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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

> Tehran "spent" 2T USD on the nuclear weapons program, which they could have spent on water desalination for example.

(Side note: That... seems like a very high figure to me?) For comparison the US spent close to $1 trillion in 2024 on the military. It could have saved lives and spent that money on healthcare. But that's not how govts work. Iran didn't get a drawstring bag with 2T in it and chose to throw it all on nukes.

Additionally, you're trying to bring a (totally valid tbf) logical argument ("Desalination is critical and an excellent place to spend money that's not going into saving lives") to a government that behaves like a cornered wild animal. It will act to save itself first, even if attacking the aggressor hurts itself too in the process.

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> It will act to save itself first, even if attacking the aggressor hurts itself too in the process.

Of course, but as we see simply focusing on ground forces, drones, and anti-air defenses would be strictly better. (Because they wouldn't be this sanctioned, and they could even have a civilian nuclear energy program too.)

> 2T USD

It's a number coming from an Iranian trade official.

I heard it in this video: https://youtu.be/OJAcvqmWuv4?t=1084 and unfortunately there's no source cited, but I think it's this one: "As former Iranian diplomat Qasem Mohebali admitted on May 20, 2025, “uranium enrichment has cost the country close to two trillion dollars” and imposed massive sanctions yet continues largely as a matter of national pride rather than economic logic."

https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/nuclear/iaea-report-and-geo...

It can't be 2T USD. That's about 60 times the cost of the Manhattan project in today's dollars. It could maybe be 2T Iranian rials.

Iran claims 1T USD damages as a result of US leaving JCPOA alone - in 2021. Now add in 5 more years, wars, sanctions before JCPOA was signed, direct expenditures on enrichment...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflic...

That's their claim for how much less economic activity Iran (not just the government) had in total due to sanctions, not how much the government "spent on the nuclear weapons program" that could have instead been spent on desalination plants.

But without a nuclear weapons program, the entire sanctions regime wouldn't have started (yea, I know today half of those are anti-terrorist sanctions, but that's not how it started, it was morphed later on). It should be considered as part of the losses.

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