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Posted
1 hour ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

I haven't seen it mentioned, but Northrop Grumman says the B-2 has a capacity of >40,000lbs. Apparently six of them dropped 12 30,000lb bombs. I guess the >40,000lbs is accurate, but now our adversaries are probably wondering about the true capabilities of all our other assets. 

The MOP entered service (2010s) well after the B2 and was basically designed for the Iran problem.  It was always intended to be integrated with the B2 although B-52s have dropped it in testing.

Actual information about the B2 payload is highly classified but the 40k number you read is likely not a weight constraint on the airframe but a constraint on how many munitions of the type in existence at the B2s service entry will fit inside the internal bomb racks. 

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

12 in a row. 6 holes, 2 MOPS each plus one or two more at Natanz. Again, very impressive execution.  But, to be clear,  the public penetration rating for them is 200 feet of earth or 60 feet of reinforced concrete. Being able to penetrate 200 feet of reinforced concrete would be absolutely bonkers. And the MOP definitely can't do that. 

I misunderstood. I thought it was 6 down two ventilation shafts. 
 

The JTAC told me 200 feet of reinforced concrete. He either revealed something he shouldn’t have or conflated numbers after being out of the service for a while. 

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Posted
5 hours ago, burnt beanz said:

A lot of Steele dossier stuff. 
Hunter laptop labeling as disinformation by former intel leaders. 

What the former Intel leaders said was that a mysterious laptop, with no digital forensic chain of custody, shows up with a bunch of embarrassing, but not criminally inculpatory information on it has the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

They were, ultimately, wrong.  Unlike Fox News and election disinfo and half the other shit they spew, they did not know they were wrong ahead of time and spew it anyway.

The only people that knew the Steele Dossier was bullshit were Steele and I guess some of his sources.  People were credulous of it, but, again, unlike Fox News, they didn't KNOW it was bullshit before they started spewing.

What Fox News routinely does is disinformation, intentionally wrong information.  The rest is just being conventionally wrong, something Fox rarely admits to.

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Posted
6 hours ago, Hitch said:

Maybe. Either way, he seems to want Peace Prize and that’s a good thing. 

Trump wants peace because he thinks it will make him popular.  If he thought blowing lots of shit up would make him popular, he'd do that instead.  In fact, that's exactly what happened here.

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Posted
4 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Trump wants peace because he thinks it will make him popular.  If he thought blowing lots of shit up would make him popular, he'd do that instead.  In fact, that's exactly what happened here.

It wasn’t a discussion about his motivation. 

Posted
1 minute ago, Hitch said:

It wasn’t a discussion about his motivation. 

But it needs to be, because his motivation is always changing. Saying "he wants peace" is BS, it's a flickering moment for a man who flips and flops on everything. 

Posted
5 hours ago, burnt beanz said:

A lot of Steele dossier stuff. 
Hunter laptop labeling as disinformation by former intel leaders. 

The cabal is too busy negging to care about facts anyway. You’ll never change these people- just hope that surly is not the majority of this country. 

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Posted
12 minutes ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

The cabal is too busy negging to care about facts anyway. You’ll never change these people- just hope that surly is not the majority of this country. 

You have a funny definition of facts, what you call facts I call irrelevant conspiracy theories.

Not to mention nobody cares about the HB laptop or the quick conclusions RETIRED people reached, not even the current GOP does because it was a dumbass conspiracy theory.

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Posted
54 minutes ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

The cabal is too busy negging to care about facts anyway. You’ll never change these people- just hope that surly is not the majority of this country. 

Negged

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Posted
42 minutes ago, linux said:

Also centrifuges are delicate if they are running, I don't think them being in a stored position makes them delicate.

They certainly are finely crafted, but if they're not spinning I would imagine they can be "packed" into a storage/shippable state. What makes them so vulnerable while spinning is that they spin at >50,000 RPM and the smallest bump can send all that kinetic energy out of control. 

Given the degree of saber rattling leading up to this attack I would be shocked if Iran had em spun up. No doubt getting bombed is not great for high grade technical equipment, but once they're that far up the enrichment cascade it doesn't take as many centrifuges to get to bomb grade so they could probably lose a few without severely setting things back. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Dahobbs said:

Oh, I don't think we were necessarily aiming for a vent shaft or anything like that. But we were definitely aiming to have each pair of bombs follow the other to maximize the overall penetration. 

hd dating GIF

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Posted
8 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

What the former Intel leaders said was that a mysterious laptop, with no digital forensic chain of custody, shows up with a bunch of embarrassing, but not criminally inculpatory information on it has the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

They were, ultimately, wrong.  Unlike Fox News and election disinfo and half the other shit they spew, they did not know they were wrong ahead of time and spew it anyway.

