Everyone asking whether Tehran will race for a weapon is picturing centrifuge halls and ten-year timelines.
Karen Kwiatkowski, who spent a career inside the Pentagon, thinks the question is quainter than the world it lives in:
"nukes are cheap and easy, and our nukes are very old"
Her logic runs like an arms bazaar. The technology is eighty years old.
China, Russia and North Korea all hold newer designs than anything in the American stockpile, and Pakistan has already offered to fire its own weapons in Iran's defense, which might be the cheapest deterrent ever priced.
A country with friends doesn't need a program. It needs a checkbook.
Then she flips the whole premise, and this is the part worth sitting with.
A proliferation wave may never come, because states that watched this war may conclude America can now be contained without one.
The asymmetry nobody says out loud: Washington can't shop.
Nobody sells to the United States, nobody helps it modernize, and rebuilding a tactical arsenal from scratch is money and stomach the country doesn't have.
@karen4the6th @WeTheBrandon
