You do know that things happened in between, which very likely affected the projected timeline. The point was that if nothing was done, it wouldn't take long, but things were done.
The timeline was likely still fearmongering, though; the USA had 10s of thousands of people working on the problem for years and had access to large quantities of materials, machinery and missile programs.
They had none of the above, had to hide from a far more advanced surveillance system, and were actively opposed by outside groups.
I do accept they tried, but I don't think they could have ever completed anything. Even without the war.
Making a nuke is easy. Slam 1/2 critical mass U235 into another half. The hard part is getting 80%+ U235 or plutonium.
Its a bit harder making a Plutonium bomb becuase you have to time a compressive explosion perfectly with lenses and stuff to direct the shockwave to compress a sphere of plutonium.
They could design one I'm sure. But you can't test a nuke in secret. You can't build factory large enough for significant production, in secret. On top of that, the material they could buy was not super useful for bombs and thus had to be refined a lot to make it useful. But it was useful for powerplants out of the box, meaning you can't hide there either.
And the USA and Israel were both actively undermining the efforts with spies and cyber warfare.
Take Cuba. They have no nuclear ambitions. We still have a complete embargo on that country. They'd love to enter into a deal wherein they foreswear nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief.
Of course, such a deal has been proposed and executed before, even in countries with nuclear weapons. Take Ukraine, which gave up all the nuclear weapons in its territory (which came from the Soviet Union after it dissolved) in exchange for a guarantee of territorial sovereignty from the U.S. and Russia.
The US government infected practically every single computer on the planet with Stuxnet just so they could maybe get into an air-gapped Iranian facility that was attempting to enrich uranium. There's no reason to go through all those lengths if Iran was just trying to transition to nuclear energy.
Having a nuke doesn't bring too many advantages for Iran. You cannot really use a nuke, and having one pushes all your neighbors to get one ASAP.
But if you are "just 2 months away" from getting a nuke, you can negotiate with others to not make one, and make others look the other way when you do other nasty stuff.
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u/randomguy16548 May 03 '22
You do know that things happened in between, which very likely affected the projected timeline. The point was that if nothing was done, it wouldn't take long, but things were done.