Early US Intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites

If they weren't planning on making nukes before, they for sure are now. Good job everyone involved!

Just couldn't wait for diplomacy to play out.

They for sure got determined making the bomb after the diplomatic solution was bombed by Trump in his previous term.

IIRC, Iran appeared to comply with the terms of the agreement and once that was out of the window they no longer complied.

Iran was hiding nuclear material during the duration JCPOA was active. They were declared in violation of the NPT by the IAEA recently for actions undertaken between 2009-2018.

You're right that the IAEA has indeed pointed to Iran's past undeclared nuclear material and activities, leading to NPT safeguard violations for the 2009-2018 period. However, it's also important to distinguish between those historical undeclared issues and the specific JCPOA compliance. For the duration it was active and before the US withdrawal, the IAEA consistently verified that Iran was adhering to its JCPOA commitments regarding its declared program. The argument is often that while those past issues were concerning, the JCPOA still provided a robust framework for monitoring Iran's active program, which was then dismantled

Iran was objectively not in compliance though [1]. The IAEA just didn’t know they weren’t so they gave Iran a seal of approval. Israel had always claimed that Iran was hiding material, which convinced Trump to leave the JCPOA, but the IAEA could only corroborate it later.

Perhaps we should be making the argument that Trump shouldn’t have only gonna off of Israeli intel, but he ended up being correct that Iran wasn’t correctly reporting their enrichment stockpile, which was a provision of JCPOA. The reason why JCPOA wasn’t revived is actually because of Iran refusing to cooperate about what they did with the undeclared nuclear material.

1. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-25.pd...

Yeah, that's not very honest position. You have to decide if you want to squeeze them out or make things right.

If they hid things and the agreement wasn't just trashed, that could have been a scandal that gets resolved on the path to peace. It could happen for many reasons, maybe they don't trust the West to uphold their part and wanted an insurance policy, maybe it was division within. It doesn't matter that much, it's not like they made the bomb already and were about to hit once everyone lowers their guard.

Later what we had was Iran that was on the table, trying to play nice and that was destroyed probably because of the ego of a guy who couldn't handle to stick with the agreement signed by someone he hates.

Interesting way to play nice by having dozens of secret sites that nobody knew about (nuclear archive) and recently taking enrichment to 60% (they've been caught with over 80%) and dabbling in metallization which have only military applications.