Iran was hiding nuclear material during the duration JCPOA was active. They were declared in violation of the NPT by the IAEA recently for actions undertaken between 2009-2018.
You're right that the IAEA has indeed pointed to Iran's past undeclared nuclear material and activities, leading to NPT safeguard violations for the 2009-2018 period. However, it's also important to distinguish between those historical undeclared issues and the specific JCPOA compliance. For the duration it was active and before the US withdrawal, the IAEA consistently verified that Iran was adhering to its JCPOA commitments regarding its declared program. The argument is often that while those past issues were concerning, the JCPOA still provided a robust framework for monitoring Iran's active program, which was then dismantled
Iran was objectively not in compliance though [1]. The IAEA just didn’t know they weren’t so they gave Iran a seal of approval. Israel had always claimed that Iran was hiding material, which convinced Trump to leave the JCPOA, but the IAEA could only corroborate it later.
Perhaps we should be making the argument that Trump shouldn’t have only gonna off of Israeli intel, but he ended up being correct that Iran wasn’t correctly reporting their enrichment stockpile, which was a provision of JCPOA. The reason why JCPOA wasn’t revived is actually because of Iran refusing to cooperate about what they did with the undeclared nuclear material.
Yeah, that's not very honest position. You have to decide if you want to squeeze them out or make things right.
If they hid things and the agreement wasn't just trashed, that could have been a scandal that gets resolved on the path to peace. It could happen for many reasons, maybe they don't trust the West to uphold their part and wanted an insurance policy, maybe it was division within. It doesn't matter that much, it's not like they made the bomb already and were about to hit once everyone lowers their guard.
Later what we had was Iran that was on the table, trying to play nice and that was destroyed probably because of the ego of a guy who couldn't handle to stick with the agreement signed by someone he hates.
Interesting way to play nice by having dozens of secret sites that nobody knew about (nuclear archive) and recently taking enrichment to 60% (they've been caught with over 80%) and dabbling in metallization which have only military applications.
Well, whoever did that was proven right(from their standing point + Ukraine). Apparently you can't trust USA and give up your nukes. If you don't have nukes they don't honor the agreements and guarantees and even bomb you.
Unfortunately the American attitudes will result in proliferation. Not the Iranian ones.
Giving up nukes was never the intention. They would've slow-boiled the frog and we would one day wake up with a nuclear iran (with icmbs! - not banned under jpoa) if they were smart about it like dprk. Unfortunately for mullahs they weren't and got cocky and overextended. Then 10/7 happened and the rest is like they say history
Maybe or maybe not, we will never know that. Who knows how things play out when a country is integrated back in the international system and have something to lose when if get caught on checks. Maybe there would have been a book about how Iran continued its clandestine nuke program but eventually dismantled it as its society and economy normalized and having that had no benefits.
Now we know the timeline where agreements are not honored by the US.
Look, I don't know why you believe so much in the imaginary timeline but maybe Iran would have been like Israel: having the bomb and not talking about it.
Who knows, it's all speculation at this point. The current reality is that if you don't have a nuke you get invaded. Everyone will have nuke soon. Those who fail will be destroyed because agreements, international laws etc doesn't mean anything anymore.
Why are you suddenly arguing against Israel? I mean he’s we know they have hidden nuclear weapons and will not enter into any deals or allow inspection. But they are on our side so we don’t care about that.
silly argument. iran is not a tiny country surrounded by much larger countries that want to run them into the sea. they should have invested that 500B into conventional forces instead - be a lot safer for that as a country (except that would threaten the regime).
I find this argument hard to believe. Israel had complete air superiority for a week and was monitoring all the sites, routinely hitting the above ground nuclear facilities. I’m skeptical Iran could transfer anything significant from Fordow and not be immediately spotted by Israel.
> The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
I still consider the main report to not be substantiated. Israel claims that they know where the stockpile is and that they have been monitoring sites[1][2]. Some official even claimed it’s mostly under the rubble. Not sure why one is to believed and the other not when neither have hard evidence.
