Sen. Tom Cotton, who is still very much against any negotiated nonproliferation agreement with Iran and who continues to be a prime contender for the title of America's Dumbest Senator, says that the United States could instead simply launch a military strike on Iran
that would set Iran back to "day zero."
“You can destroy facilities. I don’t think any military expert in the United States or elsewhere would say the U.S. military is not capable to setting Iran’s nuclear facilities back to day zero,” Cotton said. “Can we eliminate it forever? No, because any advanced industrialized country can develop nuclear weapons in four to seven years, from zero. But we can set them back to day zero.”
There's at least three problems with that statement, all of which center on what Tom Cotton supposes
day zero to mean. He seems to be proposing military action so massive that every aspect of Iran's nuclear technology is completely obliterated—presumably that means ground invasion, since some targets are thought to be beyond the capabilities of a conventional air campaign to fully destroy, and that's even
if you're willing to scatter Iran's radioactive material all over the countryside in a sucks-to-be-you bombing campaign. The second is, as Sen. Chris Murphy rebutted, that if you really intend to set the nation back to a pre-nuclear
day zero, you have to assassinate or otherwise disappear everyone in the nation who has gained nuclear expertise. That, too, sounds a bit icky. Both approaches are very likely to be gigantic clusterf--ks on order of a Bill Kristol project, and even presuming either or both was 100 percent effective the repercussions of yet another gargantuan American military action in the region would have repercussions for a generation. Again, I mean.
The third problem is that even if you do all that, according to Tom Cotton, every bit of that and then some, you're still only going to be setting back your nuclear-aspiring opponent by ... less time than the proposed nonproliferation settlement is intended to be in effect anyway. A settlement that costs America almost nothing and that still allows future leaders of Our Great Nation to blow Iran back to the bronze age if they think Iran might be dodging its commitments.
So given all that, the cost-benefit analysis of a massive military intervention bent on setting Iran back to "day zero," by which we mean setting them back for roughly the same length of time as one American presidency, doesn't seem to come out in Tom Cotton's favor even using the rosiest of Tom Cotton's own assumptions. Do you suppose the good senator even notices this? That he's proposing a gigantic, complex, dangerous, consequence-heavy regional murderfest in order to gain a temporary resolution that even he himself acknowledges may have expired before Tom Cotton is next up for re-election?