ELI5 How come the US goes after people who can enrich Uranium? If I had a country and smart people to build one but was just build energies why does the US have to intervene ie Iran.?

The common answer is nuclear proliferation. Power is one thing but it’s just a hop away from weapons.

The international community has a vested interest in some of the more… reactionary… countries not having weapons of mass destruction.

That said, the reality isn’t so simple and often these arguments make for good excuses to justify acting on other interests.

It’s an incredibly complex topic.

Normal enrichment for power and domestic use is around 5%. Iran is enriching to 60% which is only ever used as a precursor to building weapons.

That said there are no good reasons other than to distract from the genocide in Gaza. This whole thing is a sideshow so they can finish the job there first.

There's established rules about operating your nuclear program that says don't use it for producing nuclear weapons, only for nuclear energy or scientific research. If you start doing things like enrich uranium for weapons the existing nuclear powers don't like it. The US finds this a useful mechanism for achieving foreign policy goals.

They're worried about nuclear weapons.

They want a monopoly on Force. Simple as that. They want to be able to enforce their will upon countries and nuclear weapons would stop them from doing that. That's the entire reason.

Because the USA goes after anyone that fucked with their financial interests.

All posturing and bullying aside ….

Building a nuclear weapon is “easy” and the knowledge is generally available. However enriching uranium is much tougher. For many decades the most effective way to limit nuclear weapon proliferation has been to restrict enrichment efforts.

I hope you’re not questioning why it’s a good idea to limit how many countries have nuclear weapons. Sure, the ones that have them are due for plenty of criticism but you can’t escape the math of more countries with nuclear weapons means more chances of someone using one.

As a citizen of the only country to use a nuke in anger …. I’m fine with everyone else calling that out assuming they’re serious about preventing it from ever happening again

For a while, there was generally an international consensus that nuclear weapon proliferation was bad, mainly because it was thought that the likelihood of using nuclear weapons would go up as more nations had them.

It was wrong for Trump to ditch the Iranian nuclear deal, but the original deal was a deal with most of the major nuclear powers including Russia and China. There was an international interest to prevent nuclear proliferation.

I don't think it is right for the US to attack Iran regarding nuclear proliferation as Trump has been negotiating in bad faith, but that it is the idea where developing nuclear weapons is a bad thing which requires an international response comes from.

Because you could easily make a bomb if you're good at enriching. And they really, really don't trust Iran. Other countries are allowed to use nuclear power, including non-Western ones like Brazil and Mexico.

It's also worth noting the standard reactor designs need slight enrichment, but not all do. Canada's CANDU reactors have run on natural uranium for decades, and could in theory run on depleted uranium if you were to mix in plutonium or other actinides extracted from nuclear waste.