Slashdot Mirror
Iranian Heavy Water Nuke Plant Goes Online Today
avtchillsboro writes "According to an article in the NYT, an Iranian heavy water nuke plant goes online today. From the article: 'An Iranian plant that produces heavy water officially went into operation on Saturday, despite U.N. demands that Tehran stop the activity because it can be used to develop a nuclear bomb. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the plant, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes. The announcement comes days before Thursday's U.N. deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment — which also can be used to create nuclear weapons — or face economic and political sanctions.'"
I would be very suprised if mosad/delta force/sas are not already in Iran keeping an eye on things due to the lack of UN inspectors, so I imagine some non-Iranian govt somewhere has a realistic idea of what is going on in Iran.
Warhammer forums
Iran has money to burn, and UN sanctions don't seem to be particularly effective ways to convince to governments; it's the proletariat who suffer. In the meanwhile, Iran's government gets to play the "it's us against the (non-Muslim) world!" card again. Jihad, anyone?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
With Israel a known (suspected within 99.999%) holder of nukes, Iran sees themselves as the logical counterpoint. They do mean to make weapons, of this I have no doubt.
Peaceful purposes? The iranian prez has said Israel should be wiped off the map. He doesn't strike me as a man with peaceful intentions.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One quote that might interest people from the interview is this:
Mohammad Saeidi is a practical man. Sidestepping the political, ideological and historical aspects of the nuclear dispute with the West, the vice-president of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation is focused on a set of problems that must be solved logically if the country and its people are to develop to their full potential. "The country's oil and gas reserves will last a maximum of another 25 or 30 years," he says. "Therefore we have to provide other resources."
If you are an American, please don't support your current administrations drive to cause yet another war by believing their propaganda about Iran. Really, you should trust your politicians as soon as they find the WMD that they told you existed in Iraq.
Please don't let Bush plunge the world into the Realm of $200 a barrel oil prices by attacking Iran.
1. Diplomacy, so far has failed.
2. Air strikes, don't know where all the facilities are and many of those we do are located so far underground that conventional weapons are useless. Not only that but Iran would no doubt cut off oil supplies which would cause an oil crisis.
3. Military invasion, not enough troops because of our excursion into Iraq. The only possible alternative is a draft.
4. Leave it for the next administration to sort out, the most likely scenario.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
This is not a nuclear power plant that's online (yet), but merely a facility that produces heavy water.
It's fun to get people worked up with such a headline (and almost all the AP wire sites did so), but on closer examination, it's hard to get too outraged at Iran for manufacturing something that you can buy on eBay.
Don't underestimate Israel's ability to do what they feel is neccessary to keep themselves safe.
I for, one, do NOT welcome our new-clear, Shi'ite Overlords. No matter how you pronounce "nuclear", or, for that matter, "Shi'ite".
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Sounds like Pakistan.. Oh wait, the US doesn't mind Pakistan having Nuclear weapons because they are an ally.. A religious fanatic ally harboring terrorists, but an ally.
so china gets its oil slightly cheaper and the west slightly more expensive big deal
oil is a commodity, an expensive one but still a commodity. As such a single supplier cant really threaten a single customer (they can stop exporting thier oil altogether but that would hurt all oil customers as well as thier own pockets)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And noone can argue with them, because--bottom line--Israel has nukes.
This is the lesson that developing nations around the world have learned.
Noone fucks with you once you have nukes.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Exactly. For example, Israel could use nuclear weapons developed under it's cladestine nuclear program to destroy Iran's clandestine nuclear program.
The irony would be fit for a Shakespearean tragedy.
Pick a topic you're familiar with. Computer security, IP law, file sharing, medicine, whatever.
Read a newspaper article on that topic.
Note how grotesquely ill-informed the reporter and editorial staff are on that topic? Notice all the basic and fundamental errors they make that shine out as eye-searing actinic flares to you, given your far greater knowledge of that field of human endeavour?
Extrapolate this to all the topics you're not as familiar with.
I think they're just goading the Israelis to take out the facility, gain more support in the Arab world, and rid themselves of the problem while they secretly create a more clandestine program.
Reading this reminds of Bush's Axis of Evil speech. Convenient, simple-minded, defined by a narrow-enough perspective that appeals to voters, and effective in removing the complexities of the situation so as to allow everyone to move forward without thinking. A few bullet point for thought.
Iran is a sovereign country. Irrespective of what anyone's opinion of their current leadership (or the public rhetoric of their leadership), I think that is A Good Thing. Remember that they had to overthrow the US-supported Shah to get their country back. Hardly surprising they view the US with contempt and distrust.
