Suprises no one. I remember reading that the IRGC is quite a distributed organization, and has planned for the exact situation they find themselves in today.
Im guessing they have lots of stuff stashed away only known to each IRGC "section"
It's not just that, the entire Iranian government setup is designed to make it as difficult as possible to get rid of them. Their government isn't built around checks and balances or the other usual things, it's a group that came to power through revolution and have done everything possible to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to them. The result is a baroque interlocking system of councils and bodies and roles without any single point of failure.
Which any career diplomat and analyst in the USG would have known, but clearly came as a complete surprise to a motley collection of reality TV stars, religious nutcases, and former Fox news pundits.
Also, the USRAEL regime keeps feigning diplomacy after committing multiple egregious acts of perfidy. On more than one occasion they started bombing during or at beginning of negotiations.
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink".
I imagine with nukes they'd be much like Russia, or Pakistan, or India, or China. In other words, showing restraint and intelligence, and having a deterrent against wars of aggression from the world's highest-funded army.
It's game theory. You start developing nukes and risk US bombing you to stone age while killing your personally. But the moment you develop nukes, US will likely leave you alone. Choices.
US will kill more people through secondary effects of their aggression against Iran, than Iran's nuke ever would directly. True barbarians, except I understand English, so they sound to me less like bar bar bar, and more like a*holes. My gf tries to convince me US americans just don't care and are more like a bear in a porcelain shop. But dunno, I look at Cuba, Iran, Israel and lot of other places americans are very aggressive in/against and it's more like a*holes at this point to me. Whole porcelain shop is suffering. This just isn't the "we are big and stumbled a bit and broke stuff", anymore.
I don't think they should be experiencing regret. The power in nukes is not in using them, it's in the threat of using them. The threat of using them keeps you from being attacked, but once you actually use them, so will the other guys.
This war has pulled the tarp off of their control over the Strait of Hormuz though. That's a strategic weapon they can use without getting nuked back. Iran is much stronger than they were before the war; this was their Trinity test.
And what's truly ironic and moronic, is that the deal the talks are seeking a graceful exit for now would basically be a version of the JCPOA that was withdrawn for pretty much no reason in 2018. Which, if you are Iran, there is zero chance you're going to agree to anything like that anymore now they have all the leverage.
Im guessing they have lots of stuff stashed away only known to each IRGC "section"