President Donald Trump’s most consistent, and perhaps most compelling, justification for choosing to go to war with Iran was the “imminent threat” of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons with which it could not just destroy Israel but the entire Middle East, or cause a nuclear holocaust in Europe, or even threaten the U.S. via the intercontinental ballistic missiles he also alleged Iran was close to developing. He has repeatedly boasted of preventing a nuclear war and has regularly insisted that skyrocketing gas prices and other significant costs of the war are worth it since he saved the world. He even says it to kids. “We would have had Iran with a nuclear weapon, and maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now,” Trump told a group of schoolchildren in the Oval Office last week.

None of this was or is true. Iran was nowhere near developing a nuclear weapon or ICBMs, according to the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community and credible independent experts. Still, Trump has continued to insist that the Iranian nuclear threat was grave and imminent and furthermore that his war has ensured — or is ensuring, or will eventually ensure — the elimination of that threat. But after ten weeks of war, amid a tenuous cease-fire and worsening standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, the prospects for either a military or negotiated resolution to the conflict, let alone one that forestalls further efforts by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, seem dim. In the longer term, the war could amplify the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran by increasing the Iranian regime’s determination to pursue a bomb even while damaging its technical capability to do so.

The full scope of the war’s impact on Iran’s nuclear program is not yet clear. No one disputes that the U.S. air strikes on Iran’s nuclear-enrichment sites this past June pushed back the regime’s timeline for developing a nuclear weapon, but it is believed to remain in possession of over 400 kilograms of highly enriched (60 percent) uranium — enough to build up to ten nuclear weapons. That material is buried in sites deep underground, out of the reach of air strikes, where it would require a long, highly complex, and risky special-forces operation to retrieve and secure. (It would also be difficult if not impossible for Iran to recover in secret.) This is in addition to perhaps 2,100 kilograms of plutonium, which Iran could potentially weaponize and use for another 200 bombs and has not been directly addressed in previous or ongoing talks over the country’s nuclear program. U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the recent U.S. and Israeli air strikes had no significant impact on the timeline for Iran developing a nuclear weapon. The........

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