Identifying Nuclear Scientists Willing To Sell Their Knowledge

Harperdog writes "This is an interesting piece on U.S. programs most people don't know about: programs to identify and win over nuclear scientists who might be willing to sell their know-how to non-nuclear countries. Fascinating discussion, and points to the alleged Russian scientist who is reported to have sold information to Iran. How could he have been stopped?"

Comments

How could he have been stopped?

[c0lo]

Someone please explain: why should he have been stopped?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free trade is only for big businesses. What would the world come to if ordinary people could start monetizing their assets? On the other hand, if you need an explanation why it happened anyway: the Iran nuclear scare is going to fill the coffers of "defense" companies worldwide. They can't wait for us to go to war against Iran.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Is selling your knowledge suddenly a crime?

If it is about nuclear weapons it makes sense. But having nuclear science in general is the right of every country.

Besides, didn't foreign scientists contribute to nuclear science in US?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Gordonjcp]

This is the thing, though. Iran would benefit from having a nuclear weapon not because it could defend itself *directly* from the US but because they can start waving it at Israel if the Yanks start getting mouthy.

The Iranian government is presumably nervous about the US coming over and "liberating" them with the same level of wholesale destruction and slaughter as in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've also got the Israelis who just love to herd Arabs into ghettos and kill them. Why *wouldn't* you want a nuke, with neighbours like that?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[drinkypoo]

Isn't that a stupid question? I mean, it's clear why a government would want to stop him.

As for the HOW to the WHY, the answer is usually "make people feel appreciated".

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Canazza]

Because the Arab ghettos are within the death zone of any nukes on the main population centres?

That, and everyone would come and fuck you up in retaliation. Nuclear or not.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

The theory is that the more countries and NGO that have nuclear weapons, then the more likely they are to be used.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Master Of Ninja]

Because the Arab ghettos are within the death zone of any nukes on the main population centres?

That, and everyone would come and fuck you up in retaliation. Nuclear or not.

Are you sure? If the world politics/UN is anything to go by there would be some countries siding with Iran, some abstaining, some being in the retaliation camp, and then a veto or two against the whole plan by a country that's playing realpolitik. It would be a mess. But the power of having a nuke is that people start taking you more seriously on the world stage

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Islam is an evil religion that tells them to kill non muslims. They would use it if teh could get away with it.

Sorry, whatever protection you have against terrorists is highly inefficient. The only reason you aren't dead is because no-one rellay wants to kill you.
So no, you are wrong. Most muslims are good people that doesn't want to kill anyone.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because possessing even 1 nuclear weapon is enough to not be harassed/invaded/bombarded by the US.
So of course the US doesn't like it, and will do anything legal or not to prevent it. Up to now the only country they can intimidate is Iran, seeing that NK already has the bomb, Pakistan has it, India has it. I doubt Iran is more crazy than NK or India or Pakistan, those last 2 almost went nuclear a couple of times.
Don't want the US bully knocking on your door ? Get yourself a couple of nuclear weapons.
So I say go go Iran. Get yourself an arsenal. It can't get worse and you might even avoid an US/Israel invasion/bombing campaign.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that a stupid question?

It is. It is a very stupid question.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[c0lo]

The theory is that the more countries and NGO that have nuclear weapons, then the more likely they are to be used.

Strange theory... last I know of, the only time a nuclear weapon was used in a war was at a time only one nation has had the technology.And they used it twice. And I heard/read some arguing that their use was gratuitous, just for showing some muscles.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[dkleinsc]

Counterargument:
1. Iraq had no nukes. The US falsely claimed they did, and then used that as an excuse to blow them to smithereens.

2. North Korea has nukes, as well as a military much weaker than Iraq did. The US has generally rattled sabers but left them alone.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Groupers]

You don't normally monetize your intellectual assets? Most people have jobs that do that.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser guided bombs to try and minimize casualties of non combatants mean nothing to you? Check out how other countries deal with insurgents and militias, look up grozny. Better yet, look up rwanda or serbia where european UN troops stood by and let the people there to protect, get massacred. It seems that the rest of the world likes to either A: blow the town to hell even with civilians, or B: stand around and watch them die.

"wholesale destruction and slaughter" was what japan did to china and SEA. You are either purposefully trying force a lie into being believed, or you are truly ignorant to the meaning of those words and the appropriate situations they apply.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[loonycyborg]

All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ciderbrew]

Let me almost fix that for you :).
Counterargument:
1. Iraq had no nukes AND OIL. The (G1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 Nth economic clubs) which the US is one of claimed they did, and then used that as an excuse to blow them to smithereens. This got a lot of Tax money moving around the system. War does pay well and it only kills poor people.

2. North Korea has nukes; but not as much oil, as well as a military much weaker than Iraq did. The US has generally rattled sabers but left them alone. When oil starts running ooohhhhh it's on baby.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reasons I can think of are those which Israel used to kill off Iran's nuclear scientists.
No, I do not think that they qualify as good enough to kill anyone. Israel playing such a game can't turn around and say "no fair" if their scientists were killed off in a similar fashion.
As a side note, Jimmy Carter said that Israel has at least 150 nuclear warheads in their arsenal. USA and USSR might have had MAD, but Israel and Iran having them is insane. Look at the Palestinian areas, ship boardings in international waters (piracy, legally speaking), and so on.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

Do you have any statistics or clue of how many each side (Muslims and non-Muslims) have killed from the other side? I bet more Muslims have been killed.

What is your definition of Evil?

Does it cover the thing which pushes a country to start/engage in at least 50 wars in 70 years and nuke civilian cities? Or just covers Muslims which fight occupiers in their lands?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Attila Dimedici]

How far back do you want to go? Perhaps you are unaware that the Muslims started the wars that we call the Crusades (or at least those that were against Muslims) by invading "Christian" countries?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[cmdr_tofu]

Islam is an evil religion that tells them to kill non muslims. They would use it if teh could get away with it.

Not calling you bigoted or anything, but would you support laws to prevent Muslims from becoming doctors or cooks (at least for non-Muslims)?

Muslims account for over 1/5th (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam) of the world's population. Like Christianity, I find it doubtful that you could make any generalization which would actually apply to all Muslims. Peace.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[TheRaven64]

North Korea also has China as an ally. Invading North Korea would effectively mean declaring war on China (just as invading Poland prevented the UK from remaining neutral in the second world war). That's far more important than the nukes that NK claims to have (as I recall, they only had one test, which was underground and didn't appear to cause any detectable increase in radioactivity - I was in the USA at the time, and it was amusing that the test was front page news, but when the lack of radioactivity was discovered it was on the BBC but completely absent from the US news sources that had been trumpeting the test).

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not saying muslims want to kill people, he's saying Islam advocates the elimination of pagans/infidels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-Tawba_5
It's funny how muslim scholars want to defend the indefendable, saying that it has to be put into context, and is only aimed at a particular historic group of pagans. Riiiiight... These are meant to be the words of God, they should be perfect and therefore without ambiguity and understandable by everyone.
Anyway, don't laugh at children for believing in Santa Claus, there are adults who believe in crazier fairy tales.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Islam is an evil religion that tells them to kill non muslims. They would use it if teh could get away with it.

Sorry, whatever protection you have against terrorists is highly inefficient. The only reason you aren't dead is because no-one rellay wants to kill you.
So no, you are wrong. Most muslims are good people that doesn't want to kill anyone.

Exactly. Chrisq's commentary is based on utter ignorance. There was a large Gallup study about the Muslim community, the largest ever conducted about this topic, published as a book in 2008. In a nutshell, the study shows that Muslims are as peaceful as other people and share amazingly many views with e.g. most Americans. And, not very surprisingly, the very small militant minority among them is primarily motivated by political -- not religious -- reasons just like most other militants.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

If you are that good in going back (i.e. more than a thousand years), then you perhaps know how many humans were killed by religious Christians (in the name of religion) because they would not become Christians or would not like to accept whatever Church would say.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[AmiMoJo]

They were tests. Little was known about the effect on humans, animals, farmland and cities. They could easily have used their bombs on unpopulated islands or sparsely populated areas to for Japan to surrender (in fact one of the biggest factors in the decision was the threat of nuking Tokyo), but that wouldn't have told the much more than they already knew from tests on American soil.

The US was aware that other countries were trying to develop nuclear weapons and was naturally worried about the effect they would have on US cities. The two bombs they dropped used different designs because they were trying to maximise the amount of data they could collect. Many non-military targets such as Kyoto were considered but in the end they decided that they should at least make some effort to claim they were attacking ports and manufacturing.

Before the US became involved in the war they were against the targeting of civilians by British bomber raids on Germany. The British did it anyway in the grounds that the situation was desperate, even if it did violate the laws of warfare. That justification has been debated many times, but at least there was justification. Okay, in a conventional war more US soldiers would have died, but there was no chance of Japan invading the US or winning the war. Bad times indeed.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Shoten]

The theory is that the more countries and NGO that have nuclear weapons, then the more likely they are to be used.

Strange theory... last I know of, the only time a nuclear weapon was used in a war was at a time only one nation has had the technology.And they used it twice. And I heard/read some arguing that their use was gratuitous, just for showing some muscles.

Actually, there's another theory...that the more countries (and in particular, the more unstable countries) have nuclear weapons, the more likely they are to fall into the hands of an actor where deterrence does not come into play. The best current example of this is Libya, who fortunately gave up their nuclear program before the recent rebellion and subsequent chaos. It isn't at all difficult to imagine that if weapons-grade material or even a nuclear weapon itself were somewhere in Libya during the uprising that there wouldn't be forces trying to locate and seize it that would be far more likely to use a nuke than a nation-state (which can be nuked in return). This is the real nightmare scenario, these days. As you've accurately pointed out, deterrence is remarkably effective at keeping nation-states from using nuclear weapons on each other, but when you put a weapon into the hands of a group that many countries are trying to hunt to extinction anyways, there isn't much to deter them.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

The muslims have been killing people and each other for thousands of years.

I really don't give a fuck if they want to continue killing each other. But when they start targeting anyone else.. Again.

Bomb the fuck out of them. We're going to have to do it someday.

Their religion is not compatable with anyone else. And eventually we'll have to do something about it. The sooner we do it. The less dead people there will be.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Dunbal]

but because they can start waving it at Israel if the Yanks start getting mouthy.

Rubbish. Israel is far from defenseless and has its own nuclear arsenal. Iran is not going to threaten Israel at all. They can't afford to take that chance. What they can do, however, is stop being pushed around. Just like North Korea. Suddenly North Korea can shell South Korea and kill South Koreans and get away with "oh, sorry". That's what a nuke gets you. Not having nukes gets you, well, Libya.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Islam is an evil religion that tells them to kill non muslims. They would use it if teh could get away with it.

Sorry, whatever protection you have against terrorists is highly inefficient. The only reason you aren't dead is because no-one rellay wants to kill you. So no, you are wrong. Most muslims are good people that doesn't want to kill anyone.

Exactly. Chrisq's commentary is based on utter ignorance. There was a large Gallup study about the Muslim community, the largest ever conducted about this topic, published as a book in 2008. In a nutshell, the study shows that Muslims are as peaceful as other people and share amazingly many views with e.g. most Americans. And, not very surprisingly, the very small militant minority among them is primarily motivated by political -- not religious -- reasons just like most other militants.

How about 28% of British Muslims wanting to make Britain an Islamic state or 6% of British Muslims thinking that the tube bombings were wholy justified That is over 170,000 muslims in the UK would like to see us killed. Sorry for ignorantly objecting to it.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

Quite correct. At best, Iran will have 1/10th nukes and will not ever dare to start a nuclear war. Tehran (and suburbs) alone has 15 million inhabitants while the whole Israel does not have half that much.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all Abrahamic religions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions) and they are QUITE compatible and have more similarities than you think.

Abrahamic religions are too different from eastern religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) and also those of Latin America.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Hentes]

For deterrence to work, they had to be used at least once.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

And so? All that Chinese money makes it possible for USA to destroy China in any type of war. Easy.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[couchslug]

Because even more superstitionists with nukes = bad and no concept of "fairness" is remotely important compared to that.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternative view: If you have a nuke, you can launch it from an unusual location to make it look like another guy did it, sit back, and watch WWIII unfold on its own.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[couchslug]

It took considerable violence to take the edge off Christianity, and that was well worth it.

Superstitionists cannot be swayed from their position by logic, but can be killed.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you remain ignorant.

The first study you cite is irrelevant; you could just as well ask all British Christians whether they want the UK to be a Christian state and will probably get over 60% approval.

Regarding the second study, it's a small study conducted on behalf of the telegraph and I wouldn't be very surprised if it weren't representative at all / not drawn from a proper and large enough random sample (i.e., basically I suspect it is meaningless crap). The Gallup survey is representative for 90% of the world's population of Muslims and was conducted all over the world. If Muslims in England were indeed so much more violent than anywhere else in the world then you should perhaps ask yourself what them so violent in the UK. Is it their dislike for tea?

Anyway, your original statement remains as ignorant as before, whether you like it or not, because it was about Islam in general, i.e. all Muslims and not just the ones in the UK, and the Gallup study has clearly shown that Muslims are about as violent as Christians.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Talderas]

Once you use it. Yes.

However that is just retaliation. The damage from the nuke has already been done and seeing as if Iran could get two nukes and drop them on the oil export terminals that Saudi Arabia owns in the Persian Gulf (well within the range of Iranian missiles) you would see about a 64% decline in the oil exports from Saudi Arabia. Repairs that could not begin until hostilities were taken care of. Even if they could redirect their pipelines to Yanbu on the Red Sea they would only have an export capacity of around 5 million barrels per day rather than the 14 million barrels per day they can handle now. They're lose at least 3.65 million barrels per days in exports so you're looking at a about a 42% reduction in Saudi oil exports with them running at 100% capacity.

