How? Scamming you of course! Draining your bank dry on monthly dues

The real problem isn’t Iran’s nuclear ambitions or whether it’s leadership is hell bent on destroying Israel. The key players in our run-up to World War 3 is China, Russia, and whether Petrol is sold in Euros or Dollars..

For China to sustain it’s incredible rate of growth, it will need many times more oil than it is receiving today. China’s addiction to oil is second only to the US, and will soon surpass it. This is why China has been busy getting in good with oil producing nations around the world, including Iran and those in South America.

The point here is that China is not going to sit idly by while America tries to institute regime change in Iran and thereby control China’s Oil Faucet. The missles sold to Iran by China had a purpose. The Nuclear reactor from Russia has the same intention…. But the question is WHCH IS IT? Are they vielded threats to the US to back off, or are they in actuality lures to bog the the US into another quagmire.. nice and ripe for an attack…. Such a case might leave Taiwan open for Chinese invasion, and other US interests in Asia fair game for Chinese bullying….

For the hawks out there who keep screaming ‘regime change’ in Iran….. WAKE UP!! Afghanistan was suppose to be the easy one… and yet, the Taliban still have enough of a voice to be welcomed to the negotiating table. Need I mention our report card in Iraq.. I wish more of you were on the ground, so you could see what happens to kids - when suicide bombers drive into schools or when Tomahwk missiles miss their target…. Please don’t bring Playstation talk to this forum when there are real lives, real people, real babies who DIE in real wars…

The truth is regardless of what the US does now, war is imminent…… A nuclear Iran is inevitalbe (if not already a fact) is completely unacceptable to the West, and Israel will act unilaterally when she’s ready….dragging the US into it whether it likes it or not… IF the US attacks Iran, it’s instant Mid-East Regional war - It’ll be just like the World Cup, except instead of referee, the US will be the soccer ball…… . If the US DOES NOT attack Iran, then Iran will start trading Oil in Euros instead of Dollars.. a SEVERE blow to US economics - so much so that, we are willing to risk WWIII to prevent it from happening… http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HEA306B.html … That’s right it’s not about Iraqi Freedom, and not really about OIL.. but rather about Dollars versus Euros….. [noticed China's unpegging of the Yan to the dollar.... and current talk of pegging it the Euro....] …. There will be a regime change in the next few years, but the regime in question isn’t Iran…. its the US….

I don’t have the answer… but I do know that starting a regime change in Iran is a suicide mission for our soldiers that will also irrevocably kill half million innocent Iraninans in the process… and yet, won’t do a darn thing to prevent WWIII ….

too….

The Iranian “crisis” is largely manufactured

1. The Iranians are not very close to having a bomb

2. The Iranians have no national interest in attacking anybody and every reason to expect to be attacked

3. The Pakistanis and the Israelis, both of whom already have the bomb, are obviously more dangerous to the peace of the world than Iran since both have plenty of religious fanatics one election or one coup away from power.

4. The domestic political advantage of creating an Iranian war is obvious as is the way in which it serves the interests of the right-wing parties in Israel. The people who are promoting confrontation have a long track record of cynicism and dishonesty.

Why it would matter:

The W88 can yield 475 kilotons, making an attack much easier.

For example, you put your warhead on a ship. If the ship gets into New York harbor, Port of Los Angeles, wherever, you can set it off and be assured of destroying most of the city and killing millions.

There’s no worry about getting it through security or positioning it precisely for the desired effect. Plus or minus a mile or two is good enough to stab at the heart of the Great Satan.

With or without the W88, I’m guessing Iran has received modern, sophisticated bomb design, much better than a grad student’s hobby bomb, and may be capable of producing a megaton-range warhead.

Is Israel or the US - Little Satan or Big Satan - the more likely first target?

A nuclear attack may be like that great magic trick, the one so astounding you can only perform it once.

If Mamoud is smart enough to realize he may have to CHOOSE between the two Satans, will he prefer to attack Tel-Aviv or New York?

Personally, I think the question of will Iran get the bomb, or how soon, or even “will they use it?” has become a bit silly. What is going to stop them, or even slow them down?

We just got through showing His Majesty Hu Jintao that we love and adore him, and would never do anything to cause him to “lose face.”

He is completely free, along with Russia, to provide Iran unlimited technical guidance and material assistance - for “peaceful purposes” only, of course.

With the assistance they’ve already received from A. Q. Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani bomb, plus two nuclear superpowers helping out, what will stop Iran from developing a first-rate nuclear weapons program?

It’s now only a question of, will they do what they’ve promised to do?

If you believe their nuke weapons program is only to make them feel like big players on the world stage, appease their Khomeini-ist Islamists at home, and increase their fortunes by driving up the price of crude oil, well then…

What, me worry?

On the other hand, if you believe they’ll soon be holding a lottery to choose which martyr gets the high honor of driving the holy van into Tel Aviv, or sailing the sacred ship into the port of New York, you have to wonder, aside from $10 per gallon gasoline, what other “fallout” will there be, when another mad regime does exactly what it said it would do.

