So just for listeners to preview your article and your core argument in a nutshell, what does that look like in practice? And if you look back over the last decade, can you just give us that initial overview of how Iran has leveraged nuclear latency as a deterrence to promote its interests or tried to? And then we'll dive into some of the details in just a minute here.

Yeah, so I mean, I think as we all know, U.S. policy has long worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

But I think a related concern that the United States has always had and the goal that the United States has always had has been to prevent Iran from becoming a threshold state.

The Iran nuclear deal back from 2015 is a good example of that, where it tried to keep Iran one year from being able to break out to a nuclear weapon.

And so I think it's fairly easy to understand why, right? Because Iran could use that latency and that threshold status to either implicitly or explicitly threaten to go nuclear to try and deter or coerce the United States.

As Iran gets closer to nuclear weapons, it's obviously harder to stop it from actually crossing that threshold diplomatically and militarily.

And I think we've worried that Iran, even at the threshold, could potentially fuel proliferation in the region, in the Middle East.

How do we interpret or how should U.S. policymakers interpret this rhetorical escalation, especially when it regards the degradation of Iran's deterrent pillars that was happening about that time of proxies and missiles and pushing Tehran to rely more heavily on possible nuclear signaling or nuclear thresholding?

How is that going to be different than the 2015 agreement? Um, a lot of people we [laughs] spoke to said that, you know, we're just going to start, we're just going to return to where we were in 2015, and that this agreement will be touted as something new, but it may not very well be that much different.

Well, we don't know, right? We don't even know if we're going to get a final nuclear agreement.

What appears to be in the MOU, although we, we just have obviously a lot of spin from, from both sides, um, but it appears to contain clauses that say Iran will commit not to produce nuclear weapons, which, as you noted, Iran has made before, and it made both as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, uh, but also that clause was, was in the joint conference, Joint Conference of Plan of Action in 2015.

The two sides still appear pretty far apart on negotiating what some, what an extended moratorium on enrich might, enrichment might look like, with the US wanting a 20-year moratorium and Iran wanting something much shorter.

Uh, they still have to work out all of the monitoring and verification that would be used to, uh, verify Iran's compliance.

Those details were really critical in the 2015 nuclear, uh, deal and spelled, spelled out in great detail ahead of time.

One of the things I'm worried about is there appears to be a, uh, potentially significant amount of sanctions relief for Iran early on under this memorandum of understanding, including potentially on frozen funds, including potentially, uh, waivers for oil exports.

What did each of the warring parties lose and gain at all in this war?

Eric, assuming we are focusing on the nuclear issue, and that this is not about getting rid of the Iranian regime or supporting protesters or anything else, what is the residual issue with respect to the nuclear program that justifies or could be addressed with a massive buildup of force and a resulting medium-to-substantial campaign?

Yeah, no, I mean, I think the, I think the relative value of any further US military action, uh, that sort of foc- is focused on Iran's nuclear program as sort of a, a counterproliferation strike, if you will, is relatively low because of the impact of, of Midnight Hammer, right? We know, uh, the two major enrichment facilities that Iran had at the time, uh, Natanz and Fordow, are offline.

All right? Iran's no longer enriching there, and they're, they're most likely unusable.

We know, uh, that the places where Iran has potentially stored its sixty percent enriched uranium, which is really worrying because that's very close to the ninety percent, uh, weapons-grade level, and actually, you could, you could actually use sixty percent directly in, in a crude nuclear device in a pinch.

Uh, so we're really worried about that material, but that is probably located in tunnels, uh, that are not penetrable by US munitions, and that Iran has sort of worked to backfill to make it even harder to get at with any type of strike.

And so we're not gonna be able to eliminate that via airstrikes, and so the, the, the, the overall counterproliferation value is, is quite low.

I wouldn't rule out that there's some kind of, like, target of opportunity, right? Like, if Iran moved some of that material somewhere or, you know, you could, you could strike a, a facility, a military facility called Parchin, where Iran has done some, it made some efforts to reconstitute, where it was, uh, allegedly involved in some of the, the, the work around actually building that device, right? Like building some of the components that could be used for a device, but the, the menu of targets is far less, and the impact would be far less than it was back in June of twenty twenty-five.

I was gonna say, other than the deaths of fifty thousand people, or whatever the number is, w- what has changed? Of course, that's a kind of a big thing, but what, what, what are the parameters of, of the reason why what made sense in two thousand and fifteen, two thousand and sixteen, doesn't make sense now?