That's a very, very shitty situation for the whole world. Say what you want about peak oil and how we should get off of oil. A sudden significant reduction in world wide oil supplies isn't going to be good.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[TFAFalcon]

Talking about the Israelis? Because they often describe themselves as a 'group that many countries are trying to hunt to extinction'.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Tomato42]

"It's not terrorism if we're doing it." - the real US motto

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it makes strategic sense for Iran to ever start threatening Israel with nukes because it will attract a nuclear attack from Israel or the US, Iran's religious regime is propped up by a thriving Israel (Israel is Iran's scapegoat in the desert), nuking Israel would destroy the very people their hearts are supposedly bleeding for, the Palestinians, and a successful attack might destroy Jerusalem, the third holiest site of Islam.

Iran will need the nuclear weapon to keep the militaristic regimes of Israel and the US at bay or at least think twice before launching a full-scale attack and to give the irritated Iranian citizenry something to be proud of -- even a free, democratic Iran will want a nuclear weapon because they are a proud superpower with an ancient civilization.

Israel has a simple way to undermine the Iranian strategy and achieve immunity against an existential threat: make a fair peace with the Palestinians.

The only problem to Israel is that: the "democratic" regime of Israel depends on Palestinians being the enemy -- peace would cause a slew of Israeli politicians to lose their careers. (However, since the Palestinian politicians are in the same situation, peace is hardly a credible threat. An exception would be a peace agreed by two elderly statesmen worried for their legacies. Well, Abu Mazen is there, but the Hamas leaders are younger, and Ariel Sharon is no longer in the game.)

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

Strange theory...

It's well known. My opinion is that it's also true.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[The Askylist]

Siblings tend to fight each other a lot more than they fight other people. Just because they are all rooted in the same superstition doesn't mean they are compatible - internecine warfare between Christians of differing views was quite common in the Middle Ages. Look at the Catholic purge of the Cathars, or later massacres of Protestants.

.

Sky fairies aren't a solution to anything except maybe overpopulation.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Yes, you remain ignorant.

The first study you cite is irrelevant; you could just as well ask all British Christians whether they want the UK to be a Christian state and will probably get over 60% approval.

Regarding the second study, it's a small study conducted on behalf of the telegraph and I wouldn't be very surprised if it weren't representative at all / not drawn from a proper and large enough random sample (i.e., basically I suspect it is meaningless crap). The Gallup survey is representative for 90% of the world's population of Muslims and was conducted all over the world. If Muslims in England were indeed so much more violent than anywhere else in the world then you should perhaps ask yourself what them so violent in the UK. Is it their dislike for tea?

Anyway, your original statement remains as ignorant as before, whether you like it or not, because it was about Islam in general, i.e. all Muslims and not just the ones in the UK, and the Gallup study has clearly shown that Muslims are about as violent as Christians.

Say what you want, despite the larger number of Christians in the UK we haven't had them setting of bombs on public transport in the name of their religion, trying to blow up aircraft, and driving burning vehicles into airports. They don't disrupt remembrance day services, hold banners saying "Freedom can go to hell", and "Britain will become an Islamic state" or "those who insult Jesus will be killed". There aren't reports of Christians killing relatives for marrying the wrong person or leaving Christianity every week. They don't demand that areas with lots of Christians become "Christian law" areas and say they will violently punish people who don't dress the way they like. Muslims do all these things.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[VMaN]

Their military might be weaker (I don't know if that's true), but as with real estate , location, location, location....

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've also got the Israelis who just love to herd Arabs into ghettos and kill them.

That is just the most ignorant thing I've read all day (although it is early here). If Israel 'loved' killing them there would be a lot more dead. Compare the number of Arabs killed by other Arabs to the number killed by Israel. The number killed by Israel is miniscule in comparison. Yes there's a lot of problems over there, but making up information, pretending that what's obvious isn't true, and misplacing the blame isn't going to get anything solved.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[TFAFalcon]

How many British Christians want the country to remain a Christian state?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ultranova]

Superstitionists cannot be swayed from their position by logic, but can be killed.

But as you just demonstrated, this won't actually solve the problem, since there will still be murderous lunatics walking around.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Garybaldy]

Oh yeah because Everyone who even remotely tries to see both sides. Or side with anyone other than Israel is instantly discredited as anti semantic. That is really getting old. You really ought to try a new excuse.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, back in the real world, only an idiot assumes that two countries with two entirely different geopolitical situations would be treated identically. NK has starving people. Any type of military action would result in hundreds of thousands of people starving to death. Its so bad, the UN has an agreement with China to take control of NK should it become necessary. Furthermore, NK isn't really comparable with Iraq or Iran in any way - unless of course, you have no clue about the topic at hand.

Perhaps you should make an effort to understand how the world works before you attempt to apply a simpleton's cookie cutter view to every situation.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Garybaldy]

That only works till scientists come in to sample the radiation. You can tell which reactor it came from. Heck you can even find out what year it was refined.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

How many British Christians want the country to remain a Christian state?

A more equivalent question would be "how many British Christians would want the Britain to become a theocracy with punishment for heresy and other faiths like in medieval times"? The answer would me much less that 28%.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[teha2]

Jew hating retards in my slashdot?

It's more likely than you think.

Telling the truth is not hating.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Dachannien]

1. Iraq had no nukes. The US falsely claimed they did, and then used that as an excuse to blow them to smithereens.

The US legitimately believed Iraq did have WMDs, because Saddam engaged in a program of misinformation to make it seem like they did, in an effort to deter Iran from attacking. Saddam bet that Iran was the greater threat, and he bet wrong. Even President Clinton has said that the prevailing intelligence at the end of his term was that Saddam had WMDs.

On a side note, the reason that North Korea is a tougher target is because of all the artillery they have pointed at Seoul. Yes, we would steamroll them, but that's a lot of South Koreans who would be killed before we could destroy that artillery.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I don't think knowledge should be coveted. Period.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on the second. North Korea has an insanely huge military. The fourth biggest on this planet. Their navy and air force are second rate at best, but the ground forces are quite capable. And they have around 1000 artillery pieces with enough range to reach a certain city in south korea, which is home to a third of the population. Invading north korea would produce megadeath numbers among the civillians. They never needed nukes...

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[kanto]

Say what you want, despite the larger number of Christians in the UK we haven't had them setting of bombs on public transport in the name of their religion, trying to blow up aircraft, and driving burning vehicles into airports. They don't disrupt remembrance day services, hold banners saying "Freedom can go to hell", and "Britain will become an Islamic state" or "those who insult Jesus will be killed". There aren't reports of Christians killing relatives for marrying the wrong person or leaving Christianity every week. They don't demand that areas with lots of Christians become "Christian law" areas and say they will violently punish people who don't dress the way they like. Muslims do all these things.

Maybe you're thinking of the IRA.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iranians are animals, and you don't want to hand animals nuclear weapons. Duh.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nedlohs]

You don't know he bet wrong. If he hadn't done all that then Iran might have attacked him sooner than the US did, for example.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[rwhamann]

First - I am not here to defend the previous administration's ill-advised actions, so don't bring it up in reply to this. I have no interest in going to war with Iran for oil, mink or the treasure of Sierra Madre.

Why wouldn't we want to prevent Iran from gaining access to nuclear weapons? They have not shown themselves willing to play by the rules of international discourse. They have rather indicated that another country has no right to exist. Isn't in the best interest of all nations to keep nuclear weapons out of the continual hotbed of conflict that is the middle east.

- Yes, I know Israel has them - would that that could be undone.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nedlohs]

Muslims haven't existed for thousands of years, so clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Say what you want, despite the larger number of Christians in the UK we haven't had them setting of bombs on public transport in the name of their religion, trying to blow up aircraft, and driving burning vehicles into airports. They don't disrupt remembrance day services, hold banners saying "Freedom can go to hell", and "Britain will become an Islamic state" or "those who insult Jesus will be killed". There aren't reports of Christians killing relatives for marrying the wrong person or leaving Christianity every week. They don't demand that areas with lots of Christians become "Christian law" areas and say they will violently punish people who don't dress the way they like. Muslims do all these things.

Maybe you're thinking of the IRA.

They were doing it because of the occupation of Ireland, not because they were Irish or Christian. They had demands that you can agree with or disagree, not just a statement that they want to kill people different from them.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[znerk]

The problem here would be that you're assuming there's any kind of sanity over there. What happens when Iran suddenly has a few dirty bombs to toss around?

"Hey, we have 3 of these things, let's send one or two off to rid us of some infidels. Allah says we'll get 72 virgins and stuff when we get creamed in retaliation."

Never assume the other guy is sane.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[cavreader]

Since when has the UN been relevant when a country decides to initiate military actions? If Iran does succeed in building a nuclear weapon it will increase the danger of them being attacked. Nuclear weapons in general are not that big of a deal however the distribution of such devices to non-state actors is dangerous in the extreme and Iran has a history of supporting and arming some of the worst militant movements in the world. Pakistan also falls into the same category but unfortunately they already have nukes and are busy building more.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how about you start telling the truth?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[CrimsonAvenger]

hey've also got the Israelis who just love to herd Arabs into ghettos and kill them.

It should, perhaps, be noted that the Iranians are Persians.

In the general case, Persians think less of Arabs than the Israelis do. Or the Americans.

Note also that the feeling is mutual - Arabs don't like Persians, even a little bit.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Muslims haven't existed for thousands of years, so clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.

You know that in an islamic country you could be killed for saying that. They really believe that there has always been Islam and everyone was born a muslim

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[CrimsonAvenger]

The US legitimately believed Iraq did have WMDs, because Saddam engaged in a program of misinformation to make it seem like they did, in an effort to deter Iran from attacking. Saddam bet that Iran was the greater threat, and he bet wrong. Even President Clinton

One quibble - Iraq DID have WMD's. Nukes are a subset of WMD's, not the whole thing. Chemical weapons (which the Iraqis had been using in their little internal wars for years, count as WMD's.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Garybaldy]

And no i am not defending that persons POV. Just refuting that old and tired rebuttal.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the top and irrational. Are you really claiming that 28% of muslims are blowing up airports (or will blow up an airport at some stage) ? 6% think the tube bombings are justified? Bollox. How about doing something similar with the percentage of people who vote BNP (in the areas in which they stand, and then extrapolating to the whole country just to be as "scientific" as your telegraph "facts"), and you'll start to come to the same (wrong) conclusions about the white Christian majority. You throw around poorly compiled statistics like they prove your point, when all you really want to do is hate. If you were more honest, you would skip the pseudo-statistics, and just go straight to the raw bigotry.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Dails]

Come on. It's always amusing to see people bash the US for things that, heads up, literally EVERY country does. Here's the cycle:

1. My country can leverage x for economic gain (everything is about economic gain, even military power)
2. Suchandsuch is happening that threatens our x
3. Choose:
          a. Be fair, let it happen, watch your country grow poorer
          b. Be unfair, stop it from happening, allow your country to flourish

If your responsibility as the leader of your country was to ensure the economic prosperity of your country, what kind of an idiot would you be to choose 3a? Would you stand before your people and say "Yes, we could have avoided this recession, but I really thought that deserved the money more this time."

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Islamofacist states with atomic weapons is not a good thing.

You are an utter fuckhead who is not paying attention. STFU and go back to playing Halo, geek shit.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[CrimsonAvenger]

If you are that good in going back (i.e. more than a thousand years), then you perhaps know how many humans were killed by religious Christians (in the name of religion) because they would not become Christians or would not like to accept whatever Church would say.

And if you look at the same period, you see Islam expanding from nothing to well into France. After conquering pretty much the entire Middle East, North Africa, a large chunk of India, Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France.

If it hadn't been for Charles Martel, we'd all be studying our Korans now....

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

Nobody has ever claimed that Iraq had nuclear weapons, but rather that they were trying to get nuclear weapons. North Korea might have nukes (assuming they have yet gone beyond the failed bomb that they made a few years ago) and they have a strong patron, China.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

China's intervention would devastate the next Korean war. From an easy rout (after U.S. army deployment) to a bloodbath resulting in tens of thousands of U.S. deaths. The American public would panic and the entire country would be in danger of mass rioting. The first part is what happened during the previous Korean war, and the second part is because of current public opinion.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

The only reason you aren't dead is because no-one rellay wants to kill you.

It can be surprisingly hard to kill someone who doesn't want to die and has the power to protect themselves. If the above statement were true, no country would have a living head of state.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[drinkypoo]

All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.

I hear this repeated frequently, but it's a total bullshit argument. If they can save a lot of time or money by spending a little bit of time and money bribing someone, then it makes plenty of sense to do so.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Imbrondir]

War does pay well

I'm not buying that unless you speak exclusively of weapon companies. As far as I've seen debt, unemployment and the general economy has gone much for the worse since 9/11.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Just Some Guy]

Iraq had no nukes AND OIL.

I, for one, am glad to be paying $1.37 per gallon of gas now that we've confiscated all of Iraq's oil.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

Talking about the Israelis? Because they often describe themselves as a 'group that many countries are trying to hunt to extinction'.

And since countries rather than crazed independents were trying that trick, the nuclear deterrent worked. Israel hasn't had to fight a major war since 1973.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[onkelonkel]

"Chemical Weapons...count as WMDs". I have drain cleaner and bleach in my house. That means I have WMDs. Is America going to invade me?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Idarubicin]

All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.

Ah, well, pfft--engineering. At least it's nothing difficult.

Going from the physics textbook to the final application is...non-trivial. If you have a person who has never set foot in a kitchen before, you wouldn't expect them to be able to turn out a twelve-course tasting menu just because "all knowledge required to make a gourmet dinner is already freely available, e.g. in cookbooks". At least, you wouldn't expect them to be able to do the job right the first time, and without weeks or months of trial and error.

