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Comment by princealiiiii | Hacker News Reader

The world has shown that the only way for a country to have sovereignty is by having nukes - see what happened when Libya or Ukraine gave them up. Having just been attacked by US/Israel and talks from them of fomenting regime change, it is obviously in Iran's self-preservation to pursue nukes.

There was a deal in place to prevent this, and the US broke it.

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Not just that, being a threshold state abiding by international agreements with both US intelligence and the IAEA stating that you’re not building nukes doesn’t save you from attacks aimed at preventing you from building them. Thus, why the heck would you not build them?

Well, IAEA did find Iran to be in breach of their safeguards agreement, mainly given the state of their uranium enrichment and their unconvincing claims about civilian uses. "Not building nukes" can mean "not at the final device assembly stage yet".

At this point it seems possible that the one thing keeping Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons could be religious reasons. Somewhat ironic.

There are plenty of countries that have maintained their sovereignty without nukes.

…by relying on the power projected by the ones with them.

By relying on the conventional power of countries that happen to be nuclearized. We wouldn't have nuked Iraq in defense of Kuwait.

Then there's, say, Argentina or Sweden who are neither nuclearized nor occupied on your counterfactual timeline.

Ukraine never had them. They were Russian and could only be launched with codes held in Russia.

I think there are two uses for nukes...

- to maintain sovereignty

- to attack

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