Israel could not spot hundreds of Hamas terrorists rehearsing the 7 of October attacks, and using cell phones for weeks, 20 miles from their Urim base in the Negev desert. [1]
Are people really going to pick and choose which unsubstantiated reports[1] to believe instead of just waiting for actual proof? The narrative has shifted with breakneck speed from “WW3” to “it was pointless anyways”.
Wait until you learn how many off-the-shelf consumer devices contain a wifi capable microcontroller like the esp8266 and dont need or declare wifi capabilities...
Unfortunately, most of that will go towards developments that won’t be realized for years. More importantly, I’m not even sure the subsidies for manufacturing would help Intel’s financial situation — they’ve been exploring spinning off manufacturing for several months now.
The US is still the runaway leader for funding in research. American expenditure for R&D was 940 billion dollars while the EU’s was 411 billion [1]. I doubt Canada, Switzerland, the Uk, and AusNZ combined come close to matching that gap. If we get the proposed defense budget, that R&D spending will actually go up, just not in matters many people care about immediately.
With the zeitgeist shifting, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an exodus of people in the soft sciences and liberal arts though. It’s not like they’re leaving a lot on the table if they leave America.
A close relative is in fairly rigorous data science in climate based littoral oceanographic research (maintains a couple R packages) doing PhD, funding cut as part of reprisals against a certain governor
exploring offers at 3 Canadian universities
so, only a couple hours drive further north to continue fairly rigorous data science research
yeah, we don't need that "soft science" nonsense here
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
China could also use the US’ dependence on it as leverage to discourage them from intervening in Taiwan. We just saw this play out with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We routinely see Turkey threaten the EU with migrants over the bloc’s reliance on Turkey. We also saw Azerbaijan make a move for Artsakh knowing the EU needed their gas following the invasion of Ukraine. I believe China would prefer being able to extort the US rather than face the possibility of fighting an unbowed US.
The opportunity cost of moving to Canada is too great for professionals in STEM, medicine, economics, or law. However, that opportunity cost seems to be less significant for professionals in the humanities. Ironically, the Project 2025 writers are probably salivating at the idea that the US sees an exodus of liberal academics in the humanities.
If one considers life to begin at conception, abortion unambiguously violates the commandment not to kill. I grew up Adventist, and contrary to OP, I didn’t know anyone pro-abortion. Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion. The Bible doesn’t command Christians to own slaves and keeping other commandments literally would conflict with chattel slavery, but it does command not killing (murder).
> Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion.
The largest organized religious group in the United States is an evangelical community founded specifically in support of slavery, and against a movement within its former parent community to oppose slavery.
Evangelicals, did not, as a while, oppose chattel slavery, whether for literalist or other reasons.
I grew up in the Adventist church. I am still a Christian (although no longer Adventist). While I don’t agree with it at all, it is actually true that there are some weird pockets within the denomination that either overtly or tacitly approve abortion. It’s very bizarre.
Not just tacitly approved, the church has run hospitals that have performed a lot of them[1].
> Early Adventism published positions in harmony with the Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion, though it was not active in that movement. The church produced its first set of abortion guidelines in 1970, when American attitudes toward abortion had changed and some of the church's hospitals were experiencing in creasing pressure from their communities to provide abortion services.
> Less than a year after the first set of abortion guidelines was developed, the church revised and expanded it. The resulting liberalized guidelines have allowed Adventist hospitals a great deal of freedom in their abortion practices, a freedom that has resulted in a large number of abortions being performed. Although the church has been hesitant to let it be known, at the present it is clearly not, in either policy or practice, limiting its medical institutions to therapeutic abortions.
^ From 1991.
I think the church, historically, has been so conservative that they are unwilling to contort the scripture to get it to support their political ambitions to the same extent other churches are (although lately that's not so true). This is similar to how the Southern Baptists initially supported and ran an op-ed praising the Roe v Wade ruling[2].
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