Any major project (particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the field of engineering) will benefit greatly from having expert individuals on tap who have done similar work before. I know what a uranium hexafluoride gas centrifuge does, but the nitty-gritty details of actually building one are going to take some experimentation. Having scientists and engineers with previous nuclear (weapons) experience means avoiding blind alleys and not reinventing a whole bunch of wheels.

Is it possible to complete a nuclear weapons project without any outside, pre-existing expertise? Sure. (The Americans certainly did it in WWII.) Will it be faster and much cheaper to complete the project given the assistance of experienced experts? Hell yes. With the lone exception of the United States, who didn't have anyone to crib from, no present-day nuclear power has created their arsenal without information given to them by allies, stolen from enemies, or bought from middlemen.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Over the top and irrational. Are you really claiming that 28% of muslims are blowing up airports (or will blow up an airport at some stage) ? 6% think the tube bombings are justified? Bollox. How about doing something similar with the percentage of people who vote BNP (in the areas in which they stand, and then extrapolating to the whole country just to be as "scientific" as your telegraph "facts"), and you'll start to come to the same (wrong) conclusions about the white Christian majority. You throw around poorly compiled statistics like they prove your point, when all you really want to do is hate. If you were more honest, you would skip the pseudo-statistics, and just go straight to the raw bigotry.

That's rediculous in every way. Why would you look at votin in any area that did not return the majority party as typical. especially one that doesn't return a single MP?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

The only reasons I can think of are those which Israel used to kill off Iran's nuclear scientists.

Or some other hostile neighbor, such as Saudi Arabia. The method of killing, slapping an explosive device on the side of a car, doesn't strike me as particularly professional. The killers didn't leave a signed confession.

No, I do not think that they qualify as good enough to kill anyone.

And your survival isn't threatened by the presence of Iranian nukes either.

USA and USSR might have had MAD, but Israel and Iran having them is insane.

So you just thought of additional reasons for Iran not to have nukes despite writing earlier that you couldn't?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

How about doing something similar with the percentage of people who vote BNP

Ok, find the poll and we can do the comparison.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[delt0r]

True, to a point. Getting hold of the required amounts of 235U or 239Pu remain the biggest obstacles. Despite movies, it really is very strictly controlled and hard to move without a lot of people knowing about it or noticing.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[fredrated]

So somehow MAD worked for decades between the US and the USSR, but suddenly that is invalid just because you want to do things differently this time?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[delt0r]

They have not shown themselves willing to play by the rules of international discourse.

This is also true of the US.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[yacc143]

Well, actually Bush & Co claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nuke are just one kind of WMD, there are also biological and chemical WMDs, which were what Iraq was said to own. Despite the fact that even US intelligence services were not sure (their reports were more along the line "well, they might have some") and UN reports that Iraq has no such weapons, which were proven after the invasion that ended many years ago (rofl), politicians felt it necessary to do something. No matter that Iraqi and US citizens died during the liberation of Iraq. (And despite the fact the Saddam regime had a tendency to genocidal actions, one has to wonder how many Iraqis were killed per year under it, and how many during the liberation, and how many nowadays?)

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ShavedOrangutan]

Do you clean your drains with mustard gas, sarin, and VX?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[jackbird]

...and sentiment about the occupation of Ireland divides fairly neatly along sunni/shiite^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H catholic/protestant lines.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nurb432]

Because its illegal to share that knowledge with some countries. For good reasons.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit. Air bombings by the United States took hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives and exceeded the death toll of the atomic bombs. Minimizing casualties on the other side was not an intended goal.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[BlueParrot]

So somehow MAD worked for decades between the US and the USSR, but suddenly that is invalid just because you want to do things differently this time?

There were multiple close calls, and on a few occasions the decision not to fire off the full scale retaliation was down to a very small number of people. Furthermore, it has not prevented various military conflicts between India and Pakistan.

Or to put it another way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk37TD_08eA

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[BlueParrot]

Many non-military targets such as Kyoto were considered but in the end they decided that they should at least make some effort to claim they were attacking ports and manufacturing.

Hiroshima was not the primary target. It was chosen because of favourable weather conditions. They picked a city to annihilate based on where the sun was shining...

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Alioth]

So all the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland (where Christians are killing Christians over trivial differences in their religious beliefs) doesn't count?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ciderbrew]

"Let me almost fix that for you :)" - Maybe that could mean the following guff could be meant as a flippant remark that doesn't need or require an insult. Perhaps you should make an effort in life, to think about what you are typing :). My post has up set you, and I'm glad about that.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Invading North Korea would effectively mean declaring war on China (just as invading Poland prevented the UK from remaining neutral in the second world war).

In other words, invading NK provides a socially acceptable excuse for China to go to war with the US - should they feel so inclined.

Two nations invaded Poland at the beginning of WWII - the UK declared war on one and gave military aid to the other.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[morgauxo]

That was the point. War pays well to the weapons companies and other contractors. They are HUGE and POWERFUL corporations with more than enough politicians in their back pockets to keep humanity killing itself until the end of the world. Just look at Cheney + Halliburton...

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[badran]

What is there to stop this in countries that already have nukes. You know that some of those countries consult "IMAGINARY" friends for advice too.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Talderas]

You're applying cold war logic to a nation headed by religious fanatics many of whom believe they will be rewarded in death for killing non-believers and believers who don't believe the strict interpretation. That is something I'm not inclined towards believing. Most of the Cold War was done via proxy and there were very few, if any, times where world critical strategic resources were threatened by potential Russian or American actions.

A more likely scenario than Iran committing a first strike is that Iran would start attacking vessels in the Persian Gulf from the land choking off oil exports that way. That is an actual threat that exists right now. The US Navy would be hard pressed to stop all the attacks against tankers. Once the US Army or Marines threaten to invade Iran then brandish the nuke and threaten Ras Tanura saying that if the US invades they'll blow up the ports.

Once Iran has a nuke the ability of other nations to impede Iran being a little bitch about oil because exceedingly difficult since it is capable of royally fucking everyone in the ass. What can the rest of the world do? Maybe increase oil production or decrease oil demand until the oil coming from the Persian Gulf doesn't matter. That certainly reduces his bargaining chip but that will take time.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[morgauxo]

If that was all there was to it then he could have easily had his diplomats let our diplomats what was really going on. He could even have let inspectors in provided that the inspections were done in secret. It's not like the US and Iran are best friends or anything.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[PhilHibbs]

Because Iran is an enemy state, and it is against our strategic interest for them to have nuclear weapons. Duh.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[morgauxo]

He is known to have had them up through the first US/Iraqi war. After that the program was supposedly dismantled. Have you heard any reports that existing chemical weapons or even evidence of their existence were found when the US came looking for them? I haven't. While I would agree that not finding them isn't 100% proof they aren't just really well hidden the search was supposedly quite massive. It seems pretty unlikely there actually was any extant wmd program in Iraq.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember where I read this, but I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from previous air raids on account of the planned atomic bombing. So it wasn't exactly unplanned, there were several viable targets iirc.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

The two bombs they dropped used different designs because they were trying to maximise the amount of data they could collect.

Do reality and facts have no bearing on your opinions? The "Manhattan Project" created 4 bombs. They made one uranium bomb because it was hard to enrich the uranium, and they didn't have enough to make more bombs. The theory and operation were relatively simple, so they had high confidence that it would work. They made 3 plutonium bombs because chemical separation is much easier than isotope enrichment. However, plutonium can't be used in a gun-type bomb. The implosion design was much more complicated and needed testing. One bomb was detonated at Alamogordo, the second was dropped on Nagasaki after the Hiroshima bomb failed to generate an immediate surrender, and the 3rd wasn't completed until after the war.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ciderbrew]

The war criminal Tony Blair made lots of statements about them having WMDs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3750847.stm
have a search for WMD in 2002.
If you care to, WMDs around that time was sold to us as: chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/tony_blair.html
I'm not too sure what nation you want to take your Nobody from; but here in the UK in early part of our decade our Nobody at the time, the war criminal Tony Blair, did make the claim.

Note: I'd to retract my comment about Tony Blair being a war criminal. I've since found that out to be thought of as untrue.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[morgauxo]

Hmmm... how many extremist vs non-extremist madrassas would that vaporize?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[TheReadingBystander]

Whoa... wait a second. The U.S. claimed that Iraq had WMDs, which might include nukes, but I'm pretty sure they never claimed there were nukes - They were looking for bio-weapons remember.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[deadwill69]

No, Nukes are not a subset of WMD's. Weapon of Mass Destruction. Sarin, vx, gb, mustard, chlorine, etc, are not weapons of mass destruction. Never have been and never will. The military has classified the weapons as area denial weapons for the better part of a century. (think similar to mines) There is only one weapon of mass destruction. The only time in history similar destruction was carried out was Dresden at the end of WWII when the Allies bombed it with phosphorous for a month. It still wasn't a weapon of mass destruction. It was a bombing raid from hell. Literally.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Hognoxious]

Or side with anyone other than Israel is instantly discredited as anti semantic.

That statement is totally meaningless.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[fremsley471]

Never assume the other guy is sane.

This premise w.r.t. nuclear weapons is incorrect, as well as being very, very dangerous. We had 45 years of Cold War; MAD worked.

Governments who are unpopular with other governments may have their leaders called lunatics, but can you name one significant leader who truly was?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ZankerH]

And yet you're still complaining while Europe pays upwards of 1€ (coming up on 1.5) per LITRE of petrol.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[phorm]

They (Christians) do, however, get rather pissy if you photoshop a picture of the pope kissing an imam...

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

How if US decides to bomb a few more civilian cities?

Iranians are Shite Muslim and do not believe into your 72 virgin joke.

Of course. No one even assumed Bush et al. were sane.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ciderbrew]

9/11 isn't really a war. On that matter and looking from the outside and getting a lot of opinions from news events from this site (a mistake I'm sure.). It looks like the war is on American freedoms by its [government] / [back room corporation]. The amount spent on all the wars added war vs bail out is always a bargain. but I would be interested to read anything regarding the causality of on going wars and confidence of the market, which may have lead to the current credit balls up and recession. If that's provable It would be interesting to watch large corporations legislate against all war to protect their profit margins. Capitalism for peace!
The real cost of course is the huge loss of life on all side. The pollution and horrendous waste of resources is ridiculous too. That energy could be spent on exploration.
but as you say those weapon companies are doing well.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[wmac1]

Can you give a damn reference for what you claim? You like to invent beliefs for Muslims?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Just Some Guy]

I was being sarcastic. Gas is still nearly $4 per gallon. For all the righteous indignation about the US supposedly invading Iraq "for the oil", the pump prices certainly aren't reflecting any big influx of free petroleum.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[yacc143]

Well, but then you should not paint yourself as the side that follows ethical guidelines. Hypocrisy does not become politicians.

The fact is that if you took the foreign behaviour of the US, and anonymized it, you could easily identify as a member country of the "Axis of Evil".

Ever considered how many foreign civilians are killed by the US (bombs are usually not smart, and even smart bombs can kill civilians that happen to be where the bomb detonates)? How does that compare to all dead caused by foreign terrorists? In absolute numbers? In relative numbers?

How can ignoring local laws be okay (there are warrents for US agents in European countries)? And if local laws can be ignored sometimes, why does that exception not apply to the other side? And if the US is allowed to execute people without trial located in foreign countries, how come they are irritated with foreign terrorists, these guys are only their jobs, like US federal civil servants that are bombing civilians on the other side of the globe?

Basically, if it comes down to we are the good guys, because ...., well it's our people, it's very hard to condemn the other side doing the same thing?

And to the poster above, your items basically legitimatizes terrorism. If it's only about what is good for us, then if it's good for us to bomb a couple of thousands of civilians, well, let's do it. It's also a blue print to explain why what the Iranian fanatics do is okay. And so on.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought that USA was too religious country, but is the situation really THAT bad?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[yacc143]

Well, actually, there are persons that take a recipe from the cookbook (or the Internet), and cook it on an evening they've invited guests. So yes, you just to get the right person, which admittingly is not trivial in a government (no matter which country) sponsored project.

The problem with security is, that you usually cannot protect completely, you can only make the attack more expensive. (If the expense is more than the whole Earth can output in the next century, you can feel relatively secure, but the important thing that you need reevaluate your premises all the time, because new discoveries can cut the costs)

So keeping scientists (which are not engineers btw, and are the topic of the article) from selling out will make the physics book approach more competitive. And the presumption that you need to acquire the knowledge externally because redoing on your own is not economic is a dangerous assumption, when dealing with fanatics, dictatorships, and other extreme entities. (These entities often work with slightly different economical models.)

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[yacc143]

Well, Chrisq referred to the religion, which in fact has a number of questionable rules in their holy scripture. You referred to the muslim population. Now most of these are pragmatic, as are most catholics, protestants, and so on. Just consider some places in the US that go by the nickname "Bible Belt" and what these fanatics extract out of the Bible. Now the Bible is clearly adult-only lecture (you've got descriptions all kind perverse kinky stuff inside, murder, ..., every crazy behaviour you name is more or less depicted some where inside), but obviously the muslim scripture is a little bit more aggressive, so when fanatics extrapolate from it, the fanatism is a little bit more extreme.

Does not change the fact that 99% of muslim population are civil peaceful people (as are 99% of the Christian population).

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how they want to make Britain an Islamic state when many of them or their recent ancestors left Islamic states in the first place.

Perhaps they should go back to Islamic states (especially those that need help) and put their efforts there? Since those states are already Islamic states it should be less work to make them into better Islamic states right?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[guspasho]

And when was the last time anyone actually used a nuclear weapon?

The value in having nuclear weapons is not in their use, but the threat of their use. The US has been constantly escalating its threats against Iran. What Iran desperately needs is a deterrent, to keep the US from following through on it's threats.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[yacc143]

No actually British Christians wouldn't want a theocracy, certainly not 60% of them. But that is only because in most places (well exclude some bible fanatics).

