The Wall Street Journal:

By  Laurence Norman

Iran’s decision to launch more than 300 missiles and drones in its first direct attack on Israeli soil earlier this month showed an appetite for risk that is putting renewed focus on Tehran’s nuclear program and whether it will continue to refrain from developing a bomb.

Close observers of Iran’s nuclear development have long believed the country’s top leaders have calculated that the costs of building a bomb outweigh the benefits. As a threshold nuclear power with weapon capabilities within reach, Iran already enjoys considerable deterrence power without risking the war that could come if an attempt to build a bomb is detected.

But that thesis has been shaken this year. As tensions with Israel grew, top Iranian officials have made a string of statements hinting that Tehran is close to mastering the technicalities of building a bomb.

Hours before Israel hit back at Iran, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Tehran could reverse its restraint on building a bomb if Israel struck its nuclear facilities....

Iran’s failure to damage Israeli military sites during this month’s attacks could persuade Tehran to seek a more powerful deterrent. Zimmt says challenges in controlling and operating the proxy network, whose interests don’t always line up with Tehran’s, also could add pressure on Iran to pursue a bomb.

Iranian officials have fueled such thinking with a pattern of references to the country’s near-nuclear capabilities. In an interview broadcast in February, former Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, a key figure in Iran’s past nuclear work, said Iran has crossed “all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology,” comments later echoed by the current head of Iran’s atomic agency, Mohammad Eslami.

U.S. intelligence services and international officials have said as recently as March they don’t believe Iran has resumed the nuclear weapons program it is thought to have pursued in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet the country has moved forward on several fronts needed to develop a bomb, including via studies and activities that it says are civilian work. 

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