I imagine every reasonably-sized country looking at this and thinking: "well, we'd be idiots not to have nuclear weapons by any means necessary."

This will be one of the single-most proliferation-inducing events in history, maybe save Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The opposite. They're thinking "if we try to do this, we will die, because their intelligence knows where we are at all times".

This war is quite paradigm shifting in multiple ways, and I'm hopeful it serves as a strong deterrent. No longer will soldiers be the first to die. The leadership is now first to die, and within a week. That significantly alters the incentives for pursuing war. This was never the case until today.

To be fair. I think what happened in Ukraine did far more to cause nations to think like this.

The US convinced Ukraine to give up its nukes and return them to Russia. Russia was supposed to never attack in exchange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Yep, that's how it ends. I expect, there will be many many countries with nukes in 2030. Even a country like Poland, which is part of Nato, announced that it will seek to acquire nuclear weapons in the future.

We started thinking that after seeing Palestine get bombed and US vetoing every attempt at aid. We used to be a neutral country since independence, but Ukraine and Gaza proved that the world will just stand aside and watch the neutral countries get exterminated by nuclear nations.

I think you put a few too many negatives in that first sentence, and are missing a clause. As-is, you're just imagining them not thinking something.

The Russia-Ukraine war already did that. Ukraine let us talk them into giving up their nukes, and see what happened.

Iran having nukes would mean peace in the Middle East.

Any self respecting dictator could see the writing on the wall after Gadaffi, or for that matter, Sadam. A domestic nuclear program though is still not a simple proposition.

I wouldn’t be surprised if North Korea is now doubling its efforts and even offering Russia additional resources to help it acquire nuclear capabilities.

This is obviously correct. Nuclear weapons = sovereignty. UN recognition is a piece of paper.

9 countries exist. So much for self-determination.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an end to non-proliferation treaty and large nuclear alliances.

You say that but Iran couldn’t even escalate their rhetoric post-strike because “Every American is now a legitimate target” is now a tired refrain rather than a feared declaration.

The lesson here is not to make idle threats against half of the world that you don’t honestly mean.

History disagrees with you, and Iran is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism. They were even providing Russia with arms for their invasion of Ukraine. Let's not equate them with many others, such as Poland, etc. Iran absolutely should not be allowed under any circumstances to have a nuclear weapon. If they were as close as what intelligence seems to indicate (though I know that's hard to believe after the Iraq war, but we aren't in a ground war so the burden of proof is understandably less) then I frankly don't think it would have mattered if it were Kamala, Biden, or Trump in office. The facilities were getting bombed.

The scenario was already war gamed during the Biden administration, it was already a possible outcome. The G7 already backed this idea that Iran can't have this before, and they'll do it again. The US doesn't stand alone on this, Saudi Arabia and basically everyone in the region and world doesn't want Iran having a nuke sans Russia/China. I'm not even sure if Russia/China really want it either. It's just common sense.

I don't follow your logic.

You're saying that there exists some country capable of a nuclear weapons program (an exceedingly difficult thing), that for some reason has not actually built one, and now that they see Iran pummeled for trying to build theirs... is now incentivized to finally go for it??

The issue is that a nuclear armed Iran (and remember that Iran is largely detested in the middle east, and is broadly considered to be a destabilizing enemy) would result in the rest of the middle east feeling compelled to quickly pursue their own nuclear weapons programs. No one wants an nuclear armed Iran.