Or to put it stronger, Christian fanatics might oppose say abortion. But they wouldn't want a state based on the Bible (Hint: the bible gives no framework for statehood.), but they would certainly like a law or even an amendment to forbid abortion.

As sad it is that people want to limit the choices for others, and some of them are murderers too, as a whole these guys are quite a bit more compatible with democratic western style societies.

Anyway, you are certainly trying to be more stupid and nonunderstanding yourself => muslims != Islam. Certainly a huge majority of the muslim population is pragmatic similar as many Christians. And these UK muslims are more a problem of the UK not be capable to assimilate them into society, so they keep their own identity linked to their religion. The only place that I know that works despite Immigrants keeping relative strong linkage to their birth society is Canada, where many Canadians continue to identify in a secondary way with their birth country. (But then this tolerant attitude is part of the culture). Normally, immigrants that get not assimilated and continue to form their own group are an issue (e.g. without knowing the local language their chances for a good job are strictly limited, ...).

So Islam as a religion has a set of more aggressive scripture compared to most Christian religions (which differ somehow what parts of the Bible are holy and which translation is the correct one). Muslims as a population are usually similar to Christians (or whatever) as a population. One last observation, we do not have theocracies of the Christian ilk nowadays, we do have theocracies of the Islamic kind, and if the state whips up a frency, well then you've got a population that has a much higher percentage of fanatics.

Btw, Islam considers converting to some other religion to be a capital crime, and fanatics really might kill you. Christians do not that. Not that they have been always overly nice to heretics over the millenia.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Imbrondir]

Mentioning 9/11 was meant more as a point in time. A point which has since followed with several wars.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[AshtangiMan]

What you have there is grossly oversimplified. To start to get at the nature of the problem, I would put forth that while everyone is doing and has done 3b, and the trick is to start doing it so that a) you can reduce how unfair it is because the unfairness is not sustainable (ie, leads to rather large revolts), and b) do it so that you are not undermining your own economy and security as a result. The US might be going down the same path as others before it, and what the leaders need to realize is that ultimately the path leads to a pretty big fall.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[ciderbrew]

In the UK the good times ran till around 2007 with house prices at a peak. Since 2001 some parts of the US should have been having a good economic time. Then of course it all when tits up as the good time was all borrowed money which no one really had. Oooops.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iraq had no nukes AND OIL.

I, for one, am glad to be paying $1.37 per gallon of gas now that we've confiscated all of Iraq's oil.

The oil goes to the oil companies. You get nothing.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reasons I can think of are those which Israel used to kill off Iran's nuclear scientists.

Or some other hostile neighbor, such as Saudi Arabia. The method of killing, slapping an explosive device on the side of a car, doesn't strike me as particularly professional. The killers didn't leave a signed confession.

Check the CCTV footage that captured them using the forged passports of foreign nations.

No, I do not think that they qualify as good enough to kill anyone.

And your survival isn't threatened by the presence of Iranian nukes either.

My survival is threatened by a reason? On the tangental note you asked, my survival is threatened substantially more by only one side having such weaponry, which brings me to this:

USA and USSR might have had MAD, but Israel and Iran having them is insane.

So you just thought of additional reasons for Iran not to have nukes despite writing earlier that you couldn't?

Allowing only one side to have them, whilst they bully those who were native to the lands they occupy (post '47), and other governments into silent acceptance of it, is a bad idea. See the other posts here about balances and checks between powers. Heck, let them keep some of the nukes, but only if they allow full inspection of all their nuclear facilities as expected by international law. Then again, as you declined to comment on my post, they don't really adhere to international law when it doesn't suit them.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[frank_adrian314159]

Never assume the other guy is sane.

If you don't, the only way to deal with him is immediate destruction. Otherwise, you need to always assume a worst-case scenario at any time and he's too dangerous to leave hanging around. It's better to start from a probabilistic analysis of sanity. At least you have a calculation that leads you to a set of potential answers rather than a singular point of destruction.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[rraylion]

We know they had chemical weapons because we sold them to Iraq from the late seventies to the mid eighties... this wasn't a question of might and maybe -- but we knew they had chemical weapons because we gave them to Saddam. Hell Detroit gave Saddam the key to the city in 1979. He was a hero in the late seventies --- that all changed and we knew he still had some pretty good bombs --- now we were TOTALLY WRONG about having nukes.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. invaded Iraq and killed in excess of 600,000 people there. That is definitely "wholesale slaughter". The Holocaust was only 10 times worse.

Try as you might, you can't wiggle out of the judgement of history: that the U.S. committed a monumental crime in starting a war and killing so many innocent people.

And now the war drums are beating again. History will not be kind to the U.S.A.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

People like fantasizing it's about the oil because it allows them to be mad at some sort of global conspiracy of corporations. The truth is, the US government was tired of the Saddam regime, they suspected and then convinced themselves that Iraq had WMDs, and decided to get into it. Sure, maybe some supporters saw that oil could be involved and supported the administration for that, but the invasion of Iraq was soup to nuts a war based on an ideological assumption that the Iraqis were just waiting to be liberated and that leaving Saddam in power could not be allowed any more.

Let's put the blame squarely where it belongs. The administration and it's ideological backers believed (perhaps still believe) in the duty of the US to go in and squash evildoers. It is just that simple. Certainly corporations would try and benefit from it, and did. Perhaps even a few did what they could to keep the sabers rattling, but in the end, this was not a war for oil, it was a war against "Evil" as perceived by neoconservatives. The 9/11 attacks only increased the feeling that the "bad guys" in the Mideast could not be allowed to remain in power.

Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. The US had a big stick, it had an opportunity to use it, and those who would hold the US back had been maneuvering themselves into positions where they were easily branded as being either cowardly or opposing the US just because they don't like the US's position as #1. So the stick got used. I'm not happy about it, but that's the way it went down. I'd actually have been happier if they *did* go in for the oil, because at least that would be a practical reason to fight a war, if not a particularly ethical one. I'd at least have cheaper gas to help me get over my discontent with how it went down.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[shutdown -p now]

Because the Arab ghettos are within the death zone of any nukes on the main population centres?

Why would Iran care about Arab (worse yet, Sunni!) ghettos in Israel? The relationship between Iran and Arab countries are not any better than between Iran and Israel - they hate each other just as much. Furthermore, potential for real conflict there is actually higher, since there are several countries with a mix of Sunni and Shia and the corresponding internal strife (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon - to name a few), and Iran has consistently intervened there in favor of Shia.

(note that this applies to both your post, and GP's).

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

It would be Mutually Assured Destruction of the Economic Kind. The only way a war will be fought with China over anything will be if resources start getting low. China is willing to play ball, and the price they demand is their own sphere of influence and the ability to act "strong" so the power elites can stay in power. They don't want war any more than the US does, although I daresay if there was an opening to undermine the US, they would certainly take it. In any event, you either need to threaten the existing economic order or have a madman come to power before a war is even countenanced.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[shutdown -p now]

One could argue that there weren't any more Arab wars against Israel for the simple reason that Israel has repeatedly and consistently shown itself to be too tough to deal with that way. No matter who attacks first (e.g. compare Six-Day War vs Yom Kippur War), in the end Israel always had significant territorial games at much smaller casualties. And that's all conventional warfare, not nukes.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[shutdown -p now]

One guy that is named in TFA is Russian (and previously Soviet) citizen. I don't know if Russia has laws prohibiting the transfer of such knowledge to Iran, but any US laws certainly don't apply here for the lack of jurisdiction.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

We *know* Saddam had WMDs at one point, he gassed his own population with them, as well as half the Iranian army. The only sticking point was whether he still had them and if he had gone beyond the chemical weapons he had used to biological and nuclear.

The WMD argument was always just a cover anyway. The US went in because they wanted Saddam out and they wanted a democracy in that would be friendly. The WMDs were for the consumption of others, the US may well have legitimately believed that Iraq had them, but you can be certain it wasn't WMDs or oil that put the US boots on Iraqi soil. It was pure intent to do some forceful housecleaning.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

Or more to the point, does he have a weapons system to deliver any of that to a large area with maximum casualties? That's the point. WMDs aren't chlorine or even anthrax. WMDs are drain cleaner, or bleach or VX or sarin and other things in a ballistic missile with a dispersion system and a composition that maximizes delivery and persistence. And Iraq did happen to have some of those capabilities at some point.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nurb432]

They used to have similar 'export laws' for similar reasons. I assume they still do.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

Chemical, Biological and Nuclear weapons are defined as weapons that would provoke a nuclear response from the US. You can have your opinion about that all you like, but there's a whole bunch of military and political types who would disagree with you.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[tnk1]

What Iran needs is to cease acting like a bunch of extremist douchebags. It's not like you need to countenance genocide and support terrorist groups to oppose the US. There's plenty of countries that do it successfully without nuclear weapons or terrorism.

And you can be sure that while a nuke *may* be a deterrent to the US, it won't do shit for them against the Israelis, and will probably make them even more prone to being seriously attacked by them.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

WMDs, with recipes and materials provided by USA to kill Iranians.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[c0lo]

For deterrence to work, they had to be used at least once.

As I said: "for showing some muscles".

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[c0lo]

Strange theory...

It's well known. My opinion is that it's also true.

Just be careful on forming opinions... I assume you still remember the 4 years ago well known theory of "House prices never go down".

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[sabt-pestnu]

From Wikipedia:

For the purposes of US Criminal law concerning terrorism,[28] weapons of mass destruction are defined as:

        any destructive device defined as any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses[29]
        any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors
        any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector
        any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life[30]

Consider that any anti-armor weapon is going to meet those standards, then by those standards any army so equipped has WMDs. The black powder charge for a re-enactor's civil war cannon counts.

A 2006 fox news article noted that 500 chemical weapons had been found in Iraq since 2003. You may think 500 is a lot, but think about using it in war. It won't go far. Horrible, yes. But not on the scale of an international threat by a sovereign nation. Terror threat, perhaps. But not a war threat.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Savantissimo]

There was a confluence of factors that went into the decision to go into Iraq, and oil was one, but it was not,as many think, to secure that oil for the US, rather it was to keep that oil off the market and to create fear in the market of even greater supply disruptions. Anyone with oil to sell benefited enormously from this, not least Dick Cheney and his many friends in the oil business.

Other factors:
*Huge profits for contractors, often cronies
*Israel wanted it, (so did Saudi Arabia and maybe Turkey, but they were less of a factor)
*Saddam was a former associate of the crew running the US, who had gone off the reservation and needed to be taken down as a warning to others,
*Iraq was to be a strategic position along with Afghanistan for controlling Central Asia and the Middle East, surrounding Iran,
*Keeping the US military not only trained but blooded

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Savantissimo]

Iraq did not have chemical weapons at the time of the 2nd US Gulf War, or at least none were ever found, other than perhaps a single rusty shell which the Iraqi government had apparently lost track of back before it destroyed its chemical weapons.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Garybaldy]

How is it meaningless? It is truthful and accurate.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nedlohs]

No I couldn't, and know they don't.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[DaleSwanson]

Governments who are unpopular with other governments may have their leaders called lunatics, but can you name one significant leader who truly was?

These guys seem pretty crazy.

You don't consider Kim Jong Il to be crazy? Just because he hasn't started a war yet (and it's not like he hasn't come close), doesn't make him sane. Perhaps I could agree it does mean he has some grasp of reality, but sanity isn't a totally boolean choice.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[mjwx]

The problem here would be that you're assuming there's any kind of sanity over there. What happens when Iran suddenly has a few dirty bombs to toss around?

I'm still surprised that people haven't figured this out.

The ruling council of Iran (the Iranian president has no real power) is quite smart. They've kept themselves in power, unquestioned for 30 years. That whole "doing gods will" thing was just a mechanism to keep people in line. They aren't real religious fundies, they're fake religious fundies holding onto a large portion of real power and are smart enough not to do anything to jeopardise that.

They dont genuinely beleive they have any direction from God, they just use that to avoid having their leadership questioned by the people they rule (yep, historically religion gets used for this a lot). I'm more worried about a rouge US element getting nuclear weapons (as unlikely as it is). What if the Westboro Baptist Church go a hold of a nuke, say goodbye to Fristhco because they genuinely beleive God hates fags.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Khashishi]

You misunderstand the function of a nuke. The nuke is not meant to be used, but meant as a threat and deterrent.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're applying cold war logic to a nation headed by religious fanatics

To be fair, Iran is pretty religious too.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't have undisclosed WMDs and by the time of the invasion their disclosed stuff had been entirely disposed of, with UN verification.

That was the whole "Search for WMDs" story, that dragged on for years and years. No undisclosed/hidden WMDs despite years of searching. Embarrassment of all the higher-ups in the Bush administration who pushed those allegations, which were found to be entirely false, and based on testimony by defectors who were known to have Iranian sympathies or actually be Iranian agents.

Remember?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

Can you give a damn reference for what you claim? You like to invent beliefs for Muslims?

No I tell the truth about islam, unlike most of its defenders. Here is a reference for Islam existing always: http://www.cpsglobal.org/content/islam-beginning-time Here is a quote for everyone being born a muslim http://www.islam101.com/dawah/newBorn.htm . Incidentally that is being used to justify the death sentence of a Christian cleric, they say he is an apostate because everyone is born a muslim.

Here is one of the many cases in the hadith of someone being killed for contradicting islamic teaching http://www.islamqa.com/en/ref/103739

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Chrisq]

I refer you to my answer here.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Tomato42]

So US will attack North Korea next week, yes? I mean, there are real concentration camps there, just like Nazis did. But there's no oil there so you won't be playing World Police with them.

