They could have done it long ago.....they decided to not do it....being a moron hurts in this particular universe.
They tried to do it. It was estimated that their breakout time was down to a year or so back when Stuxnet was released.
At that point they had no need to produce refined Uranium themselves, because they only had a single nuclear power plant, which the Russians built for them, and it came with a contract to get all of their Uranium from them.
Iran's program back then was too small in scope to provide enough Uranium for a nuclear power grid, but it was more than large enough to start creating nukes, and it was also optimized to refine Uranium to 60%, which is only done as a stepping stone to 90%, because there's no other use for 60%.
The reason that Iran doesn't have nukes has always been that Mossad and CIA have been on them like ugly on an ape, not because they're swell guys who don't wanna commit genocide anymore.
The Iranians just finally came to the conclusion that dedicating so much of the country's resources to a program that's gonna get squashed anyways wasn't working out for them.
It made more sense for them to shift their focus away from running headlong after the dream, towards building a massive stockpile of conventional weapons which could be used to keep Israel and the US at bay, at which point they could build nukes with impunity.
Iran clearly had enough weapons to put up a good fight. The US and Israel hit them with over 10,000 strikes and Iran still has modern capabilities.
The window of opportunity* for America and Israel to put down an Iranian nuclear program was quickly closing.
The weapons systems that Iran had at the beginning of this war were being built and tested from behind the cover of the JCPOA. Iran was even testing ballistic missiles after they signed the JCPOA, which was in direct contravention of their agreement.
For leftists to claim that the JCPOA was perfect, and Iran was always in compliance, and the world was gonna be safe forever because of the JCPOA, was just bullshit. If Trump pulled a baby out of a burning building, leftists would say "He only saved it because it was white!", and if it wasn't white, they'd say "He only saved it because it's the anti-Christ!"
* When people say "How did Mossad fail so brutally on Oct 7th?", the real answer, that almost no one will truly understand, is that
failure on that day was actually a success, because if there was no Oct 7th, then starting this Iran war would have been brutally unpopular, even in Israel. And the war needed to start before Iran became too powerful to deal with anymore.
Therefor the world needed to be see the Palestinians do Palestinian things. They needed to see their ugliness and brutality first-hand in order to understand the kind of people that Palestinians are, and have always been, going back generations. Just remember that even before partition, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was living in Germany as an honoured guest of the Nazis, and he was their Arabic propagandist, broadcasting anti-Semitic messaging to the ME, and encouraging attacks on the allied forces. He was the
religious leader of the Palestinians, and a throughly vile, evil, irredeemable piece of shit. Their actual
religion was to be shit-people. Also, when the Mufti was there, he was working/plotting with Hitler to prevent Jews from migrating to Palestine. He was working with other countries to get them to prevent Jews from escaping. This is all from
before the partition.
Before Oct 7th, did you know that Palestinians would hold street celebrations to spit on the nkd corpses of women whom their soldiers had rpd and murdered? Did you know that Palestinian children would be out there spitting on those corpses?
If you did know that, do you think that you could have explained that to people around you, and have them believe it?
Even now, people don't believe it, because leftist media didn't
show it. Leftists discuss the Israeli war without remembering Oct 7th, and they do it while not understanding that this is not a random flare-up, this is yet another round of the "Iran and the Palestinians desperately need to commit genocide against the Israelis" real-life drama.
Iran and the Palestinians, along with many other Arab nations, have been plotting genocide against Israel for many
generations.
Again: plotting and
openly promising genocide for generations. It's no secret. Everyone should know that. Yet many do not.
Bill Clinton even said that the Palestinians wouldn't accept the fantastic peace deal that he helped broker for the Palestinians because their end goal always remained "genocide against Israel."
Stop looking at this as a "what Obama did vs what Trump is doing" issue, and look at it as just another chapter of "Iran and the Palestinians still aren't willing to let Israelis remain alive". Clinton tried. Obama tried. Everyone tried. The problem endured. The problem remains to this very day. Even at this very moment, the goal of Hamas and the IRGC is not to survive, it it to see a genocide against Israelis. That's their goal line. Nothing else will satisfy them.