recent formal IAEA report to its Board of Governors details a long and consistent pattern of Iranian failures to live up to its IAEA safeguards obligations (a series of technical measures through which the IAEA checks that countries are honoring their legal obligations to use nuclear power only for peaceful purposes). These include repeatedly failing to declare to the IAEA nuclear material and related activities, denying and delaying IAEA inspectors’ access to sites that contain these materials, attempting (though failing) to effectively cleanse facilities before the arrival of inspectors to cover up activities, and providing repeatedly false responses to IAEA enquiries. Furthermore, in clear violation of its legal obligations under IAEA safeguards, Iran failed to inform the agency in a timely manner of the construction of nuclear facilities (required under Code 3.1). All these instances of Iranian misbehavior breach Iran’s long-standing obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (many of these obligations were reaffirmed by the JCPOA). They can hardly be justified as a response to the U.S. pullout of the JCPOA. Hence it is clear the challenges of keeping the Iranian nuclear program in check extend well beyond the JCPOA. They relate to Iran’s willingness to restrain its nuclear weapons ambitions, and to comply faithfully and transparently with all its nuclear commitments under international law to show that its nuclear program is now entirely peaceful.

Iran’s dubious nuclear track record, its recent nuclear progress, and its apparent disregard for its commitments to the IAEA make clear that Tehran poses a far greater proliferation challenge today than it did when the original JCPOA was signed in 2015. Thus, a technical return to the letter of the JCPOA will no longer yield anywhere near the level of confidence provided by the original accord. Moreover, failure to adequately redress these challenges would have far-reaching implications for the broader nonproliferation system.
........................
However, four developments have combined to undermine this carefully designed setup.

1. Fissile material

Iran has made dramatic progress since 2018 in its enrichment capacity by reactivating its nuclear enrichment at the underground facility in Fordow and introducing advanced centrifuges (so-called IR2M, IR4, IR6, and IR8 machines). As documented by the IAEA, Iran has already mastered the expertise, built the infrastructure, and successfully deployed over one thousand centrifuges of these types, conservatively assessed to be able to effectively enrich uranium three-to-five times faster than before. Thus, Iran’s breakout time has shrunk to approximately three months as of February 2021, with the time growing shorter since and edging toward a mere few weeks, as recently noted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

2 Nuclear weapons' design and production
The JCPOA contained under Section T a forward-looking proscription on Iran’s weaponization activity. This was partly to address the inability to get Iran to admit its past nuclear weapons effort, and to cooperate with the IAEA to resolve the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program before 2003. If benchmarking Iran’s past nuclear weapons effort remained impossible, the future was supposed to be more reassuring if Iran adhered to now-explicit commitments under the JCPOA to eschew nuclear weapons work. Yet Section T has never been implemented. The criticality of monitoring and probing Iran’s weaponization potential became more apparent when Israeli agents stole the “nuclear archive” from Iran in 2018. Its documents revealed an Iranian leadership decision and Iranian plan to acquire multiple nuclear weapons, and an elaborate program to do this in clear violation of its NPT and IAEA obligations. This was despite repeated assurances that its nuclear program was purely peaceful, and that the supreme Iranian leader’s religious convictions prevent them from pursuing nuclear weapons.

3. Iran has rejected and fails to comply with United Nations resolutions about missile development
Iran has not only rejected, but also never complied with, the dual-capable missile development prohibitions embedded in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231 (and preceding Security Council resolutions). This leaves it with a ready capability to deliver nuclear weapons at a range of 2,000 kilometers (and growing).

4. Iran has not complied with IAEA safeguards obligations
A series of recent IAEA reports document years of multiple Iranian failures to live up to its safeguards obligations, notwithstanding sustained IAEA efforts to resolve these matters amicably with Iran.

 

except Iran was not honoring the deal and nobody was calling them on it. see report from Carnegie Endowment linked above

 

I'm not really sure I understand the argument that because Iran is violating limits like enrichment percentage set in the JCPOA after the United States unilaterally abrogated shows that they would have never abided by those limits even if the US had stayed in the deal and gave them the benefits they thought they were obtaining. That doesn't track for me logically.

It's plain that they have been deliberately trying to violate the agreement in a way that is not irreversible for negotiating leverage for a new deal. And if no new agreement is reached, we're probably gonna be in the same situation we are now with the DPRK after the Agreed Framework was finally killed.

And we should not differentiate on this position between the Israelis and the Saudi's. If anything, the Saudis are greater enemies of the Iranians and more llikely to cook intelligence to try to promote US Iranian active hostilities towards regime change.

 

Again, claiming they weren't "honoring the deal" falls pretty darn flat when it's 7 years later and they still don't have a bomb, despite supposedly only needing 3 months to make one when the deal was inked.

As @tampagtr points out, it seems Iran's game is to hang around on the precipice and use the threat of nuclearization to extract economic benefits/sanctions relief from the West. Basically extortion, although if we really don't want them to have nukes, I don't see many good options other than playing ball.

