Alana Goodman is right to reflect what Iran’s alleged terrorism plot means for the U.S. posture toward Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons:

If Iran feels safe planning a U.S.-based attack now, imagine how much more blatant its aggression would be if it had nuclear weapons. Some people like to pretend Israel is the only country that would be seriously threatened by a nuclear Iran. This case is a prime example of how wrong that assumption is.

The alleged plot raises other issues, however: The Iranian government is not homogenous; it is made up of myriad power centers and factions. While analysts often discuss factions along the Iranian political spectrum, for example, arguing about who is reformist, pragmatic, or a hardliner, the same analysts have very little understanding of how such factions play out in the military. For all intensive purposes, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a big black box about which the United States and the West know little. It is not a monolith, however, but is an institution consisting of individuals, each with their own point of view and, like all bureaucracies, it has its own internal debates and cultures.

What the terrorist plot indicates, however, is that individuals and bureaucracies matter. Many Iranian officials are radical, and some are willing to take the fight to the United States for purely ideological reasons. With such a reality, understanding of command and control of an Iranian bomb becomes crucial. It’s not enough to say 99 percent of Iranian regime officials are pragmatic; if it’s the one percent who retain custody over a nuclear weapon, then that’s all that matters from the point of view of American national security. To calibrate containment upon the assumption of Iranian pragmatism and rationality is simply inane given that those able to call the shots seek to murder as many Americans as they can.