Now we’ll never know where the bomb fuel is.

22 years on from Mohamed ElBaradei’s initial report on Iran’s secretive nuclear program, the regime booted IAEA monitors from the country.

Iran this week passed legislation to suspend dealings with the UN’s oversight arm, which Tehran views — not irrationally, I might add — as passively complicit in the joint Israeli-American strikes on its nuclear facilities. The inspectors left the Iranian capital for Vienna on Friday.

There are two ways to think about Iran’s decision to expel the inspectors, one alarmist the other not so much.

You might argue that a wounded Iran, back against the wall, now intends to dash for a crude bomb, and that doing so will be easier without pesky inspectors poking around. That’s the alarmist argument.

You could also suggest that declaring the IAEA persona non grata is just a means of creating a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Donald Trump. Like this: “We’ll let the inspectors back in, but you can’t attack us anymore, and you also need to keep your rabbid pit bull on a leash.”

Both of those could be true, but I’d be more inclined to the latter. The problem with a crude bomb is that you have to be able to deliver it, and it’s not as if Iran’s going to load up The Enola Gay and fly it over Tel Aviv, let alone New York City. Having enough highly-enriched uranium for — however many it is now — a dozen nukes, isn’t the same thing as having 12 modern, deliverable weapons.

To be sure, complacency’s always perilous, and if you’re going to be complacent, nuclear proliferation isn’t the arena where you want to rest on your laurels. But over the past 12 months, Israel’s exposed the regime in Tehran as embarrassingly inept in the intelligence department and wholly ineffectual militarily. To assume anything for that regime in the way of guile is probably to give it too much credit. It’s hard to be cunning when you’re moronic. And now we know the regime’s moronic.

Note that Israel’s killed a lot of top Iranian scientists over the years. Tehran boasts that you can’t kill national nuclear know-how. But that isn’t true. Iran has a fairly deep bench in the nuclear research department, but just because you’re a physicist doesn’t mean you’re capable of fashioning a nuclear bomb on a compressed time frame.

So, if you ask me, Iran’s decision to kick out the inspectors was a symbolic act of defiance aimed at bolstering its weakened hand at the negotiating table, not a prelude to some new, more dangerous phase of centrifuge subterfuge. Simply put: Tehran wants to leverage the missing fissile stockpile in talks with Trump.

There are three ways to locate the regime’s highly-enriched uranium, which disappeared a few days into the Israeli assault last month. One is to call Ethan Hunt. From what I understand, he’s already completed his final mission and besides, he’s 63 years old. Another is to invade Iran. Because the IDF has no expeditionary capabilities beyond Gaza and Lebanon, that’d mean the US invading Iran. That’s not going to happen. The third way is for Iran to let in the inspectors.

Of course, this strategy could backfire for Tehran. Trump could call their bluff (again) by green-lighting more Israeli strikes and/or conducting more bombing runs himself, effectively betting that between them, Israel and the US can bring the regime to its knees faster than Tehran can build and test a nuke.

Washington, and the West more generally, will surely condemn Iran’s decision to boot the inspectors, and Israel will surely make the case to Trump that the move demonstrates belligerence and underscores the futility of diplomacy.

Iran still has one more card to play: The regime could exit the Non-Proliferation Treaty on the excuse its rights under international treaty law were violated both by Israel and the US. They do have a legal leg to stand on in that regard.

There’s something grimly ironic about the fact that Iran’s a party to the NPL while Israel, a state currently engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign that’s killed 65,000 people, many of them women and children, isn’t.