And if you want to see how it should be done, just look at Libya: we helped them by crippling the Gaddafi forces, but the actual liberation was done by Libyans, not the UN forces.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Dunbal]

Are you saying that Pakistan is "more" sane?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

You're applying cold war logic to a nation headed by religious fanatics many of whom believe they will be rewarded in death for killing non-believers and believers who don't believe the strict interpretation.

Well, didn't Rumsfeld sent all the orders to the US troops with Bible quotes? Didn't God ordered Bush Jr. to go to war to Iraq? Didn't the USAF and US Army used more bombs in the Vietnam war than all the belligerents in WW II, killing scores of civilian buddists? Didn't candidate Perry said that God ordered him to try to be POTUS? On the opposite side, when Amedinajahad (sp?) denied the Jewish Holocaust, the religious supreme leader of Iran corrected him saying that the killing of even a single jew was still murder and a crime. About which religious extremist government are you talking about?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[nedlohs]

That's different. All the religions claim that. Christians claim that their God created the Universe way before Jesus walked the Earth. And that all the Jews were really following their God before Jesus arrived.

Obviously a religion would be pretty dumb to claim that its God only started to exist upon the foundation of the religion itself.

It's a simple fact there were no Muslims before the religion was founded. If the religion is in fact true then sure Allah existed and was the one and only God the entire time, and probably (I'm guessing given I don't care enough to learn all about all the crazy religions in the world) that people were his followers before they were called Muslims.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[FishOuttaWater]

Rouge US element?

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[uninformedLuddite]

The US does not need those threats to use nukes. They just need a battle to turn badly against them.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[uninformedLuddite]

They have peace prizes though

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[khallow]

I assume you still remember the 4 years ago well known theory of "House prices never go down".

And my opinion then was that house prices would (not might) drop, due to the ridiculous acceptance of risk in that industry, though I wasn't sure when. Some opinions end up right more often than other ones.

My view is that hoping that someone won't use nukes in a world of proliferation of the knowledge, technology, and the bombs themselves is something like hoping that house prices will keep rising. It's unrealistic. Given that, I won't be disappointed if I turn out to be wrong.

Re:How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

North Korea is China's Junk Yard Dog they love the situation it puts us in strategically and it gives them a plausibly deniable instrument to conduct covert and corrupt activities.

Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked. All countries need to understand that it is really in their best interest to get nuclear weapons fast. Libya made a huge mistake for example, so did Iraq. I think at some point Iran will have their weapon - good for them.

Good for them. They should get as many as they can possibly put their hands on. You get fucked in the ass if you can't fight back, that's what we really know today, everything else is bullshit.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[gmuslera]

Is also well known that countries sometimes get mad or at least weird thinking leaders, like North Korea, Venezuela, Libya or US. You want that those leaders have access to superpowerful weapons capable of wipiing out countries or the entire world?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

yes.

But I am for everybody having a nuclear bomb. Every single person. Unfortunately it's impractical, but every state should have their bombs.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[MichaelSmith]

Problem is that you need to be a big country to make your own nukes, so nuclear weapons place small countries at an even greater disadvantage than they already are at.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Hentes]

Libya made a huge mistake for example, so did Iraq.

Yeah because it would have been great if one side had access to nuclear weapons in those civil wars wouldn't it? With smaller undemocratic countries the chances of nukes getting into the hands of some crazy rogue dictator is huge. Just look at all the suicide bombers, there are many people who don't care about death. If every country had nukes there would at least one dumb enough to use them.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[wmac1]

Suicide bombers did not exist before Israel, US and some other countries effectively occupied middle east. Islamic extremism came to existence after Islamic countries got raped. Some of their people could not bear it and reached a state that they would explode themselves to force occupiers out.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of like what the gun lobby wants?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[jpapon]

But I am for everybody having a nuclear bomb. Every single person. Unfortunately it's impractical, but every state should have their bombs.

I'm assuming that's just hyperbole, because nuclear weapons are only a deterrent for mentally stable people. If someone has no problem sacrificing themselves to blow others up, the whole idea of MAD and deterrence breaks down.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

I don't know what they want, I want everybody around me to have a nuclear bomb and myself. I think it would make people a little less likely to yell at each other.

You are yelling? Boom.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

What benefit is there to this that would outweigh the inevitable disasters?

What threat exists in the world that could make regular unpredictable nuclear explosions seem like the lesser of two evils?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

No, no hyperbole. I really wish everybody naturally had a nuclear arsenal. Every single person. Mentally ill, everybody. I think it would make the world a more interesting place, a more honest place.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[jpapon]

Suicide bombers did not exist before Israel, US and some other countries effectively occupied middle east.

That's ridiculous. Suicide bombers have existed for just as long as bombs. Persuasive leaders have always been able to convince their followers to die for them.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

I never said it was going to be easy. But if you don't have a large stick and the monkeys around you do - you are fucked. And hey, maybe it's just they it should be. The bigger monkeys with bigger sticks fuck the smaller monkeys with no sticks. That's how it is in nature.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

Actually you are right. I am for every single person owning a nuclear weapon - would make the world a more honest place or would unmake the world. Our choice.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Pft, haven't you played RTS games?
Just spam the anti-nukes and throw some engineers on them to speed up construction of the missiles, you'll be invincible!

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

In a rainbow and unicorns world there would be a chain of command for authorizing a launch, the possibility for someone sane to do not follow order would be greater.

The final word is always in the guy who have to push the trigger and if the thing is done right he is in a bunker with a door that only opens from inside.

 

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Coward1]

i aint dying for nobody PERIOD.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Wife beaters did not exist before the rise of feminism.
Nuclear accidents did not happen before there were ecologists.
Drugs did not exist before war was declared on them.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Nidi62]

It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked. All countries need to understand that it is really in their best interest to get nuclear weapons fast. Libya made a huge mistake for example, so did Iraq. I think at some point Iran will have their weapon - good for them.

Good for them. They should get as many as they can possibly put their hands on. You get fucked in the ass if you can't fight back, that's what we really know today, everything else is bullshit.

Yeah, but if you can't even afford to feed your own people, or your government is so corrupt that most of the money the state brings in goes straight the the bank accounts of the leader and his family/cronies, how are they going to protect these nukes? Nukes aren't a rifle, or a MANPAD; hell, it's not even a tank. These things have a limited damage potential (either in number of casualties, or portability/mobility). A nuke can be very small, and can kill hundreds or thousands of people very easily. There are people out there that would love to get their hands on nuclear weapons, and are just waiting for a 3rd world country to get some.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

It would also make the world a very quiet place. With a healthy green glow.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Libya made a huge mistake for example, so did Iraq.

Yeah because it would have been great if one side had access to nuclear weapons in those civil wars wouldn't it? With smaller undemocratic countries the chances of nukes getting into the hands of some crazy rogue dictator is huge. Just look at all the suicide bombers, there are many people who don't care about death. If every country had nukes there would at least one dumb enough to use them.

Just like Pakistan then ? ^_^
A country known to harbor terrorists, and known to finance them without problem just over the border.
Yeah now tell me again why we don't disarm Pakistan and India with force if necessary ? Yep, its because they have the bomb. So you see, even if you're a dictatorship that everyone hates, having nukes ensures that you will not be assailed bu the worlds #1 thug. That is a good thing.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly, door handles are for losers. The world would be a more interesting place if people burned down their houses when they wanted to go outside.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[gl4ss]

the arab countries got raped by uk and other arab countries long before israel came to be again.

suicide bombers, martyrs and activists of all sorts did exist before that too though.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Attila Dimedici]

Right, because Germany did not attack France early in WWII and Japan did not attack the U.S. early in the same war. Sorry, the evidence suggests that balance of power world politics always leads to war sooner or later.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[TheRaven64]

In a rainbow and unicorns world there would be a chain of command for authorizing a launch, the possibility for someone sane to do not follow order would be greater.

There was in the USSR, and when the equipment malfunction ordered the launch he refused to fire and probably saved the life of a significant proportion of the world population. His reward? Early retirement and a lifelong holiday in Siberia.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[dkleinsc]

But I am for everybody having a nuclear bomb. Every single person. Unfortunately it's impractical, but every state should have their bombs.

I'm assuming that's just hyperbole, because nuclear weapons are only a deterrent for mentally stable people. If someone has no problem sacrificing themselves to blow others up, the whole idea of MAD and deterrence breaks down.

Except that there's almost never 1 person only who can actually launch the nukes, so all it takes is 1-2 guys somewhere in the chain of command who's not that stupid / crazy. Basically, you can stop a nutcase with a Stanislav Petrov.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[thisnamestoolong]

I didn't know that Insanity Wolf was on Slashdot...

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[berashith]

this would give a whole new consideration for road-ragers.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rrossman2]

The other poster is right.. they've been around as long as the bomb.... and a needless example to.prove your thoughts wrong, would you not consider a Japanese kamikaze pilot a suicide bomber, since they knew before take off what their role was, used the plane as their bomb, and had religious beliefs in what they were doing just like any current bomber?

And obviously this was before "Israel" existed...

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Suicide bombers did not exist before Israel, US and some other countries effectively occupied middle east. Islamic extremism came to existence after Islamic countries got raped. Some of their people could not bear it and reached a state that they would explode themselves to force occupiers out.

the anarchists have a rather lengthy tradition of blowing stuff up - including themselves when necessary.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[makomk]

Too late. Israel have already got their hands on nuclear weapons and have quietly been threatening behind the scenes to reduce much of the Middle East to radioactive rubble if they ever get invaded. Then there's countries like Pakistan whose current leadership probably wouldn't use nukes but is incredibly unstable and in danger of being overthrown.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Dunbal]

Well to be fair it was France and Britain that declared war on Germany. But that only disproves the GP's point even further, since Germany was a strong military force in 1939, rivaled possibly only by Japan.

No I think the main point to consider where war is concerned is that logic and the rules of logic cease to apply.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Hentes]

would make the world a more honest place or would unmake the world

The second.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

projecting much? Speak for yourself.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[X.25]

If every country had nukes there would at least one dumb enough to use them.

Not every country has nukes, but one in particular was dumb enough to use them.

Can you recall which one that would be?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[necro81]

There have always been people willing to die spectacularly for their cause, and to take as many down with them as possible. (I won't call them martyrs, because the definition of martyrdom does not include wantonly slaying the innocent.) To say that the creation of Israel led to invention of the suicide bomber is disingenuous and ignores, well, all of humanity's bloody history.

From a practical standpoint, the reason you don't hear many stories of suicide bombers, say, 200 years ago, was due in no small part to the fact that the technology for an effective suicide vest (compact high explosives, small triggers, understanding of shrapnel for maximum carnage) didn't exist until the turn of the century. One could perhaps have fashioned a suicide vest from sticks of dynamite in the late 1800s, but it would have been bulky and obtrusive, and not nearly as effective as the flack jackets of C4 and ball bearings that people worry about today.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[tgd]

It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked. All countries need to understand that it is really in their best interest to get nuclear weapons fast. Libya made a huge mistake for example, so did Iraq. I think at some point Iran will have their weapon - good for them.

Good for them. They should get as many as they can possibly put their hands on. You get fucked in the ass if you can't fight back, that's what we really know today, everything else is bullshit.

I think the population living under those dictatorships are probably pretty happy both of those countries didn't have nuclear weapons, for two reasons:

1) They wouldn't be free now
2) They were the ones who would be vaporized when their batshit-insane dictator lost a nuclear weapon or worse, did something stupid and escalated the rhetoric to a nuclear confrontation.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[coder111]

Hm, you could argue that ANYTHING leads to wars sooner or later, as most countries get involved into war during their history. However, given that there was no major war for 100 years in XIXth century (1815-1915, see Congress of Vienna, Concert of Europe and a guy called Metternich) I'd say balance of power gets reasonably good results at preventing wars. XXth century already gave us 2 world wars and a multitude of regional ones. Some people argue that loss of balance of power after World War I and Treaty of Versailles (which did NOT restore balance of power) is what lead directly into World War II. OTOH since the start of cold war, major wars were prevented so far, so MAD also kinda works. But as others pointed out, MAD only works if the players are rational and have a sense of self-preservation. If you give everyone nuclear bombs, MAD will lead to war. And cold war based on MAD is kinda over now. Now we have Pax Americana, and this has led USA into 2 new wars within 10 years for no other reason than to gain some profit and decrease civil freedoms, so that's not much of a "Pax".

I don't know. Maybe it's just me living in a relatively safe England, but I don't feel like wars have much impact on the world these days. Commerce and finance and trade and corporations matter more than governments and their petty wars.

--Coder

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[inhuman_4]

It's being shown time and again that strong countries do not get attacked.

And what do you do in the interim while some states have it and others do not? It basically forces every country to develop nuclear weapons as soon as as one of their neighbours has them. Or more likely launch a preemptive strike before they get them if one is ahead of the other. Or quickly use their new found nuclear power to wipe out regimes they don't like and call the bluff that the USA will retaliate in kind.

How does the international community stop genocide, etc. in a nuclear armed country?
What do you do about nuclear weapons and state sponsored terrorism?
What do you do about nuclear arms in failed states or civil wars?
Accidents?
Some crazy SoB just pushing the button?
If I'm going down I'm taking the world with me?

Iraq wasn't a mistake it was a failure of the international community to keep the USA in check. The UN should have just stepped in and said no and sent in peacekeepers to hold the Americans back. Alternatively Russia or China should have sent support to Iraq before the invasion.

Not having nuclear weapons was a mistake for Gaddafi, but a nuclear free Libya was great for the Libyan people. It was also great for people in Sudan, Serbia, Rwanda, pretty much every other hell hole where there was mass killings. North Korea just got nuclear weapons, does anyone other than Kim Jong-il feel safer? How about India and Pakistan, are we safer having added the threat of nuclear weapons on top of boarder disputes?

