Bombing Iran toward the bomb

The most grotesque possibility in the war to prevent an Iranian bomb is that the war itself may manufacture the bomb.

Washington has spent years declaring that Iran must never conclude nuclear weapons are necessary for survival.

It has now furnished Tehran with the most persuasive argument for exactly that conclusion: remain non-nuclear, remain inspected, remain inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty — and get bombed anyway There is still no verified evidence that Iran has made the political decision to build a nuclear weapon.

That fact matters.

The distinction between having the technical capacity to approach weaponisation and deciding to produce a bomb is not diplomatic hair-splitting.

It is the entire distinction between threshold capability and proliferation.

But strategy is not […]