Leaving aside the accuracy of this claim, "building a weapon" here means "taking the uranium they've already enriched almost to weapons-grade, and completing final assembly into a working device".

The nuclear physicists got the glory for the Manhattan Project, but the enrichment was the vast majority of the time and cost[1]. Similar ratios apply today. There is zero question that Iran's government is spending a significant fraction of its GDP on enrichment activity that would be economically absurd except as a step towards nuclear weapons--they acknowledge it proudly!

That doesn't mean these strikes were necessarily a good idea. There's no question that Iran was working actively towards a bomb though, even if "building a weapon" gets redefined narrowly to exclude almost all the actual effort.

1. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-the-...

> "building a weapon" here means "taking the uranium they've already enriched almost to weapons-grade, and completing final assembly into a working device".

Agreed. However, taking into account the full statement (provided by the collective U.S. Intelligence Services) to include the parts about: Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003 and that he has final say in the matter, says they were not working actively towards a bomb.

But there was growing advocation for doing so. Now they have been emboldened further and been given fuel to advocate restarting the program. If Khamenei had so far kept the pro-nuke elements of the regime at bay, this strike may force the very thing that foreign Intelligence roped us into "stopping".

I am not saying they did not have the means; they will rebuild the means, and now they will have the motivation as well as know-how in a way that will be more difficult to stop.

So it seems that due to imprecise language people disagree on the exact place of the red line the US (and Israel) were drawing. The post you responded to was indicating that the red line was, as a sibling comment mentioned, the breakout time from political decision to working nuclear weapon. Many other people, yourself included, seem to consider the red line to be the political decision itself. This red line now may be crossed in response to our first strike after their violation of the breakout time red line. If we were successful it seems as though the message is clear, we will use overwhelming military force to prevent them from having a nuclear weapon. So even if the political decision gets made to build one, any attempt to restart the process - which isn't exactly stealthy - will be met with similar force. If we failed though, then we might get to see a nuclear weapon being used in modern times.

> they were not working actively towards a bomb

I think this becomes a definitions game again. I'd consider a country to be "working actively towards a bomb" when it's taking costly steps that provide no commensurate benefit except towards a nuclear weapons program. At that point, there's no rational explanation for their actions except that they're working towards the bomb.

So e.g. enrichment of uranium to <3.67% (as permitted by the JCPOA) is not such a step, since that's also economically useful for civilian nuclear power. Enrichment to 60% is such a step--the only conceivable civilian uses are niches for which the cost would far exceed any benefit.

It seems you agree they're enriching in the latter way, but you don't count that as "working actively towards a bomb". So what definition are you using for that phrase? We obviously can't just let the Iranian government decide, or they'll define everything short of a successful test as part of their "peaceful explosive lenses program" or whatever.

My general sense is that the JCPOA was working reasonably well, and it's unfortunate that Trump exited. To the extent these strikes were a necessary solution, they might be to a problem of his own making. I agree that Iran could be emboldened and merely delayed here. That may imply an inevitable endgame of either regime change or near-total destruction of Iran's economic capacity, big escalations and risks.

“Intelligence community” can be wrong. It’s not as if they are infallible.

Sure, but so can foreign Intelligence that the America First Trump team decided was way better than US Intelligence that tax payers are paying obscene amounts for. So, I guess we just pick which ever one fits what we find more important to listen to.

This stinks of Iraq & WMD. Which the U.S. Intelligence made drastic changes to prevent happening again.

Only now we were on the side of saying there is no proof it was actively being worked on, and the person/state with "proof" also happens to be the state that has been bitterly opposed to Iran and started launching unprovoked missiles. That state also knows how to get what it wants from this administration and suddenly we go from, there is no proof they are doing nefarious things with their program, to they are about nuke us all if we don't do something; all in a matter of weeks.

The alternative was to do nothing , let them continue the obvious nuclear weapon nation program. I am surprised we hadn’t attacked them earlier given what they did to our troops in Iraq with EFPs or Ukraine with the Shahed drones.

> The alternative was to do nothing , let them continue the obvious nuclear weapon nation program.

Or the alternative being the JCPOA. Which was an agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other provisions.

An agreement which failed because the US side reimplemented the sanctions while Iran was in compliance with the agreement.

> The alternative was to do nothing

Yes & No. Thats what I understood the Trump campaign promised, to stop military meddling in other countries religious (or otherwise) conflicts.