Nuclear weapons don't make the world safer they just raise the stakes when something goes wrong.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[qpqp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[TFAFalcon]

If removing nuclear weapons from irrational leaders is the goal, then why just stick to a non-proliferation treaty? Have the security council declare nuclear weapons illegal and any country that has them should be automatically subject so severe sanctions.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up where the phrase "run amuck" comes from. Its another case of Muslims behaving badly, easily pre-dating Israel. Now back to Zicotti park with you! Who let you out, anyways?!

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[sarhjinian]

I have a question: other than nationalising it's industry, exactly why is Venezuela lumped in with North Korea or Libya. Hugo Chavez is no angel, not by a longshot, but in the bastard rankings him, and his government, aren't particularly awful. Heck, there are much worse people whose boots we'll happily lick.

It's rather telling that a petroleum-producing state, and especially one in the western hemisphere, that shows a little backbone and follows the "wrong" economic doctrine, gets a disproportionate amount of scorn. I think it well and truly freaks out many American politicians, and the business interests that back them, that governments like Venezuela's can exist; governments that decide they don't feel like playing by the rules of the international economic game.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[TFAFalcon]

The problem is that there wasn't a balance of power in Europe back then. Germany had a large modern army, while France and the UK were still stuck in WW1.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[argStyopa]

While I appreciate your pragmatic geopolitical viewpoint, I hope you will equally appreciate that it's EQUALLY logical that the powers with nukes do whatever they have to, to prevent the spread of the franchise. I mean, if we're just talking about geopolitical reality, right?

And it's worth mentioning that it's not a binary "have nukes = safe" situation.

Building nukes is not a mass-production thing, particularly in the early stages - each one is essentially a crafted item. Further, the reliability of the early products make their deterrent value extraordinarily questionable.

Having a small handful of nukes is arguably MORE dangerous than having none....it's a strong signal to the 'nuke club' that you're pushing your way in the door, and if they want to exclude you, they need to act quickly.

And let's be clear too that there are gradations of membership in that club.
There are nuclear powers, and there are superpowers. All having nukes does for the "powers" is simply raise the cost of invasion to prohibitive levels, ie purely defensive.

Superpowers, on the other hand, have the ability to literally annihilate a target country (at potential cost of nuclear winter, and end of the human race if the exchange is large enough) without really even a great deal of effort/risk to themselves. It's an entirely different position. Angered enough to use this level of force - ie the target of a nuclear attack themselves - they can pose an EXISTENTIAL risk to a target.

This is the subtlety that I hope the Tehranian mullahs understand. It's one thing to develop a nuke to prevent external power meddling, sure. It's entirely a different thing to build a nuke in the belief that you can use the resulting leverage to push your political goals or (worst case) share with your buddies to detonate in Tel Aviv.

The latter are a course that arguably could result in the extermination of Iran as a state. I sincerely hope that a) get that, and b) care.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[znerk]

Suicide bombers did not exist before Israel, US and some other countries effectively occupied middle east. Islamic extremism came to existence after Islamic countries got raped. Some of their people could not bear it and reached a state that they would explode themselves to force occupiers out.

I know some suicide bombers who might have taken exception to that.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Attila Dimedici]

You apparently never heard of the Franco-Prussian War or the Crimean War both of which involved what were considered powerful countries on both sides.
If you count the two wars the U.S. has been in against Pax Americana, then there are a lot of wars to be counted in the 1815-1915 period.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Attila Dimedici]

Well, there was a balance of power at the start of WWI and WWI still happened, as did the Franco-Prussian War and the Crimean War before that. Before the Franco-Prussian War both France and Prussia were viewed as strong countries. All of the participants in the Crimean War were viewed as strong countries.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[jgtg32a]

Looks at user name, smiles

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

In a rainbow and unicorns world there would be a chain of command for authorizing a launch, the possibility for someone sane to do not follow order would be greater.

Just one problem. In a world of rainbows and unicorns, apparently they use the things for urban renewal.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it wouldn't be our choice. It would be the government's choice, since the only way for everybody to have access to nuclear weapons is if there's some huge Communist government to dictate the production and distribution of nuclear weapons. But you know what happens when big government is in control: they stay in control.

Of course, there's great chance that socializing nuclear weapons would lead to another bubble (like housing and education), which... would make Xzibit proud, as we'll be blowing up (the bubble) while we blowing up (our weapons)

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Golddess]

"Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[squiggleslash]

Well, the main problem is that he said mean, mean, horrible things about our Lord and Saviour George W. Bush after all poor George had done was try to depose him by helping out with a coup.

Big meanie.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[geekoid]

Can you explain why ti was stupid?

It saved 10's of thousands of lives.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello retard,

That is not a threat, that is simply defending their country. They are not saying they will attack anyone or randomly start nuking anyone. They state that if they get invaded, they will obliterate the invader. There is nothing wrong with that.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[rim_namor]

It just makes sense for a private enterprise to step in and develop a large underground nuclear program and sell subscription services to it, have member states pay for their number of nukes, have reps from each country within the facilities, each armed with their codes and each able to launch up to the number of nukes they paid for.

The sites should be strategically located across the globe, evenly enough so that there wouldn't be a risk of taking out just one site obviously.

There is a lot of potential in this.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[shutdown -p now]

Doesn't mention anything about a "lifelong holiday in Siberia", by the way. In fact:

"Petrov underwent intense questioning by his superiors about his actions. Initially, he was praised for his decision. Gen. Yury Votintsev, then commander of the Soviet Air Defense's Missile Defense Units, who was the first to hear Petrov's report of the incident (and the first to reveal it to the public in the 1990s), states that Petrov's "correct actions" were "duly noted." Petrov himself states he was initially praised by Votintsev and was promised a reward, but recalls that he was also reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork with the pretext he had not described the incident in the military diary.

He received no reward. According to Petrov, this was because the incident and other bugs that were found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the influential scientists who were responsible for the system, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had to be punished.He was reassigned to a less sensitive post, took early retirement (although he emphasizes that he was not "forced out" of the army, as the case is presented by some Western sources), and suffered a nervous breakdown."

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[shutdown -p now]

Islamic extremism came to existence after Islamic countries got raped.

Really?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[yacc143]

Mentally unstable people are the problem, for everything.

Plus naturally the people backed into a corner, not seeing any chance to get their grief redressed in any sensible way?

(Hint: The Americans did prefer to go Terrorist instead of continuing to send letters to their King, their legal Sovereign at the time?)

Another piece of food for thought: The labels "Terrorist", "Rebel", "Partisan", "Freedom Fighter", "Hero" are applied by the party that wins. Before there is a winner, all these labels are while not exactly synonyms very overlapping. (Or to you think that the British of the time would have labeled the Americans Freedom Fighters?)
Same thing applies the Civil War (to stay with American history), any number of European conflicts/wars. One interesting thing that I learned by attending a French school was that history is very "pov-dependant"; the same facts more or less were presented in history class. But the way of presentation painted many historic events quite differently. Philosophically, as German/French history books use the same facts (well, the selection could be slightly biased but in practice this seemed not a problem), so neither author did lie. But still they managed to present events in completely contrary fashion.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[mjwalshe]

actually the french had more and better tanks than the Germans - just did not use them effectively

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminded me of http://www.fat-pie.com/latestmodel.htm

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Khashishi]

blue glow.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[MichaelSmith]

The bigger monkeys with bigger sticks fuck the smaller monkeys with no sticks.

I bet you live in a big country.

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[argStyopa]

Well, of course you wouldn't actually OWN the nukes. You'd be buying a license to access the nukes for your use. Maybe this would be an answer not only to piracy but non-proliferation concerns?

Re:Everybody should have the weapons

[Kyusaku Natsume]

I don't know, the stupid son of a bitch, catholic extremist of Felipe Calderón in México receives praise and weapons from USA despite heading the most bloodthirsty government in Latin America in decades. But well, he played along the USA with the incredibly ridiculous story of the narco-iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to USA. The US government takes good care of their puppets.

Possible to do after the fact

[paper tape]

Once they've sold their knowledge, they can be identified, sometimes.

Keeping the knowledge from spreading isn't possible - eventually it will become commonplace. The challenge is making the raw materials and weapons grade nuclear material out of the hands of those who would misuse it.

A similar problem exists with bioweapons - eventually the knowledge to make them will become commonly available. The differences there are that raw materials for bioweapons are far easier to obtain, the equipment needed is far less expensive than for nukes, and the potential damage of bioweapons is far worse.

Re:Possible to do after the fact

[Khashishi]

I don't know about potential damage, but the real damage of a nuke is much worse than any bioweapon.

Re:Possible to do after the fact

[Anonymous Coward]

The potential/real damage of a single nuke (in the right place) is billions of dollars and perhaps a million casualties.

The potential damage of a contagious bioweapon with an 80% fatality rate is the end of civilization and 5 billion or so casualties.

Given a choice between terrorists getting hold of a nuke or a bioweapon, I'll pick the nuke.

Could have been stopped easily enough

[S3D]

By giving him job with salary better that one of Nigerian garbage collector in Abuja.

Re:Could have been stopped easily enough

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just the salary, its the quality of life that comes with it. I'm speaking of things like traditional benefits, but there is much more. Things like, not having to commute two hours in traffic one way is one...

Re:Could have been stopped easily enough

[Anonymous Coward]

He had a job, in his specialist field of nanotechnology, where he is a published author and holds all the relevant patents on the manufacture of nanodiamonds, nothing to do with nuclear technology except in the minds of the hopelessly paranoid

App ?

[shikaisi]

I"programs to identify and win over nuclear scientists who might be willing to sell their know-how to non-nuclear countries."

You mean there's an app for that? Oh boy, I'm going to install that right now.

Knowledge...

[Anonymous Coward]

...doesn't kill people, people kill people.

Knowledge isn't the problem.

[satuon]

Lack of knowledge isn't what prevents most countries from building a nuclear bomb, lack of uranium and plutonium is.

Re:Knowledge isn't the problem.

[Hentes]

Yeah, building the bomb is easy, but building a rocket to carry it is much harder.

Easy identification

[mseeger]

I would bet 100% of nuclear scientists are willing to sell their secrets. So the identification is the easy part.

The only question is: at what price? One will spill for a drink at the hotel bar, the other only when offered critical medical services for his sick child.

Re:Easy identification

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of scumbag would be willing to murder the entire world (including their child), in order to 'save' their child?

Re:Easy identification

[mug funky]

most of the knowledge required is freely available. it's a bit of a stretch to say that one scientist developed the whole program, ran the centrifuges and piles, developed the high explosive lenses, then built and dropped the bomb.

Re:Easy identification

[herr.lorenzen]

I would

Re:Easy identification

[Anonymous Coward]

I would easily sell out every single person on this planet if I knew it would save my family.
The real problem would be convincing me that I wouldn't end up dead at the end of the deal.

Re:Easy identification

[TheRaven64]

What kind of scumbag would be willing to murder the entire world (including their child), in order to 'save' their child?

No one. But most people would accept a small risk of lots of people they don't know dying to save someone they do know. It's part of the pack / tribe mentality shared with a lot of other mammals.

Re:Easy identification

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

most sane parents ?

we're wired to care a whole lot more for our next of kin than for complete strangers. so, i one government have a fucked up health care system, a sane nuclear scientist living there who's in need of care for his child _WILL_ sell his knowlege. his instincts will kick in and drive the decisions.

you'd know that if you were a parent.

Re:Easy identification

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't be feeding trolls, but either you do not have a kid (I'm placing my money on this option) or you're the worst parent in the world.

Re:Easy identification

[Anonymous Coward]

I would bet 100% of nuclear scientists are willing to sell their secrets. So the identification is the easy part.

The only question is: at what price? One will spill for a drink at the hotel bar, the other only when offered critical medical services for his sick child.

You're talking about something that has some high stakes. Selling those secrets could count as an act of treason, take a look at Wen Ho Lee. Even though he was not found guilty, he still got pretty well screwed. Imagine what would happen if he actually was found guilty...

Re:Easy identification

[Anonymous Coward]

God?

Re:Easy identification

[thejaq]

This "we are wired this way" "his instincts will kick in" is an absurd cop out. We have built an entire world/civilization that is contrary to our 'hard wired' nature.

No proof.

[siddesu]

There was nothing close to believable evidence for most of the "damning" allegations in the report, no sufficient information to justify taking them seriously even while reading the 20 odd pages. Most of the report was based on stuff that was shown by "one member state", and it happens to be the same member state that manufactured "evidence" for the war against Iraq. Excuse me if I delegate it to the trashcan without more extraordinary and unambiguous evidence than a table in yellow, orange and red.

From the rest of the report it was only evident that a) Iran has not succeeded in buying weapons tech or plans, b) Iran does not even have the fundamental science to develop weapons and c) all their efforts invariably end up in a brick wall.

Finally, while I keep hearing these scary stories about everyone and their dog develop nuclear weapon based on Russian know-how, it is, as a Russian combinator would say, a medical fact that ALL non-NPT nuclear programs except the Chinese are based either on US or NATO expertise.

Will we get a break from these scary, but largely baseless stories?

Re:No proof.

[Hentes]

To be honest, Russian nuclear technology is also based on the US one.

Re:No proof.

[berashith]

a table in yellow, orange and red.

three colors!!! If it was printed on glossy paper then it has to be true!

Re:No proof.

[siddesu]

Yes, and they stole it for the same reasons everyone else is trying to. It is no coincidence that the only time a nuclear weapon was used was the time only one country had it.

Re:No proof.

[pjabardo]

And there is more to it, the Russian Nuclear scientist is not a nuclear scientist at all:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/14/the-holes-in-the-iran-nuke-report/

And what a coincidence: this shit comes up a couple of weeks after that ridiculously bogus attempt to frame Iran for trying to kill the Saudi Ambassador in the US. What are the evil Iranians going to do next???

A scientist willing to spread his knowledge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? The question on everyone's mind is how to stop a scientist from sharing his knowledge? You could as well ask how to stop a banker from profiting, or a politician from lying...

