The American intelligence revelation:  The Iranians are not trying to get something they don't need and shouldn't want.  So what?

I confess that I don't follow the progress of Iranian bomb technology at all closely, a habit I perhaps should change.  One can take it for granted that Iran will get a deliverable nuclear weapon, or several, if nobody does anything to stop her.  That's why I find the brouhaha over the new American intelligence report a bit puzzling. 
One can take it for granted that Iran will get a deliverable nuclear weapon, or several, if nobody does anything to stop her.
As I understand it, the report says Iran is not developing a plutonium nuclear device, which requires sophisticate electronics and exquisitely machined parts.  Why this is supposed to be big news is beyond me.  On August 6, 1945, 75,000 residents of Hiroshima were wiped out in an instant, and not one of them was killed by a plutonium nuclear device.

Nuclear bomb technology is, as technology goes, very old.  It represented the frontier of science in 65 years ago. At that time there were four nations—Russia, Germany, Britain and the US—with the knowledge and resources to develop a bomb in a reasonable time.  All of them, however, were busy fighting the biggest war in history, and only the United States possessed the sheer resources to fight and develop a bomb at the same time.  But if Germany hadn't started a war it couldn't win it could have gotten a bomb, easy.  Iran is still considered a third-world nation, but its economy today is a lot larger than Germany's was in 1942, and it's at peace.

Iran's biggest problem right now is getting enough Uranium-235 to be useful in a bomb, and it's working on this problem all-out.  Doing so with magnetic centrifuges requires some pretty fine electronic technology, but remember, this problem was solved 65 years ago.  The Iranians appear to have solved it too.

Making a bomb out of Uranium 235 once you have it is relatively easy.  All you need to do is get a couple of large pieces of the stuff, put them at the far ends of a large metal tube, and place high explosive behind one of them so you can shoot it toward the other whenever you feel inclined to blow someplace up.  The whole project can probably be done with the equipment in a good truck repair shop.
The entire American intelligence report strikes me as a revelation about an irrelevance.

So the entire American intelligence report strikes me as a revelation about an irrelevance.  To get a plutonium bomb, the Iranians need to solve three difficult technical problems:  a) get uranium; b) turn it into plutonium; c) build the plutonium into a bomb.  To get a uranium bomb they only need to solve the first.  They're doing things the simplest way from their perspective.

It still seems to me that if anyone wants to stop them, he better get his act together real soon.