Well the holocaust denying president of Iran isn’t the actual leadder, the current ayatollah is. Iran consists of an elected congress and president who then elect the supreme leader (usually an ayatollah) and an islamic guidance counsel. Iran’s democracy or government has proven to be problematic, becuase it’s congress actually didn’t want to elect the current supreme leader of Iran and favored a more moderate Islamic leader. The political problems of Iran aside, the ayatollah has issued a law against the development of nuclear weapons. The question here is, is Iran’s government undermining the supreme leader by covertly developing nuclear weapons? or is this as they claim an actual attempt at just nuclear power? Regardless, Iran is a modernized nation with a government that isn’t quite represenative (although most Iranians support nuclear power as a means of weaning Iran from oil based power), but then again neither is the U.S. government right now, but one in which popular support has a say. Iran has the possibility of being a responsible nuclear power, and also with it’s current government, the possibility of being the second country in 100 years to attempt to annihilate the jews. I’m not betting on the later, chances are Iran’s political system will eventually become more moderate especially if their largest trade partners (south korea and japan) put pressure on them.

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A

That approach worked out really well in North Korea.

A deal may be possible.

Los Alamos removed them from the internet and from the wayback machine when China got the blueprint for the W88.

While the science should not be secret, the Los Alamos chemical progesses and technical programs for making WWII type bombs should not be so readily available.

While I agree that proliferation should be averted by physical means, and not by head-in-the-sand ’scientific secrecy’, there is something absurd in having documents like http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00349710.pdf

freely downloadable by anybody. Not all those reports are would speed up Iran’s bomb making, however. For example http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00315644.pdf is just fascinating physics everyone should be aware of (the natural nuclear reactor at Gabon safely confined radioactive fission products for a billion years), and the reports on nuclear weapons effects like EMP are vital for civil defence to be taken seriously against nuclear terrorists, see http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00322994.pdf for EMP from 1962 tests and http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00317067.pdf for computer simulation of the effects of a megaton near surface burst. I think effects and scientific civil defence data should be openly available, not the chemistry of plutonium separation, etc.

Belizean, giving nukes to terrorists to attack the US is just not practical. You also have to look at the cost vs. ‘’benefit’’.

Count Iblis,

With all due respect, you still don’t get it. Ahmadinejad is not the sort of guy who’s going to dispassionately perform a cost-benefit analysis. Being fundamentally medieval in his thinking, he is likely fixated on particular vision of the apocalypse that involves dramatic explosions and a cleansing holy fire (or whatever picture the Koran might paint). He is also likely to believe that no price is too high to ensure that Allah’s will be done.

Even if he were a rational cost-benefit analyzer, he’d probably decide against ebola. It’s just too hard to ensure that the millions of people that you’ve infected do not spread the contagion to unintended places, such as other Muslim countries including your own.

The problem with this whole ‘bomb the crap out of them to let the internal resistance take the government down’ thing is that it appears to be based on hope. If the Iranians pull together in response to an attack (which is hardly impossible) then we strengthen the position of Ahmadinejad (who, don’t forget, isn’t actually in charge of the country in any case).

Adam,

The proposal is a revolution supported by bombing, not bombing that is hoped to induce a revolution. There are two possibilities: either most Iranians support the current clerical rulers, or most do not. Judging by the extraordinary degree of oppression to which the clerics must resort in order to retain their power, the latter possibility is far more likely. If true, a revolution will be supported by most. If the revolutionaries make it known that the precision bombing is in support of their efforts and directed by them, it is less likely to cause the backlash that you predict.

…moderate Iranians, who aren’t friends of the current regime, think that Iran has a right to nuclear weapons, and certainly a right to nuclear energy.

No one is attempting to prevent Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons. The effort is to prevent oppressive, terrorist supporting, hatred driven regimes from possessing them. If Iran becomes Belgium or even Cost Rica, few will be concerned about their acquisition of nuclear weaponry.

Belizean, giving nukes to terrorists to attack the US is just not practical. You also have to look at the cost vs. ”benefit”. You need many billions of dollars to produce just a few nukes…

If Iran’s mindset was really like Bin Laden they would spend their money differently.

E.g. you could think of sending agents to Africa when there is an outbreak of ebola. The ebola virus survives up to two weeks in dead bodies, so it’s possible to collect samples containing the virus and move them to Iran. Their they could let the virus multiply in secret biological laboratories.

An attack with ebola could wipe out a significant fraction of the US population at a fraction of the cost to develop an atomic bomb.

The NPT is a truly moronic piece of legislation. At least two of the P-5, who were crowned rulers of the world via this legislation, did not even bother to sign it until 1992 i.e. China signed the NPT only in 1992. France also did it at about the same time. Reagan as such by proposing nuclear cooperation with China in 1985, proposed giving nuclear technology to a country which had not even signed the NPT as of on that date. The BJP’s position appears to be that if Reagan chose to push for an exception in the Chinese case, based on a demonstration of nuclear power ( a nuke detonation as ratified by the NPT), why cant Bush do a similar exception for India based on certain knowledge that the US had as early as the early 1960s that India had the capability to detonate a nuke. The difference ofcourse is that while the NPT is an international agreement which has crowned the Chinese “rulers of the world”, the India exception will have to rely on the US’s own determination (via its historical intelligence estimates) that India was indeed a defacto nuclear weapons state prior to NPT cut off date of mid 1967 and based on that the US will unilaterally crown India as a ruler of the world.