Iran is surrounded by nations with nuclear capabilities, and most of those nations are perceived, to one degree or another, as a threat. They fought a long, brutal war with Iraq only to have the US move in and set up camp. Hardly a stretch to consider that they, too, have legitimate defense needs. Notable among the list of those nations is Israel. Think what you want about Israel, but the folks in Lebanon most certainly view, and justifiably so, Israel as real threat. I doubt the the folks in Iran intend to wait to be bombed to rubble for them to justify their concerns to the western world.
The US doesn't talk directly with Iran. Or with Syria. Or with North Korea. Or with many other nations for that matter. So much for the diplomatic process, and so much for the extent of US influence in the region.
Iran sits on a lot of oil. Our economy depends on that oil continuing to flow. The bluster about taking direct action, or hinting to Israel that they direct action on our behalf may work for the voters, but balancing "national security" concerns includes ensuring the US economy continues to grow.
To my mind, the only possible outcome is for the US, and by extension, its allies, is to move toward acccepting the eventuality that Iran will in due time have nuclear weapons and nothing anyone says or does is going to change that. Once the US learns live with that, maybe the Iranians will get over their hatred of the US and it's involvement in their own country, and its continuing involvement in the countries that surround it.
Doesn't it seem stupid to have only a handful of countries with nuclear weapons?
My solution would for the US to build one ICBM for each country in the UN. If you're in the UN, here's ONE nuke. You only get one.
* You want true equality around the world, there it is. Every country is now equal.
* You want to end wars, you've done it. No one can invade anyone else or risk getting nuked.
* Talk about one world government? Now it's really possible.
Give them all nukes.
Oh wait I think you meant we have a greater relationship with Israel because we view the Israelis as "white people". You might be right about that.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
mutualy assured distruction works* becoase you have two rational powers with nuclear capabilities threatening each other - both know and fear the result of a strike.
What we have here is one side which is a secular democratic power who have never actually stated they have nuclear capabilities. on the other side you have a theocracy who glorifies honorable death, and has publicly stated it's will to distroy the other side.
* thanks to what we know now of Curtis La-may's recomendations during the kuba missle crises - I think it's pretty obvious that we had more luck then brains with MAD. Most people don't know how close we were to distructions back then.
A country like Iran doesn't care. They're fixated on a religious war, which supercedes any concern over political matters. These people don't care if they die, because they're convinced that they will reach a special form of heaven in the process. That makes for a very, very dangeous opponent.
Sovereign states may have whatever weapons they wish, but when their leadership pronounces that their goal is to wipe out a neighbor state (Israel), it no longer becomes acceptable to the international community to allow such weapons programs to go forth. If Iran does develop a nuclear bomb and uses it against Israel, the retaliatory strike from Israel would result in casualties that are simply beyond anything any previous war has shown us. Yet Iran's leadership may well be foolish enough to do it anyway, if only to ensure that the rest of the middle east would destroy Israel. Never underestimate the blind arrogance of religious zealotry.
The US cannot learn to live with another nation developing nuclear weapons who wants to destroy another nation. Say what you will about current US foreign policy, but we go out of our way to minimize civilian casualties and avoid use of excessive force. Terrorists do the opposite, as seen on countless occasions. After 9/11, two options were available to the Bush administration - nuclear strikes on al Qeida bases in Afghanistan, and special forces teams. There was no possibility of ground invasion for some time. Would the leadership of Iran, placed in the same situation, be so reluctant to use nuclear force?
There is no economic gain to an attack on or invasion of Iran. None that would be realized within 15-20 years at least, and by that time the need for oil would have reduced as alternative energy options come online. Any time the slightest conflict erupts in the middle east, oil jumps another $10/bbl. That said, our economy has continued to grow despite a doubling of the price of gasoline in the past five years.
In regards to your comment about Israel/Lebanon, I am a bit taken aback. Israel acted with extreme restraint in the face of continuing Hezbollah attacks launched from Lebanon. They had pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 after the UN adopted a resolution stating that a UN force would disarm Hezbollah and enforce a peace. The UN and Lebanon both failed to do so over the course of six years. When terrorist attacks increased, Israel did what any sovereign nation has a right to do - retaliate and disarm. Were civilians killed? Yes. Were Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah attacks? Yes. The difference is that Israel wasn't targeting those civilians. Terrorists like to hide in civilian areas in order to cause casualties like CNN was so happy to show.
The situation in the middle east is perhaps unrepairable. The rest of the world can't tolerate dictatorships bent on the destruction of each other and the acquisition of nuclear arms. The people of the middle east can't tolerate the rest of the world interfering and apparently can't tolerate each other's differences enough to get along under a democratic system of government.