 

3 months to accumulate enough material is not the same thing as three months to make a bomb, the fissable material is just one element required. And I seriously doubt that Iran is going to test a nuke until such time that they have enough for multiple bombs and have a delivery mechanism that makes other countries (Israel) think twice about a military strike to cripple their nuclear program. And the extortion being paid only limited them for a certain time, about the same time it owuld take to finish their reactor, develop the rest of the components needed for a bomb, and get their missile program in shape. We agreed to give them the time and money they needed and got little to nothing of real substance in return.


It was all style and no substance when you realize that 1) Iran republican guard had no intentions of honoring the deal in the facilities they control outside of IEAA inspection 2) There is/was no stomach for any sort of enforcement when Iran did breach the agreement. The IAEA is/was more interested in maintaining relations that it is with enforcing the terms of the deal. They were more concerned with politics than they are enforcing the deal. If Iran said no to something, the IAEA said ok, but we will write a sentence that says you told us no.

not a Dershowitz fan but he details how Iran was violating the agreement before trump ever cancelled it

Iran is violating the deal | The Hill

Iran is not only violating the spirit of the no-nukes deal, it is violating its letter. The prologue to the deal explicitly states: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” This reaffirmation has no sunset provision: it is supposed to be forever.

Yet the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently stated that it could not verify that Iran was “fully implementing the agreement” by not engaging in activities that would allow it to make a nuclear explosive device. Yukiya Amano of the IAEA told Reuters that when it comes to inspections, which are stipulated in Section T of the agreement, “our tools are limited.” Amano continued to say: “In other sections, for example, Iran has committed to submit declarations, place their activities under safeguards or ensure access by us. But in Section T, I don’t see any (such commitment).”

{mosads}It is well established that Tehran has consistently denied IAEA inspectors access to military sites and other research locations. This is in direct contravention to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and bipartisan legislation set out by Congress, which compels the president to verify that “Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement.” Yet, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, as of the last quarterly report released in August, the IAEA had not visited any military site in Iran since implementation day.

For its part, the IAEA has been complicit in allowing Tehran to circumvent the agreement and act as a law unto itself. Consider that after the deal was negotiated with the five permanent U.N. Security Council members, it was revealed that Tehran and the IAEA had entered into a secret agreement which allowed the Iranian regime to carry out its own nuclear trace testing at the Parchin complex, a site long suspected of being a nuclear testing ground, and would report back to the IAEA with “selective” videos and photos. This arrangement, which went behind the back of Congress, is especially suspect when considered in light of the Iranian regime’s history of duplicity.

To be sure, revelations about Iran testing the boundaries of the JCPOA and crossing the line into violation are not new. While many of these violations have not been disclosed by the previous U.S. administration, or by the IAEA, there is a myriad of information and analysis suggesting that Iran has previously failed to comply with several provisions of the JCPOA. It has twice been revealed that Iran exceeded the cap on heavy water mandated by the agreement, and has also refused to allow testing of its carbon fiber acquired before the deal was implemented. Moreover, it has also been reported that Tehran has found new ways to conduct additional mechanical testing of centrifuges, in clear violation of the JCPOA.

 

I don't find Dershowitz's argument very persuasive, which deals only with inspection regimes at Parchin. That was what
Opponents fixated on to try to build political support against any deal whatsoever, not because of specific issues with the deal as a prevention of the because they wanted to use the existing extreme sanctions regime and widespread world support in hopes of obtaining regime change and stopping a whole lot of Iranian behaviors outside of the development of nuclear weapons.

As I mentioned before somewhere on this thread months ago, I rely a lot on Jeffrey Lewis for my opinions on this issue. I have followed him for about 10 years and read a few of his books.

There would have no doubt been residue at Parchin. As lewis said, and I paraphrase, course they had an active program. That's the whole reason the JCPOA was put into place. It was like the Israelis using the historic document cache to show they were lying in earlier years with their denials. No duh.

Plus there is already sensitivity to inspecting active military sites, which the inspection regime of the JCP 08 was a bit ambiguous about. So there was a legalistic issue there.

I have no faith in anything Dershowitz says. My wife will be last night that she saw Larry David talk about dissing him that Martha's Vineyard, which is a continuing source of amusement and maybe have more respect for David.

Here is a recent Twitter thread by Jeffrey Lewis not exactly on the issue of past noncompliance but will give you some perspective on the program.

He always brings up a great argument using the DPRK. No one likes buying off someone not to go nuclear, but it's far better than the alternative. He is also the source of the argument that nuclear weapon technology is 70 years old and it's rather ridiculous to think that any nationstate sufficiently dedicated in terms of resources cannot reach that point, at least if they don't need to overcome too much in terms of delivery. See the need to buy them off somehow figure out some way to deter them if you don't want them to reach that goal. It's kind of absurd to think that we can prevent that knowledge and capability from being obtained.

 

Producing enough weapons grade fissile material is by far the most difficult part of building a bomb. That’s why non proliferation is always focused on enrichment. There’s just no possibility that they’ve had the material for 7 years but haven’t been able to complete a bomb.

And candidly, the idea that they have some super secret cache of bombs already strikes me as an Iraq level conspiracy theory.