Comment by throwaway290
5 months ago
> I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care
All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
> if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea
They could. Russia bought weapons from Iran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_drones) so why no the other way around
Caveat for all of this: I'm guessing wildly on that and you shouldn't take this as deeper than armchair/pub talk.
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
As for "why not": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.