The only people that knew the Steele Dossier was bullshit were Steele and I guess some of his sources.  People were credulous of it, but, again, unlike Fox News, they didn't KNOW it was bullshit before they started spewing.

What Fox News routinely does is disinformation, intentionally wrong information.  The rest is just being conventionally wrong, something Fox rarely admits to.

Below is part of the wiki description of the steele dossier.  It was raw intelligence and many of the allegations were confirmed by Mueller.  There is real journalistic criticism towards Buzzfeed concerning their decision to release the document. 

 

image.png.0e61d41e8a57257b5a3bf422bf2c3a18.png

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Posted
9 hours ago, Dahobbs said:

...Top Gun Maverick style (aiming for the same hole).

Put a pic of South Austin's mom on the target and the Surly Horns horn dogs will take care of it.

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Posted (edited)

Are we sure it’s a good thing to shatter the President’s notion that he successfully nuked Iran into the Stone Age?  I mean, we either did, in which case there’s no need for us to get further entangled, or he thinks we did, in which case there’s no need for us to get further entangled.

Edited by Goredho
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Posted
9 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

What the former Intel leaders said was that a mysterious laptop, with no digital forensic chain of custody, shows up with a bunch of embarrassing, but not criminally inculpatory information on it has the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

They were, ultimately, wrong.  Unlike Fox News and election disinfo and half the other shit they spew, they did not know they were wrong ahead of time and spew it anyway.

The only people that knew the Steele Dossier was bullshit were Steele and I guess some of his sources.  People were credulous of it, but, again, unlike Fox News, they didn't KNOW it was bullshit before they started spewing.

What Fox News routinely does is disinformation, intentionally wrong information.  The rest is just being conventionally wrong, something Fox rarely admits to.

Not to sidetrack the thread further, but I think this is misleading. Nobody actually knows what happened. The most likely theory has always been that someone hacked Hunter's email and loaded up genuine emails along with a bunch of bullshit on a laptop that might have been stolen from Hunter or might've been another laptop entirely. What's pretty clear is someone tampered with the data on the laptop.  It might've been Russians, it might've been GOP operatives. We don't know and probably never will. Marcy Wheeler has a good summary of all the knowns and unknowns here: https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/01/24/embarrassingly-wrong-the-ongoing-misinformation-campaign-about-the-hunter-biden-hard-drive/.

 

 

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Posted

You have to know that communications are being monitored at all times in the region, most likely everywhere actually, and some higher up asked about the condition of the facility after the strike and the reply was “Everything is perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”

Between satellite imagery of the activity around the sites and recovered conversations about the work to be done they’ll know in short order how effective the strikes were. I doubt the Iranians are sophisticated enough or have the organizational discipline to keep it quiet for long. 

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

I doubt the Iranians are sophisticated enough or have the organizational discipline to keep it quiet for long. 

[Laughs in whiskeyleaks]

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Posted
2 hours ago, victory88 said:

Daily reminder of that Netanyahu is charged with numerous war crimes and is starving an entire population.  Not only are they starving an entire population, they are using food trucks as bait to shoot civilians.  Want to know how sick this gets, Israel has observation decks where their citizens can watch this happen.  

Israel has murdered and killed more journalists than world war 1, world war 2, Vietnam war, and Afghanistan war, Iraq war combined.

Israel has killed 233 UN aid workers.  Most recent one was shot driving a UN aid truck.  Who is the terrorist again?  Or is that word only for Muslims?

 

 

 

Thanks for sharing this.  Anyone who is extremely hawkish needs to volunteer themselves and their sons and daughters for these wars moving forward.  It always amazes me that people like Mark Levin, for instance, are ready to volunteer everyone else but themselves in conflicts such as these.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

You have to know that communications are being monitored at all times in the region, most likely everywhere actually, and some higher up asked about the condition of the facility after the strike and the reply was “Everything is perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”

Between satellite imagery of the activity around the sites and recovered conversations about the work to be done they’ll know in short order how effective the strikes were. I doubt the Iranians are sophisticated enough or have the organizational discipline to keep it quiet for long. 

