Iran could enrich uranium to weapons grade (90%) if attacked, lawmaker warns

What hasn’t taken place?

When has that ever stopped any follower of an Abrahamic religion

Religious books are full of contradictions. All of them.

Inconceivable

It feels like this war has strengthened the regime though. There were widespread protests and a leader in his 80s. Once he passed it's unlikely they would have been able to get a hard liner in. By killing him they handed a lot of power to the IRGC and hard liners as they were at war already. Having the US team up with Israel for the war is a good way to push moderates away as well. The bombing of the girl's school will have pushed a lot of people away as a standalone incident on its own.

They benefit so long as the strait opens without them having to make concessions to Iran. It's going to be really difficult, risky and politically challenging for them to ensure that the strait is safe so they are either going to need to negotiate an end that includes the strait being opened or they just leave it and the momentum and slack in the global economy starts to run out and the costs mount.

Strategic ambiguity? Plausible deniability? Political football or in-fighting? I'm sure there are many more potential reasons.

Well for one the US and Israel were making many efforts to undermine the nuclear program by launching cyberattacks, launching targeted attacks against infrastructure, assassinating nuclear scientists, etc. They have been at it trying to prevent the proliferation by Iran non-stop regardless of any previous deal that might have been in place.

>Then why hadn’t they yet? It's not easy to play cat and mouse games with a nation that has has both the ability to see a mouse fart from space and the ability to skullfuck a mountain with 30,000 pound bunkerbusters. A couple of nuclear weapons is neither a deterrent nor an opportunity, they're targets and excuses. A dozen or so on the other hand become a problem, especially if they get into the hands of the middle-east's favourite troublemakers. I did some back-of-the-envelope math a few months ago and concluded that the mass of 60% enriched uranium would be sufficient for at least 4 little-boy style gun-type weapons. They could probably get that enrichment level up to 80% (it doesn't need to be 90% which is what a lot of publications like to cite) and convert it back into elemental form within a month. From there it's just a bit of machining and the rest can be done in a garage. >They’ve been at that step since Obama was in office. It was literally the basis for the Iran nuclear deal. No they haven't. They've had the industrial capacity to do it, and they've been playing games since Obama was in office, but they did not have the reserve stockpile which is necessary to reduce nuclear latency. They've been working on that for only the past few years and were caught by the IAEA after a surprise inspection at Fordow. The JCPOA was a stop-gap measure which put some eyes on the Iranian nuclear program but it ultimately didn't address the elephant in the room; why was Iran enriching so much uranium in the first place? The Bushehr nuclear power plant is Russian operated and burns fuel produced by Rosatom rather than fuel produced indigenously in Iran. The Tehran Research Reactor doesn't need that much -- and it certainly doesn't need in excess of 20% --, and they're not selling what they have. Iran has basically been enriching uranium, sitting on it, moving it around, and pleading ignorance whenever the IAEA asked questions. >If they’d be on the precipice of building nukes for over a decade, and hadn’t, what were they waiting for? Like I said above, they don't want to just build *one* nuclear weapon, that's no good. They want to build a dozen or more before anyone has a reason to believe that the first one is complete and functional.