To the contrary, the war has proven to Iran how critical their nuclear program is to the regime's, and maybe Iran's, survival.

US wouldn't go into such a war against Russia, because of their nuclear program. They wouldn't have attacked Iran if they already had a standing nuclear program with strategic nuclear weaponary.

What are their options now? Strategically focus on rebuilding their defense capabilities with most likely the same result in 10-25 years or strategically focus on nuclear weapons so that adversaries won't rage war against them like that again in 10-25 years?

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gyanchawdhary 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You are theoretically right to assume this but practically this will never happen (i.e iran's nuclear ambitions) .. let me explain

As Putin once quipped, "having the desire to do something is very different from having the ability to do something" ..

Iran can desire as much as they like to "want" and "have" a nuclear program .. but the objective truth is that US just crushed the intellectual and philosophical source of this desire by eliminating their rolodex of ayatollahs ... whether you agree or not with this approach is a different matter but US has been successful in scrubbing the source of that desire so aggressively that the new hopefuls are simply exhausted to play the nuclear long game ..

Now at a personal note, I live between Dubai and London (previously Hamburg) and all these places have a significant Iranian diaspore and not a single one of those people in my circle is against what the US did and is doing in Iran ..

What hilarious though is that some HN folks have such vitriolic hate for Trump (based on the comments of the OP's post) that they'd rather see Iran have a nuclear capability than admitting that the defanging of Iran's nuclear program has been a good thing for the world ...

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defrost 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> and not a single one of those people in my circle is against what the US did and is doing in Iran ..

Interestingly the Iranians I've talked to (Eg: a married couple both with nuclear physics degrees from Iran who bailed out long long ago) would prefer to see Iran still being monitored and kept in check - they are concerned that Trump has not defanged the HEU program, merely scattered and set it back somewhat, while at the same time increasing the likelihood of rogue use of HEU and or those cache's being fed into an actual unchecked weapons program elsewhere.

A big issue, not so much discussed, is where exactly has the HEU ended up, in how many parts, and under whose control. Was it buried under rubble? Is it secure in a void? Was it moved and sequestered into multiple parts before Trump went loco?

	▲	HDThoreaun 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Expats are expats for a reason. They tend to not be aligned with the domestic views of the country they left. Often the leave exactly because their politics are incompatible with local ideology.