Vast portions of this thread are dedicated to the idea that Iranians hid information on their nuclear program from inspectors with the IAEA under the previous agreement despite all audited and reported findings suggesting compliance with the agreement. No substantive proof of their non-compliance as ever been publicly disclosed. Assuming all of this was correct, it would be foolish to believe that Iran isn't sophisticated enough to continue to hide the true state of their nuclear program. 

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Posted

I figured it would be good to plug one of the really good youtube channels that started up with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The end of this particular video discusses the most recent strike. 

 

 

 

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Posted (edited)
24 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

You have to know that communications are being monitored at all times in the region, most likely everywhere actually, and some higher up asked about the condition of the facility after the strike and the reply was “Everything is perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”

Between satellite imagery of the activity around the sites and recovered conversations about the work to be done they’ll know in short order how effective the strikes were. I doubt the Iranians are sophisticated enough or have the organizational discipline to keep it quiet for long. 

Just gotta circle back on this for another datapoint - NYT has reported that the pentagon (link to mediaite's story, because I don't have a NYT sub) was literally feeding trump fake attack plans because they were so worried about him leaking on truth social

So, once again, lol at "organizational discipline". Lmao, even.

 

Our so-called """organizational discipline""" resulted in Iran having plenty of heads up to relocate their nuclear stockpile and us not materially slowing down their ability to produce a bomb. So we spent probably upwards of a couple billion dollars between all the support crew and equipment used, didn't achieve the stated strategic goal, and did it all without congressional approval. Wow what sophistication!!!

Edited by Captainant
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Posted
11 hours ago, Dahobbs said:

I don't think it is fair to call it a failure even if it didn't result in complete destruction of the facility. I also don't know what the purpose of randomly dropping smaller bombs are dirt would be. By all accounts, this was an extraordinary tactical success and a well coordinated strike. I doubt any of the military planners seriously expected there to be a high chance of complete destruction of the facility. 

They didn’t need to completely destroy the place, they knew dear leader would just say it was and half the country will believe it or pretend it’s true. And don’t @ me about fucking cloak room, this is the President of the fucking United States reporting on matters of international conflict with nuclear implications. 
 

image.thumb.jpeg.8d8409bd2dad4e32635eecbf1d4c932f.jpeg

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Posted
35 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

You have to know that communications are being monitored at all times in the region, most likely everywhere actually, and some higher up asked about the condition of the facility after the strike and the reply was “Everything is perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”

Between satellite imagery of the activity around the sites and recovered conversations about the work to be done they’ll know in short order how effective the strikes were. I doubt the Iranians are sophisticated enough or have the organizational discipline to keep it quiet for long. 

I have no doubt that we have a reasonably accurate damage assessment in hand.  I’m just not sure it’s in the President's hand, and if it is, if it would be allowed to contradict the result he proclaimed shortly after the attack.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Just gotta circle back on this for another datapoint - NYT has reported that the pentagon (link to mediaite's story, because I don't have a NYT sub) was literally feeding trump fake attack plans because they were so worried about him leaking on truth social

So, once again, lol at "organizational discipline". Lmao, even.

 

Our so-called """organizational discipline""" resulted in Iran having plenty of heads up to relocate their nuclear stockpile and us not materially slowing down their ability to produce a bomb. So we spent probably upwards of a couple billion dollars between all the support crew and equipment used, didn't achieve the stated strategic goal, and did it all without congressional approval. Wow what sophistication!!!

I get it. You hate all things associated with the current administration. I made no assessment of our own organizational discipline. You can point out the gaffes with Signal, and I would point out that no one saw the B2 raid coming when it did. 
 

Iran moving what material it had produced isn’t some 4D chess move. It was the obvious thing to do once they realized that their air defenses were useless and that their nuclear sites were targeted. The very fact that they were moved at all suggests the Iranians weren’t as confident in the bomb proof nature of their facilities as many on this board or knew at the very least that they’d have to dig it out. 
 

Supposing that that material did in fact make its way out of Fordow then there is still value in destroying or at least significantly delaying the use of those and other facilities for the foreseeable future. You don’t just throw you hands up and say “Fuck it” if one cow makes it out of the barn.