I see no real solution short of allowing them to obliterate each other, which means we need to stop using their oil.
and the Neocons?
There is perception and then there is reality. Few politicians are what they appear.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Rally? this site says between 40,000 and 45,000 people's relatives would disagree with you if every given the chance."
Heh, compare that to the 150,000 to 340,000 (depending on who you ask) Iraquis Saddam killed. Then, there were the 450,000 to 700,000 Iranians killed during the Iran-Iraq war. Sorry, but regardless of whether US is involved in a middle east war, Arabs always kill more Arabs than anyone else.
sig: sauer
In regards to your comment about Israel/Lebanon, I am a bit taken aback. Israel acted with extreme restraint [...] The difference is that Israel wasn't targeting those civilians.
Thoughtful and reasoned replies I've found are always more useful than the knee-jerk reaction I was expecting. The only thing I can say in response to any They Did This Because of That is that the Middle East has a long history of action/reaction, and the continuation of the cycle, while grotesque and unfathomable to us outsiders, has support from both sides. My own opinion is that like everything in life, there are two sides to every story, and in this story, both are sides are equally culpable.
My motive, if there was one, was to highlight the possibility that an average person or family in Lebanon doesn't have to an extremist to view the destruction in his country as something more than the abstract interplay of geopolitical forces, or the calculated military maneuverings of their respective militaries. Put another way, if someone bombs your neighbourhood in the ground and kills most of your family or neighbours, chances are you'd view the person who did the bombing as a dangerous threat. If you're smart, you flee the country (as many did). If you're angry and armed, you take up weapons and fight back. If your're angry and without arms, you do throw rocks and molotov cocktails like the poor in the Palestinian territories.
As for Iran, I think we'd all agree their rhetoric is alarming, but then I find the speeches of Bush, Cheney & Co. alarming as well. I can say that and laugh, but I don't live in the Middle East. If I was an Iranian citizen, I wouldn't be laughing, but I would be proud that my country wants to extert its influence in the region (the Shia crescent), and find a perverse but perfectly-human satisfaction that my country could snub its nose at a greater power. Not unlike a typical US citizen who feel proud when the US goes out to remake the world in its own image, or thumping their chest when the conversation involves United Nations, the WTO, or internal treaties of any sort.
I'm afraid that the US will, for the time being, continue to prosecute its bogeyman theories, while the bogeymans themselves (Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on), will continue on despite, or perhaps in spite. One thing is certain if not a constant in each case. Someone is Really Pissed Off. Doesn't hurt to ask, or consider why that is.
Read up on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, a worthless piece of shit who extensively collaborated with the Nazis, helped recruit Muslims to serve in the Waffen S.S., and never missed an opportunity to help kill more Jews.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Or rather three different ways of looking at it:
One is the grandfather clause. Basically when the nuclear non-proliferation treaty was signed it allowed those nations who already had nukes to keep them. So the US can have them for the same reason as Russia, the UK, France, and so on. That would be the legalistic view.
Another would be because the US has a stable government with excellent protections against accidental launch, or deliberate launch by a rogue person. You can Google around for the details if you wish, but what it comes down to is that GWB can't just wake up one day and decide to nuke a country for the fun of it. He lacks the authority and the ability. The US also cares for the lives of its' citizens to a high degree, and has a stable government that doesn't get overthrown all the time. That's the somewhat moral view.
Finally, there's the simple matter that nobody can stop them. They've got the biggest military, and the amount of nukes they have is such that they can annihilate anyone they wish. There's no possibility of any sort of invasion or strike that could take out even a fraction of the US arsenal before they could retaliate. So there's simply nothing anyone can do about it. That's the practical view.
You can take it any way you like but it really isn't comparable to Iran getting nukes. The US is allowed, under internal law, to have it's nukes, they are not (despite some ranting on Slashdot) run by extremists that can launch them at any time, and there's just really nothing anyone can do to take them away. Iran isn't allowed to develop nukes, there is a concern that they would use them given that there are no controls in the country stopping their hard line government from doing so, and as it happens they can be stopped.
I'm not saying that they should be stopped, that's a different argument. However trying to say "The US has nukes so Iran getting them is the same thing," isn't the case, regardless of what level you choose to look at it on.
Those gas attacks happened when Iraq was a US ally and were covered up by the US at the time, remember? Iraq was armed by the US to fight Iran.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
No, they're not. They're designed primarily to spread damage capabilities against lightly- or non-armored targets over a maximum area per weapon. They were intended to deal with soft targets that are often spread out or in difficult-to-reach locations such as in hilly or mountainous terrain, or which spread over a large area, such as happened with Soviet-era SAM bases, which were designed such that a single powerful bomb could not destroy the entire complex, whereas one cluster bomb had a decent chance of damaging every launcher to such an extent as to render the location useless. This also makes them useful against artillery, which includes rocket artillery, which Hezbollah makes great use of, firing from scattered locations.