Why SHOULD he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should anyone be stopped from pursuing a living? It is a Right we cherish here in the US.

If I have knowledge that is valuable on the market, why should I not be allowed to use that knowledge to earn a living?

Sure, we don't want IRAN to have nuclear facilities, but do we really have the Right to prevent them from it? No, we don't.

How?

[Anonymous Coward]

With a bullet to the head.

Reverse Prime Directive.

[lemur3]

Gotta love how the real world is a lot different from TV..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive

Instead of letting this culture/nation, Iran, Naturally develop their science to a high level, nuclear weapons, allowing them to flourish much as the USA has..

the US and the big guys on the anti nuke front are actively SQUELCHING the scientific advancement of Iran .. Pushing them further into the past because USA et al wont alllow them to develop naturally (or however iran develops..russian scientists or not)

I personally find it reprehensible that a nation would fight so hard to stifle the scientific understanding and development of a nation/culture/anyone.

The Reverse Prime Directive!! Don't let them get Warp technology! ITS DANGEROUS!

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some benevolent use of nuclear weapons that I'm missing? You don't need to be able to weaponize the technology in order to build, say, power-generating nuclear reactors. The weaponry branch of nuclear technology is a scientific dead end, and the pun is very much intended. This is like saying that by stopping al'Qaeda from acquiring sarin nerve gas that we're just oppressing Arab chemists in their rational pursuit of novel uses for organophosphates.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Loki_666]

Perhaps the term Manifest Destiny - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny - is still relevant for those in power in the US.

Its a bit hard to be the bully in the playground if those you want to squash also have equivalent tech.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Tomato42]

Russians used nuclear explosions in civilian applications many times with quite good results...

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[TFAFalcon]

Deterrent. I'm guessing other countries are less likely to sabotage you if you can threaten them with a nuke.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Is there some benevolent use of nuclear weapons that I'm missing?

Uhhh... Orion type interstellar ships?

Deflecting extinction level event asteroids? ;-)

The Jersey Shore?

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Just Some Guy]

the US and the big guys on the anti nuke front are actively SQUELCHING the scientific advancement of Iran .. Pushing them further into the past because USA et al wont alllow them to develop naturally (or however iran develops..russian scientists or not)

Frankly, the generalized version of your idea is retarded. Let's swap out Iran for North Korea. By what hypothesis would openly permitting Kim Jong Il to develop nuclear weapons promote a peaceful, flourishing culture? What harm to their society are we causing by not freely allowing that nutjob to mass-produce WMDs? By all accounts, Iran is a lot different from NK. But my point is that your argument is fundamentally flawed regardless of which specific country you're talking about.

Wanna make free energy? Quality pharmaceuticals? Sustainable agriculture? High-tech industries? Sure! We'll even help you do that stuff! Want to build an object with the sole purpose of killing millions and poisoning the local environment for centuries? Yeah, well, that's where we're going to part ways.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[wegnerr]

You are obviously not much of a Star Trek fan nor have a good grip on what it takes to run a country and defend yourself. Capt Kirk spent much of his career circumnavigating the prime directive, but, more importantly, the Federation, and it's military arm, Star Fleet, didn't go about opening their doors or even leaving them unlocked so that a third world with hostile intent could steal the crown jewels. The US does not generally go around "squelching" scientific advancement unless it is expressly for the development of weapons of mass destruction by countries who outwardly support terrorist regimes and whose expressed goal is the destruction of the US. Even Alfred Nobel http://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/life-work/index.html would agree with me that stopping the spread of some weapons is a good thing. (I apologize in advance for my poor formatting, first time poster)

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[TrekkieGod]

Actually, that's not much different at all.

The prime directive applied for cultures that were vastly behind technologically. They were isolated in their own little islands of worlds, posing zero threat to anyone other than themselves. We do have that version of the prime directive, and we try to protect from interference by civilization at large.

On the other hand, if you're not technologically behind, even the ethical federation was not beyond heavy interference. Even if we leave aside the desperate war against the Dominion in DS9. For example, in Chain of Command, when Starfleet got intelligence (which turned out to be deliberate misinformation) that the Cardassians were building a "biogenic weapon", they sent Picard with a small group to covertly enter Cardassian space and destroy it.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[hibji]

So an interesting question would be to imagine what would happen if WMD's existed in the Star Trek universe. What would the federation do to an empire with clear intentions to build planet destroying weapons? What if such planet busting weapons existed? Would the federation limit its proliferation?

Gotta love how tv is so different from the real world...

(not a total star trek fan, so not entirely sure if this has been covered...)

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Anonymous Coward]

You just went full retard...

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem...

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Metagenic_weapon

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command%2C_Part_I_(episode)

You're wayyyyy wrong.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Ruie]

Gotta love how the real world is a lot different from TV..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive

Instead of letting this culture/nation, Iran, Naturally develop their science to a high level, nuclear weapons, allowing them to flourish much as the USA has..

the US and the big guys on the anti nuke front are actively SQUELCHING the scientific advancement of Iran .. Pushing them further into the past because USA et al wont alllow them to develop naturally (or however iran develops..russian scientists or not)

I personally find it reprehensible that a nation would fight so hard to stifle the scientific understanding and development of a nation/culture/anyone.

The Reverse Prime Directive!! Don't let them get Warp technology! ITS DANGEROUS!

No, the TV show is spot on. You just need to read the page which corresponds more closely to our society.

Re:Reverse Prime Directive.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Reverse Prime Directive!! Don't let them get Warp technology! ITS DANGEROUS!

I'd watch that show...

"win over"

[Arancaytar]

Sure, they will "win them over" with a Predator drone.

And the Libya example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Give up your nuke program in exchange for normalized relations. Didn't work out so well for Gaddafi.

Re:And the Libya example.

[SpzToid]

Sure I'm feeding the AC trolls here, but I'll reason that once Gaddafi gave up his nukes everything turned around for the better, as far as he was concerned. It wasn't until his people turned against him, and he chose to fight them, that things turned out badly for him.

Re:And the Libya example.

[Dunbal]

It wasn't until his people turned against him,

No - it wasn't until he suggested to the African states (especially oil rich Nigeria) that they drop the US dollar and accept gold or some other commodity in exchange for oil. An idea put forward several years ago by Chavez. An idea that is extremely dangerous to the US, because it's the only nation in the world allowed to print US dollars. Therefore the US gets its oil for free (well, in exchange for bits of paper it takes the trouble of printing up). Having to pay in gold or any other REAL currency that the US has to work for instead of print would severely affect the US economy. THAT is why Khaddafi was "taken out".

Re:And the Libya example.

[khallow]

No - it wasn't until he suggested to the African states (especially oil rich Nigeria) that they drop the US dollar and accept gold or some other commodity in exchange for oil.

Ah, that explains the French actions then. They're always looking for an excuse to boost US power.

Re:And the Libya example.

[mapkinase]

By Occam lazor says: swishshshsh.

Re:And the Libya example.

[Anonymous Coward]

An idea that is extremely dangerous to the US, because it's the only nation in the world allowed to print US dollars. Therefore the US gets its oil for free (well, in exchange for bits of paper it takes the trouble of printing up). Having to pay in gold or any other REAL currency that the US has to work for instead of print would severely affect the US economy. THAT is why Khaddafi was "taken out".

Your premise seems flawed. What would prevent the US from printing money and using it to buy gold, instead of oil, and then trade it for the oil? Printing money to buy commodities has the same inflationary effect regardless of the commodity.

Re:And the Libya example.

[badran]

If that happened, then countries selling oil will have most of the gold in the world. What happens if they do not want to sell it back. Where would you get the gold needed to buy oil.

Re:And the Libya example.

[ZankerH]

Print more gold, obviously.

Re:And the Libya example.

[ciderbrew]

Looking at how much the Chinese own of the US in dept (Treasury bills, notes and bonds), wouldn't they have an interest in keeping the US dollar good too? If OPEC did change payment the Chinese would lose too.

Re:And the Libya example.

[shutdown -p now]

It wasn't until his people turned against him, and he chose to fight them, that things turned out badly for him.

If he had only his people to deal with, he'd have won the civil war (as evidenced by the first few weeks of fighting, before Western countries stepped in) - largely because he actually did have significant popular support in the western part of the country, so it wasn't just dictator vs everyone else.

Re:And the Libya example.

[tnk1]

Yeah, he was clearly taken out. Now, if his own people had risen against him and rebelled, then maybe... oh wait, that's what they did.

Gaddafi was just another dictator who got KO'ed by his own people. All NATO did to serve their own interests was to make sure it didn't descend into a decade long civil war and turn into a haven for terrorist psychopaths.

Re:And the Libya example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't really his people who were fighting him, but good old paid Al Qaeda mercenaries with SAS and SEALS, courtesy of CIA. Read http://informationclearinghouse.info to keep uptodate and get a dose of uncensored news
from around the world, not just ne neocon bullshit propaganda filtered shit.

Re:And the Libya example.

[Savantissimo]

Actually there is no evidence that he bombed his own people, which was the justification used for the so-called "no-fly zone", which somehow immediately morphed into a full-scale air/special forces invasion with the rebels tagging along for the ride. (The US can't say the same - look at Philadelphia's aerial firebombing of MOVE in the '80s) The NATO bombardment, OTOH did verifiably kill many hundreds of Lybian civilians, and worse, intentionally bombed Libya's water supply and the pipe factories that produced spares. Taking out the water supply leads to the risk of killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children under the age of five, as the US did in Gulf War I and the sanctions which followed. Dysentery is not a nice way to go. Bombing water supplies is a war crime of the first order.

Also, when Gadaffi was killed by a targeted airstrike, he was traveling under a flag of truce which had been negotiated. Anybody else in the world now has no reason to trust the US or European forces to obey the most ancient of the laws of war in any future conflict.

The popular account of Gadaffi, Libya and the Libyan conflict was almost entirely propaganda. He wasn't even exactly a dictator, not being formally a part of the actual government. Libya had a strong direct democracy, a relatively low level of corruption compared to other African nations, a high standard of living due to enlightened policies. Life for the people of Libya will certainly deteriorate as NATO loots the country (the British government is claiming it will make hundreds of billions, about a 1000x profit on the war). The social programs will end, debt, destitution, hunger and disease will spread among the Libyans, and all for "humanitarian purposes".

Re:And the Libya example.

[Dunbal]

Because there is only a limited amount of gold in the world, and the US already owns a big big chunk of that. Buying more gold would push the price of gold up. Buying oil is doing the same ($100/bbl again yesterday), but there is a lot more oil so the price doesn't go up as quickly.

Re:And the Libya example.

[Anonymous Coward]

To put it in perspective its like if China and Nato armed the KKK and gave them Air Support and advisors told them to take over Texas and then the all the news channels called it a revolution. Also they they beat Perry with in an inch of his life raped him with a night stick and shot him in the head.(this is the way Ghaddafi died) only difference being Ghaddafi was a leader and Perry is not.
I often think Ghaddafi's main crime in the eyes of the public was being fuggly and not wearing european monkey suits.

How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

By giving his name to Mossad.

There's a simple answer to this

[ndogg]

If he was employed, he wouldn't have been tempted to sell the information.

and

[unity100]

what about u.s., which invades countries to steal their oil and gold and then set up sharia ?

Did they identify the CIA?

[michaelmalak]

Did the identify the CIA as being a source of nuclear proliferation to Iran?

just like battleships

[dltaylor]

Just as the US (and British) bullied the Japanese in the 1920s and '30s, limiting the number of battleships they could have, bullying the Iranians about nukes will simply push them into the aircraft carrier equivalent for the 21st Century.

Ultimately, we can probably beat them in a war, or, at least, turn the livable parts of Iran into radioactive glass, but can we really block every single every avenue of damage to the US without turning the whole nation into even more of a gulag, with the attendant impact on innovation and productivity?

Re:just like battleships

[Anonymous Coward]

The US hasn't won *a single* war since WWII, and that was with allied help and the Russians on the East front. What makes you think you'd "probably' win??

Re:just like battleships

[Hentes]

Battleships kill soldiers, nukes kill civilians, and millions of them. BIG difference.

Re:just like battleships

[Tomato42]

Yeah, vote him down for stating uncomfortable truths!

Re:just like battleships

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as the US (and British) bullied the Japanese in the 1920s and '30s, limiting the number of battleships they could have,

Was that perchance part of the agreement that ended World War 1? Should Japan not have lived up to its surrender agreements because if felt 'bullied' by them?

Re:just like battleships

[Elky Elk]

No it wasn't. Japan was allied with Britain in the first world war.

The treaty was actually very beneficial for Japan. As a one ocean navy they had 10 battle ships concentrated in the Pacific, the Americans (two ocean navy) had 15 but split between the Atlantic and Pacific. Britain has responsibilities all over the globe so it was even harder for us to concentrate our battleships (Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans and the Mediterranean sea).

Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach on a Nuclear Reactor physics masters course. We teach students from all over the world - I've had Saudi and Iranian students in the past. Everyone who graduates our course could have a decent stab at building a bomb. Why is this myth that the physics of constructing a nuclear weapon is a well kept secret? You could teach yourself, easily, from publicly available materials.

The countries that the US and allies want to prevent from acquiring weapons are only held back by the lack of availability of the fissile materials. The physics is well known and the engineering is fairly straightforward.

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

You are completely right about that.

Building the centrifuge for uranium enrichment is much more difficult than building the bomb.
Plutonium makes it easier, so what a country really needs to build a bomb is nuclear reactors. "Storing" nuclear waste can also be a sign of building a bomb (and the producer of the waste pays for it!)

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand. In order to make a nuke-u-ler bomb go off, you have to know the Deplorable Word, a secret that has been held by the men of Numenor since the second age. Without the Deplorable Word, it's all just a bunch of fag math, and why do we care about fags who talk about letters as though they were numbers?