Lastly, it doesn’t take a lot of creative signals intelligence or satellite imagery to determine if a lot of concrete rebar etc is being ordered, sent to and delivered to places like Fordow or Natanz.

 

Posted
7 minutes ago, Goredho said:

I have no doubt that we have a reasonably accurate damage assessment in hand.  I’m just not sure it’s in the President's hand, and if it is, if it would be allowed to contradict the result he proclaimed shortly after the attack.

That’s fair. Now take the other view and suggest that SigInt probably picked up someone saying everything is fine, someone who knew they were being monitored, and that someone at DIA decided to leak that in a report because they don’t like the POTUs. 
 

That’s why I said the truth is that the program probably wasn’t destroyed, but was knocked on it ass for a while. 

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Posted
19 minutes ago, 'stache said:

They didn’t need to completely destroy the place, they knew dear leader would just say it was and half the country will believe it or pretend it’s true. And don’t @ me about fucking cloak room, this is the President of the fucking United States reporting on matters of international conflict with nuclear implications. 
 

image.thumb.jpeg.8d8409bd2dad4e32635eecbf1d4c932f.jpeg

Isn’t the assessment based on satellite radar that’s accurate down to like a couple inches or better? Like… the fuck?

Posted
37 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Vast portions of this thread are dedicated to the idea that Iranians hid information on their nuclear program from inspectors with the IAEA under the previous agreement despite all audited and reported findings suggesting compliance with the agreement. No substantive proof of their non-compliance as ever been publicly disclosed. Assuming all of this was correct, it would be foolish to believe that Iran isn't sophisticated enough to continue to hide the true state of their nuclear program. 

That’s a lot of assuming, and the Israelis have shown both the willingness and ability to hack their systems, track their personnel and lure their leadership into target sites. 
 

All that to say that such absolutism is dangerous. 

Posted
2 minutes ago, B00M said:

Isn’t the assessment based on satellite radar that’s accurate down to like a couple inches or better? Like… the fuck?

Signals intelligence means people talk, and we capture the conversations. They’re most certainly talking about the damage to those facilities. The only question is whether they’re being caught out or if they’re making deceptive communications. Add that to other observable means. 

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Posted
7 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Signals intelligence means people talk, and we capture the conversations. They’re most certainly talking about the damage to those facilities. The only question is whether they’re being caught out or if they’re making deceptive communications. Add that to other observable means. 

The radar doesn’t lie. We either caved the shit in or we didn’t 

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Supposing that that material did in fact make its way out of Fordow then there is still value in destroying or at least significantly delaying the use of those and other facilities for the foreseeable future. You don’t just throw you hands up and say “Fuck it” if one cow makes it out of the barn.

This is my concern, dude. Once we made the decision Israel forced us to back out of negotiations by unilaterally and preemptively bombing Iran before talks were complete, which set us on a course to end the program by kinetic means.

If we didn't get the job done for whatever reason, we're more likely to continue using force to complete the mission, which means more bombing. That said, if we don't have the intestinal fortitude to drop more bombs, then it was only a half-measure and all for naught.

Moreover, you've kind of convinced the Iranian regime -- if it wasn't already apparent -- that developing a nuke truly is the only path forward to saving your own skin.

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Posted
26 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Iran moving what material it had produced isn’t some 4D chess move. It was the obvious thing to do once they realized that their air defenses were useless and that their nuclear sites were targeted. The very fact that they were moved at all suggests the Iranians weren’t as confident in the bomb proof nature of their facilities as many on this board or knew at the very least that they’d have to dig it out. 

There was no way for anyone to be confident in what would happen. These weapons had never been used in a real world operation before. Whatever they thought or didn't think about the structural stability of their facility is entirely irrelevant, moving the material was the only move to make in the face of such uncertainty.

Posted
9 minutes ago, B00M said:

The radar doesn’t lie. We either caved the shit in or we didn’t 

It would be impressive if we have the ability to see through severaL hundred feet of rock and bunker concrete from space and make that assessment. 

8 minutes ago, bolverk said:

This is my concern, dude. Once we made the decision Israel forced us to back out of negotiations by unilaterally and preemptively bombing Iran before talks were complete, which set us on a course to end the program by kinetic means.

If we didn't get the job done for whatever reason, we're more likely to continue using force to complete the mission, which means more bombing. That said, if we don't have the intestinal fortitude to drop more bombs, then it was only a half-measure and all for naught.

