Iran’s Art of Building a Nuclear Weapon

_INTRODUCTION_

In the days before the joint American-Israeli campaign against Iran, Tucker Carlson mounted a last-minute lobbying effort to stop President Trump from going forward. Allied with Megyn Kelly, he wielded their combined audience to make the case against striking Iran.

After the operation began, Trump denounced them both. He said Kelly "oughta study her history book a little bit," and dismissed Carlson's influence entirely, saying he has “lost his way” — this after Carlson had called Trump "disgusting" for going through with the strikes.’

Central to the case being made by these commentators, and others like them, is a distortion of the context and history surrounding the conflict, the Iranian threat, and above all, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

Both showed their audiences a montage of clips, starting in the late 1990s, of a young Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Iran was just months or weeks away from having nuclear weapons. Year after year, the warnings were the same — Iran was so close to having the bomb.

When I first began to understand world politics, I saw these warnings pop up again and again. Finally, I decided this was a classic hoax, not much different from the climate alarmist refrain that we have ten years left before we all die.

The warnings kept coming. And weeks later, Iran still didn't have the bomb. I don't blame the skeptics.

But Tucker Carlson, for all his recent lies, is — or at least was — a smart man and a gifted reporter. He has virtually unlimited access to people who can give him answers. And though he now claims to be seeking the truth, I firmly believe he has abandoned that pursuit in favor of an ideology that sees Israel and the Jewish religion as a threat to American stability. He has advanced that ideology by conjuring "facts" out of thin air, manipulation, and leaving out important context that his viewers deserve.

So, I want to share what I found while following a recent rabbit hole sparked by Tucker's montage of Bibi's warnings about nuclear weapons. In this piece, I explain what I believe he should have:

The creation of the nuclear bomb essentially created the modern world we live in. It determines which nations are sovereign, which have power, and which do not. By the end of this piece, you should understand that — and understand how the world works a little better.

_THE MODERN WORLD_

The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China are the five "official" nuclear states under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, a mostly symbolic pact in which the countries that already had nukes promised to eventually disarm, while everyone else promised not to build them.