Diplomacy is not nothing, and has kept the Iran program from restarting (going by US reports that it was stopped). Now it is all but sure to start up again. Unless the goal was for the US to be suckered into forcing a regime change, and we all know how well those attempts have gone.

> I am surprised we hadn’t attacked them earlier given what they did to our troops in Iraq with EFPs

If it happened at that time with proof and congressional approval then okay, but thats not an excuse for now. Thats how states end up in a war that lasts for a couple or more millennia

President at the time didn’t need congressional approval to say blow up the EFP factories.

Everyone keeps saying Trump didn’t have approval when Congress authorized this

I think a good way of explaining what the Iranian government has been doing, is actively working on reducing breakout time without actually making the breakout decision

"Breakout time" is how long it takes a country between the political decision to build a nuclear weapon, and actually having one which is militarily usable

I question whether lowering your nuclear latency for strategic purposes is the same thing as building towards a bomb.

Switzerland's nuclear program stayed one step away from actually putting together a nuclear weapon for several decades straight. The fact that they could become a nuclear power, but haven't, and could credibly restart their program if attacked, is of strategic importance to them.

Is it building towards a bomb if your intention is to sit on the precipice of building a nuclear weapon for the rest of time, leveraging your position as deterrence, but never going over the edge? I have no idea! I also have no idea whether this describes Iran. Saying that there's "no question" they were building towards a bomb is ignoring this question, though.

A small team of skilled physicists relying only on public knowledge can design a nuclear weapon (and did, back in 1964; their work product was classified, the demonstrated futility notwithstanding). The only reason that random grad students don't have the bomb is that enrichment of uranium requires state-level resources. So why focus on the easier part of building a nuclear weapon that they haven't undertaken, while choosing language ("lowering latency", not "building") that minimizes the much harder part that they have? This view is prevalent, but it seems exactly backwards to me.

As to intent, the concept of "deterrence, but never going over the edge" doesn't really exist--if you're never going over the edge, then where does the deterrence come from? At best it's a bluff, like threatening someone with an unloaded gun. But would you really want to bet your life that Iran has put maybe a quarter of their GDP (including sanctions impact; the program itself is much less) into a bluff? We can't read minds, and their costly actions seem like much more reliable signals than our guesses at their intent.

Switzerland is an odd comparison, since they got their capabilities in what they openly described as the initial stages of a nuclear weapons program. Since abandoning that, Switzerland has been divesting its enriched uranium. If Switzerland were instead building up its stockpile while funding proxies to (conventionally) strike its neighbors, then I'd expect some combination of sanctions and military action there too.

> As to intent, the concept of "deterrence, but never going over the edge" doesn't really exist--if you're never going over the edge, then where does the deterrence come from?

Exactly the same place as the deterrence in MAD. You don't intend to immediately nuke your geopolitical rivals when you build the bomb, you intend to sit around with a metaphorical shotgun aimed at your door for the rest of time.

> If Switzerland were instead building up its stockpile while funding proxies to (conventionally) strike its neighbors, then I'd expect some combination of sanctions and military action there too.

Sure, I agree. I approve of the strikes against Iran in principle. I still don't believe there's "no question" that Iran was going to build a nuclear weapon if nobody else intervened.

> You don't intend to immediately nuke your geopolitical rivals

I don't see why intent requires immediacy? Perhaps this becomes uselessly philosophical, but I would say MAD requires the defending state to intend to nuke its adversary, conditioned on some future event (a nuclear attack on themselves, an existential conventional attack, etc.). They hope that condition is never satisfied, but intend to strike if it is.

> I still don't believe there's "no question" that Iran was going to build a nuclear weapon if nobody else intervened.

For clarity, I don't believe that either. By "working actively towards", I mean only that Iran was taking costly steps that bring them closer to a working bomb, and no other rational purpose could justify those costs. I think the distinction of what such steps we count as "lowering latency" vs. "building a bomb" is arbitrary and mostly meaningless, since as the latency approaches zero the latter goal is effectively achieved.

I agree that Iran might just have been saber-rattling; or even if they currently intended to build and test a complete bomb, they might have discontinued the program before succeeding. I just don't think intent is a useful focus (vs. practical capabilities), since it's fundamentally unknowable and could change at any time.