They are, of course, quite effective against civilians, since civilians are rarely well-armored, but this is incidental. That Israel used them bothers me greatly, as I am generally in favor of the removal from service of the common dumb weapons that make up cluster munitions, and was quite pleased when the US began doing so some time ago. From a moral perspective, I would rather have seen their use avoided, but from a tactical perspective, it's easy to see their utility.
Israel withdrew completely from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN. Later, every militia group in Lebanon disarmed -- except for Hezbollah. Hezbollah continued periodic attacks against Israel for six years, including attacking outposts and patrols, kidnapping soldiers, and the occasional rocket attack into northern Israel, on the fictional basis that Israel had not completed its withdrawal because it was still in the Shebaa Farms area, a location that no map in the last century has showed as part of Lebanon, save for one that conveniently showed up in 2000 and which was claimed to have dated from the 1960s, and which was contradicted by official Lebanese and Syrian maps printed over the ensuing decades.
Hezbollah views Israel as a snake. Well, if you keep prodding a snake that has nowhere to which it can retreat, at some point it will lash out, and Hezbollah claimed surprise that it did so, suggesting that the response was unprovoked. While it's possible to claim that Israel's response was out of scale (and I do think that it was), I don't think anyone can reasonably believe that Israel was completely unprovoked.
And for those that think that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians and not causing collateral damage when attempting to deal with Hezbollah infrastructure, consider that an average of 30 Lebanese (including Hezbollah fighters) were killed each day over the course of the war. If Israel was capable of killing dozens with a single bomb, and civilians were what Israel was after, then why was the overall count not in the several tens of thousands? If Israel was capable of hitting Hezbollah bunkers, then why did it not hit a few dozen civilian bunkers, where dozens or hundreds could have been killed in short order?
Lebanon is in a very poor position. Due to both the unwillingness of the Lebanese government and the world to force a disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has remained a pawn, even after Syria's withdrawal, in a larger game of which most of its people want no part. It is the only state in the Middle East that has significant fractional percentages of multiple religions living largely peacefully in the same set of borders. Muslims (Sunni and Shiite), Druze, Christians, and (until recently) even Jews lived there. I see more hope in a better Middle East in Lebanon than I do in Israel. Until Lebanon can be helped to rid itself of Hezbollah, it will remain as a pawn, and subject to outside interference from Israel, Iran, and Syria, and its people will continue to suffer.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
you have no FUCKING clue what the ground reality is. You would seem to think we go out of our way to kill Iraqi civilians. Wrong. We have our strict rules of engagements.
Was Abu Gharib within those rules of engagement? How about the torture in guantanamo bay? The thing is, you're right, we have no fucking clue, and I'll bet if we knew the whole story it would look a helluva lot worse than it is. you can look at yourselves through rose coloured glasses if you like, the rest of the world with a half a brain knows what this war is really about.
You don't even know why you're there. First it was because Saddam had WMD's. Now that ya'll look like fools in the eye of the world and have turned up nothing, y'all simply change your mission objectives to say it's to liberate the Iraqis (who incidentally did not seem to want you there at all).
I admit I don't have as much of a clue as I'd like. I point you to articles like this where you have the police policing the police, only answering to themselves. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
He did all the things you mentioned, but frankly the US didn't give a toss about that.
The problem was that the second largest oil field in the world would soon only be available in Euros. Which would mean that oil buyers wouldn't have to buy dollars to get the oil. Which reduces the demand for US dollars. So. supply and demand. demand for dollars decreases, the value decreases, the US dollar begins falling in value. The dollar is worth less the more of them you need to buy things, That's called inflation and guess what, devaluing dollars severely limits the US government's ability to print more of them with abandon, to pay their huge military, to pay huge subsidies to industry and farmers etc etc.
Guess what. Iran is planning to set up an oil exchange which would operate in Euros. I wonder who's going to be hit next.
Deleted
If you are going to judge a majority by the actions of a minority, then go ahead.
No, I judge by the military's response to the actions of the minority. Rest assured if the media attention was not on Abu Gharib (sort of like it isn't on Guantanamo Bay), the military response would have been quite different.
Look, I respect those of you who fight in Iraq. You probably believe it's a noble cause. Truth is this war in Iraq has cost the US almost a trillion dollars. Think about the kickass health care system ya'll would have if you invested alomst a trillian dollars into it. How man American's lives would have been saved if the money was better allocated back home, to health and education?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0