I worked in a Congressional office during the original debate about the Iran nuclear deal, and it’s incredible how poor of a job the national news media did of covering the basics of what the problem was and what the deal does.

So many fearful, confused constituents called us. https://twitter.com/thekarami/status/1358449962183397376

Thread, for the layman regular Joe/Jane. Note that I am not a nuclear specialist, but this is also not actually that complicated.

Basically, in order to make a bomb, you need to enrich Uranium to a high % level of purity.

Nuclear power plants require only a smaller percentage of enrichment.

So you can keep an electricity-generation program active without being able to produce a nuclear bomb.

The JCPOA “Iran Deal” basically does (did) that.

It limited Iran to only having small numbers of centrifuges (machines that spin around the ore to separate it out, & concentrate the heavy Uranium more) so if they tried to make bomb material it would take a long time/we’d know.

It simultaneously put limits on how MUCH Uranium that Iran could stockpile at once - enough for electricity power plants, but not enough to be able to be able to make a bomb (the higher the enrichment % you want, the more material you need on hand to start with).

The basic thing about preventing new countries from getting nuclear bombs is that the actual technology to build one isn’t actually *that* complicated. This isn’t like super space tech no one else can figure out because Americans are uniquely smart. It dates back to the 40s!

Any industrialized country with scientists & engineers can probably figure out how to make a nuke.

So the way you stop them from doing so is:
1) limiting their access to sufficient Uranium (& amount they can stockpile)
2) monitoring how many centrifuges they build.

The way we stop countries making a nuke is by making it hard for them to do so 1) quickly & 2) secretly.

If you limit how many centrifuges and how much material they can have, it buys the rest of the world time to “do something” if the country says “screw you” & does it anyway.

How much time would elapse between the country saying “screw you guys, we are going to go ahead & make a bomb” and when they actually finish making their first bomb is called their nuclear “break-out time.”

We stop proliferation by:
1) keeping breakout times long, so we can use “sticks” (eg military strikes) to punish them & stop them before a bomb is finished
2) using “carrots,” to prevent countries from feeling backed into a corner and choosing to say “screw you guys!” at all.

How long of a “break-out time” is enough for everyone to feel comfortable is somewhat subjective, and depends on how much everyone trusts that country.

For example, Japan doesn’t have the bomb, but probably has a relatively shorter breakout time if they decided they wanted one.

But because of the domestic political culture of Japan, the presence of lots of other military forces in and around Japan, and factors like the US guaranteeing Japan’s security from other nuke-armed countries by covering them in our “umbrella,” Japan doesn’t want nukes much.

The countries that most would want a nuclear bomb are ones that:

-feel threatened by another country that *does* have nukes

-feel threatened by another country they can’t beat using conventional fighting

-have nothing to lose (eg because they’ve been crippled with sanctions)

This is exactly how North Korea got nuclear bombs.

If you just punish, punish, punish, punish, punish a country and constantly threaten it will invasion, and offer no incentive to cooperate, they’ll just decide they have nothing to else to lose & deterrence to gain.

Because, again, the actual technology to build a nuclear bomb is not actually that hard if you have some scientists and engineers and access to Uranium.

This is why Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran was just so utterly stupid and counter-productive. It creates all the incentives for Iran to just say “screw it, we have nothing to gain from letting ourselves continue to be punished.”

And this is why people like Tom Cotton and NeoCons who just want to go to war with Iran keep trying to portray all the “carrots” (like lifting sanctions, allowing a civilian nuclear energy program, etc) as somehow elements of a “bad deal” when in fact they’re what make it strong.