system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is the Iran nuke deal a good thing?

It sounds like we are letting Iran have nukes. That sounds horrible. I have, however, seen multiple instances of intelligent people praising it. Can someone explain this to me?

Edit: thanks for all the responses. I read them all. I did not reply because frankly I do not understand it well enough to contribute.

Edit again: I didn't see the option to make the thread as explained on my phone.  oops.
gpt
We're not letting Iran have nukes - that's literally the opposite of the intention of this deal, regardless of what some media is saying.

A bit of history - for years, Iran has been working on their nuclear industry, for both peaceful purposes (nuclear power) and non-peaceful (nuclear weapons).  The world isn't really worried about the nuclear power part, only the weapons, so the idea is that we will let them continue the nuclear power usage so long as they abandon the weapons.  The key difference is the quality (enriched percentage) of the uranium that they use.

This deal is about letting them have the lower-enriched uranium, and physically taking away their enriching equipment.  This lets them have their nuclear power, without getting the weapons grade material.

With no deal in place, they would continue what they were doing, and would certainly get fully enriched material at some point.  There's 3 real options then - strike a deal, increase economic and diplomatic sanctions to the point where they quit on their own, or go to war.  Since the economic sanctions haven't really convinced them to stop up until now, it seems reasonable to try a deal instead, because war is a real mess anyway.

The deal is not nearly as good as some people would like.  Some would like for all nuclear activity of any kind in the country to stop permanently.  There's also time restrictions in the deal where certain restrictions stop after a period of 10 years, and they might then have more abilities to get enriching equipment.  But it's still a deal, and at least if followed, it really will remove the weapons abilities from Iran for at least 10 years.  It's fair to say that they might not go along with the deal, but as structured, economic sanctions will come back into place if they don't play along, so that's something to fall back on.