Moreover, you've kind of convinced the Iranian regime -- if it wasn't already apparent -- that developing a nuke truly is the only path forward to saving your own skin.

The current cease fire an anything that comes from it with regard to Irans nuclear program will make it clear if the attack was just an expense firework show. 
 

The fact that Iran has produced some fissile material at the very least and possibly smuggled it out of Fordow ahead of any attack suggests that they weren’t deterred from the goal of a nuclear weapon before Israel started bombing them. 

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Posted
26 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Just gotta circle back on this for another datapoint - NYT has reported that the pentagon (link to mediaite's story, because I don't have a NYT sub) was literally feeding trump fake attack plans because they were so worried about him leaking on truth social

You should try reading the article because that is not what it says at all. 

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Posted
1 minute ago, Brian Fantana said:

There was no way for anyone to be confident in what would happen. These weapons had never been used in a real world operation before. Whatever they thought or didn't think about the structural stability of their facility is entirely irrelevant, moving the material was the only move to make in the face of such uncertainty.

Having any material at all produced at a facility who’s sole purpose was the manufacture of fuel for nuclear bombs be snuck out is kinda damning on its own. 

Posted
5 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

It would be impressive if we have the ability to see through severaL hundred feet of rock and bunker concrete from space and make that assessment. 

The current cease fire an anything that comes from it with regard to Irans nuclear program will make it clear if the attack was just an expense firework show. 
 

The fact that Iran has produced some fissile material at the very least and possibly smuggled it out of Fordow ahead of any attack suggests that they weren’t deterred from the goal of a nuclear weapon before Israel started bombing them. 

And, yet, they were compliant when a deal was in place. But now that Bibi has revealed his hand that regime change was his intent with Operation Rising Lion, the Iranian regime now knows their days are numbered if they don't get the bomb.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

It would be impressive if we have the ability to see through severaL hundred feet of rock and bunker concrete from space and make that assessment. 

 

You don’t think we can measure the height of the ground in the area before and after the strikes? We can, very accurately. It takes a lot of math to know if we caved the shit in, but thankfully we have computers and shit. Trump doesn’t trust it and I guess you don’t either 

Posted
2 minutes ago, bolverk said:

And, yet, they were compliant when a deal was in place. But now that Bibi has revealed his hand that regime change was his intent with Operation Rising Lion, the Iranian regime now knows their days are numbered if they don't get the bomb.

I’m not sure compliance of the “Ima hang onto this weapons grade fuel (or precursor to) just in case” nature is comforting in their hands. 
 

Again, I don’t know how close or not they were. None of us, as has been pointed out in this thread, were up all night worrying about Iranian nukes for years on end. 
 

OTOH, I can’t think of a time when I or most of the world wouldn’t have been overjoyed to find out that they Iranians have given up their nuclear ambitions for good. 
 

They may well be more determined than ever. If so their facilities are at the very least buried and likely damaged to some extent, and much of their military and nuclear program leadership has graduated to fully dead. 
 

We’ll see how it plays out until the next thing for everyone to get hysterical about is served up this week. 

Posted

The Bombing of Iran May Teach an Unwelcome Lesson on Nuclear Weapons
Will America’s pre-emptive strike discourage other countries from pursuing a weapon — or just the opposite?

It has been nearly two decades since any country elbowed its way into the club of nuclear-armed nations. President Trump, with his bombing of three Iranian nuclear installations last weekend, has vowed to keep the door shut.

Whether Mr. Trump’s pre-emptive strike will succeed in doing that is hard to predict, so soon after the attack and the fragile cease-fire that has followed. But already it is stirring fears that Iran, and other countries, will draw a very different conclusion than the one the White House intended: that having a bomb is the only protection in a threatening world.

The last country to get one, North Korea, has never faced such an attack. After years of defying demands to dismantle its nuclear program, it is now viewed as largely impregnable. Mr. Trump exchanged friendly letters with its dictator, Kim Jong-un, and met him twice in a fruitless effort to negotiate a deal. In Iran’s case, Mr. Trump deployed B-2 bombers just weeks after making a fresh diplomatic overture to its leaders.

“The risks of Iran acquiring a small nuclear arsenal are now higher than they were before the events of last week,” said Robert J. Einhorn, an arms control expert who negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration. “We can assume there are a number of hard-liners who are arguing that they should cross that nuclear threshold.”

