Nukes are not "illegal" There is nothing like legality around such things. But if you declare over and over that you want to wipe another nation off the map, then that nation sure would take notice when you work on developing nuclear weapons. It's simple really
Sure nukes can be illegal. Maybe not in international jurisdiction, but here in the US we have Federal U.S. Code 18 § 831 and the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
Which is somewhat salient when you consider how Israel actually got enriched uranium. It was straight-up stolen from NUMEC in the 1960s, and when the CIA found out about it they helped bury the story. If America actually cared about policing nuclear proliferation, they would have started with Israel.
Clearly, we don't care (and that should have been clear to us all since Reagan).
if you will read a wiki entry on apollo affair you will discover that loss probably was due to "what was called "previously unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms", including "contamination of workers' clothes, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment"
also, there was loss after shapiro left his position numec
And if you will read the wiki entry, you might notice that it only accounts for 110lbs of the 200lbs+ that went missing. It didn't come out in the wash, as a matter of fact the CIA detected the HEU's unique signature over at Dimona. Fancy it just flew there on the wind? Hitched a ride on a Congressman's jet leaving Haifa?
The goal should be no nation, including the US, possessing nuclear weapons, similar to the situation with chemical and biological weapons already. How does Iran acquiring nuclear weapons gets us closer to that goal?
That goal has long since expired. The specific moment it died was the conclusion of the Reykjavík Summit, where Reagan professed that the US would rather invest in Ballistic Missile Defense than agree to strategic arms reduction with the USSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk_Summit
After that point, collapse was inevitable and no amount of negotiation could prevent the Balkanization of Russia's nuclear-armed states. The US made attempts to stop terrorists from acquiring the unattended nuclear materials, but with sovereign nations they could only ever negotiate them out of a nuke (eg. Taiwan and Ukraine's cases).
In fact, I think the parent comment is making a more prescient comment than you realize. Israel's "strategic ambiguity" over nuclear weapons is ultimately harmful to their view of nonproliferation. It creates an incentive for other countries to follow their perverse lead, which entirely sabotages the goal of documenting and eliminating nuclear weapons.
