The idea state actors could building anything quickly and secretly is a misconception.
Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well. Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge. There's probably all manner of less complex projects underway that U.S. intelligence is oblivious to.
Like China and North Korea, Iran is something of an outlier. Israel has long had strong intelligence assets in Iran, and in addition to benefiting from those, the U.S. seems to have been able to beef up SIGINT fairly quickly with arguably better than usually results.
It's highly dependent on the technology and the country in question. Sure, at the end of the day it's impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. But the goal is never forever. A country's strategic interests always have an implicit time component. If you can suppress tech long enough for a "rogue" state to become a respectable player in the international system, then you've won. Long enough might be only a few years.
Conversely, if you can develop tech faster than the U.S. can learn about _and_ act upon it, you've won. North Korea won that race, and might have been able to win it even without China protecting it. And how did North Korea win that race? Largely with exogenous skill, importing Soviet talent after the fall of the USSR.
Also, need I remind anyone the intelligence disaster that was both 9/11 and the Iraq War? It's not so much that the intelligence community was wrong, but that there's rarely any certainty in their assessments. If you don't know for certain that something is true, how do you justify your policy decisions? It gets muddy very quickly.
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who live and work in those countries.
> Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge.
How do you know that?
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have
done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who
live and work in those countries.
How do you know that?
However, for whatever reason the Illuminati saw fit to disclose that Pakistan sold nuclear secrets to North Korea; which apparently went on for over decade before the initial disclosure; that many high-level U.S. officials (politicians, appointees, and civil servants alike) went [apparently] apoplectic upon disclosure; and that the fall-out seemed to be widespread and persistent.
We also "know" that South Africa had the bomb and Israel has the bomb. And despite official denials it seems clear that Israel, minimally, had the tacit approval of the U.S. if not outright assistance, and that South Africa's program was also under surveillance at the time. In other words, once details of these programs became publicly known it also became publicly known shortly afterward the extent to which the U.S. knew about those developments. In the case of the Pakistan sale of nuclear secrets, and in multiple situations wrt North Korea and China, by all public accounts the U.S. was and still is often readily taken by surprise. There are plenty other historical examples (including recent examples) of the U.S. being taken by surprise, although obviously not all were so strategically consequential.
(An interesting insight into late cold-war politics is that it was the Soviet Union that tipped off the United States that South Africa was preparing to test a weapon).
What's not known is how much he was engaging in nuclear proliferation with the permission of the government, or which parts of the government were helping him. Pakistan's warring security agencies make the current US dispute between the CIA and FBI over Trump and the Russians look like amateurs.
Now did the CIA believe that Sadam would have re-built them the first chance he got? Very probably.
(and ok i guess technically they could still be buried out in the desert somewhere, has this been ruled out?)
The case for the Iraq War was made on the back of a single informant, an informant that most Western intelligence agencies (including Israel) believed not particularly credible. The CIA also, initially, didn't believe that informant very credible. However, Cheney & Co went hunting for evidence, dredged it up, packaged it, and sold it as a "slam dunk" to the previously incredulous Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. It's only by dint of Tenet being Director can we say that the CIA believed the justification behind the Iraq War.
TL,DR; Iran vs SaudiArabia turns with nukes into, Iran <-> Iran and SaudiArabia vs SaudiArabia.
Short term gain is long term pain.
Rare, but it does happen.