(Re: China/US nuclear agreements, see e.g., http://www.nci.org/d/dh102497.htm)

The NPT is damaged by current events only to the extent that no one has a memory horizon beyond that last two years. Raising the “Bush admin led damage to the NPT” is political spin, and nothing more.

Jacques - the statement does apply to the other NPT signatories with substantial programs, and that is the problem. The US has effectively destroyed the NPT by backing Iran into a corner and rewarding India.

We certainly agree on that.

We probably also agree that they screwed up the NPT, without first having found a workable alternative.

And Iran’s original ambition to sell their oil and have nuclear for baseline main electricity is very sensible, but they by now will resent not being trusted, and with the “axis-of-evil” speech will figure that getting a bomb is an overriding imperative. Trying to influence the Iranian elections was also dumb.

Iran was (and, in more competent hands, maybe still would be) a manageable problem.

I generally agree that, over a 10 year time-frame, Iran easily has the capability of developing nuclear weapons. In the short term, however, I’m a lot more dubious about the scenario (outlined in your post) by which Iran could obtain a bomb (or two) rather quickly. A lot of iffy propositions have to be true in order to succeed, and they won’t get a second chance.

Belizean wrote:

The regime in Iraq has been changed successfully. As a consequence freedom has risen there. Perennially hostile factions are now free to attack each other.

Freedom is truly on the March!

And, flush from our resounding success in Iraq, we can go and spread the good fortune to their neighbour to the East!

Eventually, one faction will win (almost certainly the side that we support).

Actually, since you seem to have forgotten, it is the faction closely allied with Iran that is on top of the political pyramid. And, without Iran’s tacit support, Iraq’s descent into chaos would be even more swift and bloody than it already is.

My reading of the globalsecurity.org summary is that Iran has done lab tests of extracting Pu from irradiated uranium using their small lab reactors, so they have in fact closed the cycle, as they announced.

The Pu metal engineering is just not that hard, it is not trivial, but it is solved, with lots of hints in the literature, and probably some hard advice available for a price.

Main point of my original post was to seek a distinction between the long term issue, that Iran is within ~ 10 years of having a full fuel cycle without nuclear power input at some stage, which can lead to a steady bomb production line if desired; and on the other hand Iran’s fairly evident urgent desire for deterrent, which they have a window for doing right now, at the expense of open break with the IAEA and probably the Russians. But they won’t need them any more.

And Iran’s original ambition to sell their oil and have nuclear for baseline main electricity is very sensible, but they by now will resent not being trusted, and with the “axis-of-evil” speech will figure that getting a bomb is an overriding imperative. Trying to influence the Iranian elections was also dumb.

Belizian, a few nuclear bombs would not destroy ‘’the enemy’’.

Correct. That is why 1) I don’t recommend nuclear bunker busters. 2) I hold regime change via fomented and air-supported internal revolution to be essential. [If the changed regime is sufficiently sane, its possession of nukes will not necessarily be a problem.]

No Joy,

While it is technically true that Iran’s possession of a nuke does not mean that there is a 100% chance that they will use it against us, the President would be unwise not to assume that they will. Ahmadinejad’s head genuinely appears to be full of millenarian visions of a glorious apocalypse that will usher the return of the 12th Imam. It truly seems that he sees himself as the instrument of Allah that will bring this about. Sure, there’s a chance that it’s all an act. But do you want to bet New York City, Washington D.C, or Los Angeles on that? Let’s be conservative and suppose that there’s only a 10% that they’ll “clandestinely” nuke a U.S. city (by passing the bomb to terrorist surrogates). The corresponding 2% chance that an American city will be destroyed and rendered uninhabitable for decades (if not hundreds of years) is too huge to be ignored. [If there was a 2% chance that your car would explode within a year, I don’t think that you’d blithely continue to drive it.] [Sorry about the incompetent numbering and lettering of my hasty previous post.]

Jacques Distler,

One might have thought that those advocating regime-change in Iran would be slightly humbled by the debacle of their previous attempt at regime-change in Iraq.

The regime in Iraq has been changed successfully. As a consequence freedom has risen there. Perennially hostile factions are now free to attack each other. We saw this before, when oppression was reduced in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Eventually, one faction will win (almost certainly the side that we support). Please remember that even relatively homogeneous countries like the United States and England experienced all out civil wars — far greater strife than the current situation in Iraq. [Iraq seems most problematic from the frame of reference offered by the Western news media, which is sensationalist, ahistorical, selective by agenda, focused on the moment, plagued by a herd mentality, and obviously biased.]