Iran would face formidable hurdles to producing a bomb even if it made a concerted dash for one, Mr. Einhorn said, not least the knowledge that if the United States and Israel detect such a move, they will strike again. It is far from clear that Iran’s leaders, isolated, weakened and in disarray, want to provoke them.

Yet the logic of proliferation looms large in a world where the nuclear-armed great powers — the United States, Russia and China — are viewed as increasingly unreliable and even predatory toward their neighbors. From the Persian Gulf and Central Europe to East Asia, analysts said, nonnuclear countries are watching Iran’s plight and calculating lessons they should learn from it.

“Certainly, North Korea doesn’t rue the day it acquired nuclear weapons,” said Christopher R. Hill, who led lengthy, ultimately unsuccessful, talks with Pyongyang in 2007 and 2008 to try to persuade it to dismantle its nuclear program.

The lure of the bomb, Mr. Hill said, has become stronger for America’s allies in the Middle East and Asia. Since World War II, they have sheltered under an American security umbrella. But they now confront a president, in Mr. Trump, who views alliances as incompatible with his vision of “America First.”

“I’d be very careful with the assumption that there is a U.S. nuclear umbrella,” said Mr. Hill, who served as ambassador to South Korea, Iraq, Poland, and Serbia under Democratic and Republican presidents. “Countries like Japan and South Korea are wondering whether they can rely on the U.S.”

Quote

 

Support for developing nuclear weapons has risen in South Korea, though its newly elected president, Lee Jae-myung, has vowed to improve relations with North Korea. In 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed a deal with Seoul to involve it more in nuclear planning with the United States, in part to head off a push by South Korean politicians and scientists to develop their own nuclear weapons capability.

In Japan, the public has long favored disarmament, a legacy of the American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But it has begun debating whether to store nuclear weapons from the United States on its soil, as some members of NATO do. Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister, said that if Ukraine had kept some of its Soviet-era bombs, it might have avoided a Russian invasion.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons early in that conflict gave pause to the Biden administration about how aggressively to arm the Ukrainian military. It also deepened fears that other revisionist powers could use nuclear blackmail to intimidate their neighbors.

The lesson of Ukraine could end up being, “If you have nuclear weapons, keep them. If you don’t have them yet, get them, especially if you lack a strong defender like the U.S. as your ally and if you have a beef with a big country that could plausibly lead to war,” wrote Bruce Riedel and Michael E. O’Hanlon, analysts at the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, in 2022.

Saudi Arabia, an ally of the United States and archrival of Iran, has watched Tehran’s nuclear ambitions with alarm. Experts say it would feel huge pressure to develop its own weapon if Iran ever obtained one. The United States has tried to reassure the Saudis by dangling assistance to a civil nuclear program, but those negotiations were interrupted by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

And yet, for all the predictions of a regional arms race, it has yet to occur. Experts say that is a testament to the success of nonproliferation policies, as well as to the checkered history of countries that pursued weapons.

The Middle East is a messy landscape of dashed nuclear dreams. Iraq, Syria and Libya all had their programs dismantled by diplomacy, sanctions or military force. In the category of cautionary tales, Libya’s is perhaps the most vivid: Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Eight years later, after a NATO-backed military operation toppled his government, he crawled out of a drainpipe to face a brutal death at the hands of his own people.

Iran’s strategy of aggressively enriching uranium, while stopping short of a bomb, did not ultimately protect it either.

“To the extent that people are looking at Iran as a test case, Trump has shown that its strategy is not a guarantee that you will prevent a military attack,” said Gary Samore, a professor at Brandeis University who worked on arms control negotiations in the Obama and Clinton administrations.

Mr. Samore said it was too soon to say how the Israeli and American strikes on Iran would affect the calculus of other countries. “How does this end?” he said. “Does it end with a deal? Or is Iran left to pursue a nuclear weapon?”

Experts on proliferation are, by nature, wary. But some are trying to find a silver lining in the events of the last week. Mr. Einhorn said that in delivering on his threat to bomb a nuclear-minded Iran, Mr. Trump had sent a reassuring message to American allies facing their own nuclear insecurities.

“In Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing,” Mr. Einhorn said, “they’ve taken notice not just of the reach and capacity of the U.S. military, but the willingness of this president to use that capability.”

 

 

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