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've had Saudi and Iranian students in the past.

how to identify scientists willing to sell their knowledge: just ask on ./ , wait for comments like this, profits.

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

You still can? Our local university also has a nuclear reactor, and it's been made very clear to them that no Iranian students will enter it. There are no nuclear sanctions against the Saudi's, so they can still study reactor physics here.

But yes, the real problem is obtaining sufficiently enriched uranium. Stuxnet showed how hard that process is, and how easy to wreck.

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Building a bomb that will fit on a missile is a harder problem, though certainly you could do plenty of damage with a simpler design.

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach on a Nuclear Reactor physics masters course. We teach students from all over the world - I've had Saudi and Iranian students in the past. Everyone who graduates our course could have a decent stab at building a bomb. Why is this myth that the physics of constructing a nuclear weapon is a well kept secret? You could teach yourself, easily, from publicly available materials.

The countries that the US and allies want to prevent from acquiring weapons are only held back by the lack of availability of the fissile materials. The physics is well known and the engineering is fairly straightforward.

Pretty much THIS. My father is one of the first Baby Boomers, my grandfather was a pilot in the Army Air Corps during WW2. They were stationed in Tokyo when my father was a teenager (~1960). My father and grandfather were having a conversation about being in Japan, nuclear weapons, etc., and my father explained to my grandfather the process behind constructing the essential parts of building a nuclear bomb. My grandfather was fairly eager to find out how he came across such guarded, secret intelligence information. My father's resource? Reading up on the process in an encyclopedia -- again, in 1960!

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[DerekLyons]

Why is this myth that the physics of constructing a nuclear weapon is a well kept secret?

The existence of such a myth is a strawman of your own creation. And proof that being highly educated in one field does not equate to knowledge in all fields, or to an immunity to batshit crazy ideas.
 
What's difficult about constructing a nuclear weapon is engineering the weapon itself - if you are what you claim to be, you should well know there's a long and pothole filled path between the equations and a physical object in the real world. An additional difficulty is obtaining the nuclear material, which is again simple in theory but not so simple in the real world.

Re:Knowledge is hard to contain

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, all you really need to get the right kind of plutonium is a high-flux reactor (such as is used for medical isotopes or power), depleted uranium and some chemistry equipment. Oh, and privacy. Enriched-uranium weapons are for lamers, everybody uses plutonium.

Burn all the physics books

[tp1024]

They contain nuclear knowledge!

That is some seriously good news

[Anonymous Coward]

I must say I am relieved because until now I thought they (Iran) had done everything from scratch.

I can't even imagine what freak/nuclear accidents his knowledge prevented.

the radioactive cat is out of the bag

[FudRucker]

with all 18 half/lives and there is no keeping that secret safe anymore...

the government spooks trying to play "whack a mole" with scientists from all over the world is a losing game, too bad its only a matter of time before the big one goes off, it is not "IF" but "WHEN" since that info is already out there.

I went into the wrong field

[GameboyRMH]

Instead of getting paid little to work, I could be getting paid a lot to *not* work. D'oh!!!

More civilians would have died in conventional war

[coder111]

This fact is often forgotten. But the estimates at the time were running at ~2 million soldiers and ~10 million civilians dead in case of conventional invasion of Japan. And of course, Russians would probably have been there in time to "help" with invasion and occupation and raping and pillaging and they would have turned the occupied areas into puppet communist regimes as in europe.

So nuclear bombs were bad, but not nearly as bad as conventional war would have been. OTOH there are people claiming peace could have been achieved at that point without conventional or nuclear war (by granting the emperor immunity), but given that even after nuclear bombs there nearly was a coup to continue the war, this is doubtful.

--Coder

Answers to questions

[gavron]

> How could he have been stopped?

A well-placed shot from a Barrett 0.50.

Other posters have asked:
> Why should he have been stopped?

Iran is the bully on the block who lacks the technical expertise to do much of anything right. This includes oil refinery (none), centrifuges (slow), monkeys into space (sorry all dead), etc. They are also the saber-rattlers of the neighborhood. Not Syria, Lebanon, or even the militant Hamas rattle sabers like Iran. They are the LAST country that should have nuclear weapons, and THAT is why the nuclear scientist should have been stopped.

Other poster:
> ...north Korea...
North Korea is cute. They aren't trying to recreate "the great Persian Empire" at the expense of every country around them. Yes, they have nukes. (They didn't use a rogue scientist for this). Yes, they have delivery mechanisms. But ultimately they're not trying to conquer the countries (read "vast swaths of ocean") around them.

Other:
> ...Why should only the US and its friends get to be in the nuclear club...

Evolution. The end result -- to quote Larry Niven -- "Think of it as evolution in action."

E

Re:Answers to questions

[geekoid]

Who are you to dictate you should develop what technology?

"(They didn't use a rogue scientist for this). "
hahaha, wow, you should shut up now.

N. Korea has a loon for a dictator. One who literally thinks psychics shields will protect them in a nuclear war. And why you think the ocean would prevent someone from invading is stupid.

You style of, what I will graciously call, 'Thinking' is exactly what cause problems, alienates countries,and create enemies.

  Welcome to the age of information , Pal.They are going to get nuclear expertise. We should help them and create better ties.

IN any case, we have no right to dictate what another country does.
We can refuse to sell them stuff, buy stuff from them, and try to get other countries not to deal with them. That's fine. Recruiting people who would sell information to Iran is also fine. Killing people who want to sell them information? That's a short sight meathead solution.
We have no right to dictate what other countries do within their borders just like other countries have no right to dictate what we do within our borders.

"Evolution. The end result -"
Evolution has no end result, you moron.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

The bombs were not dropped to save civilian lives. That's just an explanation invented later.

The civilian lives are of no value, when big countries are drawing global borders for areas under their own influence. Just as in the war in Irak; the hundred thousand iraki-civilians casualties are never mentioned by american news agencies.

Re:Sure...

[khallow]

The bombs were not dropped to save civilian lives. That's just an explanation invented later.

Truth is the best propaganda.

Re:Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? The USA had destroyed something like 80% of Japanese cities before Hiroshima. One incendiary raid alone killed close to 100,000 people. If anything the nuclear attacks get too much attention. At least 50% of Japan's casualties occurred before the nuclear "final solution" was envisioned.

Re:Sure...

[khallow]

The USA had destroyed something like 80% of Japanese cities before Hiroshima.

That is nonsense. The US had already discovered the limits of convention bombing and shelling of hardened targets in both the European and Pacific fronts. The destructiveness of convention power was far less effective than that from an atomic bomb for two reasons. First, it's less bang for the buck. A convention attack which causes as much damage as an atomic bomb would require a vast expenditure of resources. This is quite relevant since the strategy at this point for the Japanese was a war of attribute, doing enough damage to the US to keep in the long term Japan out of allied hands. The atomic bombs obsoleted that strategy.

Second, the destruction of an atomic bomb is more thorough. Those "destroyed" cities would be truly destroyed once a few atomic bombs were dropped on them.

At least 50% of Japan's casualties occurred before the nuclear "final solution" was envisioned.

Which tells us that a lot of Japanese casualties would have occurred during a conventionally armed invasion of Japan.

Hello, Friend! Awaiting your response!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Nuclear Scientist and I am Willing to Sell Everything I know. I am also a Prince of Nigeria. For only 100,000 dollars I can sell you what you want to know about radioactive materials and such!

Re:More civilians would have died in conventional

[jgtg32a]

I usually prefer mentioning the fact that we haven't needed, not to say we haven't, to make more Purple Heart medals since WW2.

Where was the US

[Evtim]

when the Pakistani guy was selling the technology he stole from the Netherlands left, right and center?

According to a BBC documentary I saw a few years back there were at least 4 cases where the CIA asked to "deal with him" and was forbidden because at the time the US wanted to empower Pakistan against India which has become “dangerously socialist”.

So, under the approving eye of the west the dear doctor did sales pitches in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria and god knows where else. For more than a decade. Well done!

To summarize:

1. The nuclear powers have no moral right to deny development of nuclear weapons to any nation, especially since the most prominent member of the club is the only one that actually used them against civilians.
2. Fight the “red menace” by funding and training religious fanatics, allow them to build the bomb and then come back to squash them later. Win-win!
3. Lie your pants off in case they did not actually manage to build the bomb.
4. Invade
5. Profit

Re:Where was the US

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The nuclear powers have no moral right to deny development of nuclear weapons to any nation, especially since the most prominent member of the club is the only one that actually used them against civilians.

... moral? Where the fuck did you get the idea politics and foriegn policy have anything to do with morals?

We need Team Fortress on the job!

[Quiet_Desperation]

How could he have been stopped?"

"I have yet to meet man who can outsmart bullet." -- Heavy Weapons Guy, TF2

Re:We need Team Fortress on the job!

[geekoid]

"The gun is a cowards weapon!" - Batman.

Re:Hello, Friend! Awaiting your response!

[Quiet_Desperation]

I have a complete device ready to go. I know it looks like I took parts from a pinball machine, but it works. Honest.

Nuclear distribution program...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a firm believer that the US should provide any country with nuclear ambitions with a number of nuclear devices - preferably delivered by MIRV in less than 20 minutes. I can guarantee that would cut down on the number of countries that the US would have to classify as ROGUE STATES, as well as cool the ambition of many countries. Then anyone who's trained or lived in those countries could be tracked with the simplest of radiation detectors. Seems to me it solves a lot of problems, quickly, easily, and relatively cheaply.

Real world vs development "rights"

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it difficult to receive nuclear know-how from other countries because I could take advantage of it and develop weapons.
Actually, if i tried to develop weapons on my own, i could, it would be perfectly legal and my right to do so, but it would take me decades to get there.
Therefore I sign the NPT, promise not to develop weapons, then you give me nuclear know-how in exchange.
I take your know-how, develop weapons, and when caught - tell you to go shove my signature up your rear.

And everybody's happy.

Interesting trivia: Out of the NPT violators, all but one (NK) are Muslim states.

Neils Bohr and making an atomic bomb

[wfstanle]

The matter of putting the knowledge of building an atomic bomb ando actually producing an atomic bomb is a wholly different matter. The facilities to make one are enormous. Before Neils Bohr was aware of the Manhattan Project he stated the opinion that ( I am paraphrasing) making an atomic was theoretically possible but to make one you would have to make a factory the size of an entire nation. When he later became a member of the Manhattan Project he toured the facilities and then stated (again I am paraphrasing)... I said that making an atomic bomb would require a factory the size of an entire nation and that is exactly what you have done! (He was probably talking about a nation the size of Denmark, his home.)

Granted, the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb is easy to master. In fact, it is easier to prematurely detonate a "Little Boy" type bomb than to actually deliver one to a target and THEN have it go off. An implosion type bomb ("Fat Man") is much safer as far as premature detonation. There still is the high explosive component of such a bomb which can go off prematurely. The chances that the resulting conventional explosion will cause a nuclear explosion is quite small. The explosion would be like a "dirty bomb" going off.

PS. If you are interested in the history behind the Manhattan Project, I highly recommend reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. It is easy reading and I understand that it is fairly accurate.

Re:Neils Bohr and making an atomic bomb

[Anonymous Coward]

Niels not Neils

Is the Danilenko case relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Danilenko case goes like this:
- russian nuke scientist teaches Iranians to make nukes
- okay, an ex nuke scientist then. Because he's been working on nanodiamonds for 20 years. But he really went there to work on bombs/
- okay, he also worked on nanodiamonds In Iran but that is just a cover.
- well, he's not really a nuke scientist, but he worked at the nanodiamond department at an institute that also had a department working on nukes.

So really the main problem is "how do we manage to sell the Iraq story again"

reference(one of many)http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2011/11/09/iaeas-soviet-nuclear-scientist-never-worked-on-weapons/

Theoretical but not construction knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to build a bomb you need to know how to construct it, explosives timing etc. that's complicated stuff. Otherwise you get a very low yield like NK did.
The big issue about mechanical devices (or just about any product) is not their theoretical feasibility. It is making them work, and reliably.
Furthermore, a bomb the size of a container doesn't mean much. There's lots of knowledge in building a compact warhead that can be put atop a missile.

I'm willing to sell my nuclear knowledge.

[bcrowell]

I have a PhD in physics, and my field (back when I was doing research) was experimental low-energy nuclear physics (not specifically nuclear engineering, etc.). There is no secret about how, e.g., neutron-induced fission works, what the cross-sections are, or what is critical mass for a given enrichment. When I saw the title, "Identifying Nuclear Scientists Willing To Sell Their Knowledge," I thought, sure that's me. I'm willing to sell my nuclear knowledge. In fact, I do sell my nuclear knowledge. I teach physics at a college. That's what the taxpayers pay me to do. Is there some reason why I would not want to do my job properly in some very large subfield of physics such as nuclear physics? Of course not. It happens to be my specialty, so I'll probably do a better job teaching it than any other topic.

mod parent up

[bussdriver]

Totally spot on. Why do people believe their government's assertions just because a few POLITICIANS on "opposing" sides repeat some of the same talking points?

How about we use some science to make policy for a change? What does Game Theory say about how we deal with Iran? http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future.html

Of course, the best answers are not important and neither is science because its lawyers thinking not scientists; the truth is not relevant. The whole mode of thought is to have a political policy (likely set by somebody else) and defend it like a guilty murderer. Win or lose you still profit. Later, you are payed privately to represent some corp (arguably they do that while in office already.)

Granted, I didn't read through every single nugget

[almitchell]

Of all the accumulated slashdot knowledge herein, but of the ones I did read, why has no one pointed out that most countries, especially us fun-loving, bomb-slinging Americans, tend to view the selling of nuclear trade secrets as treason? Even in the private sector, the contracts for weaponry are given by the government, and you are bound by the same secrecy as if you were working in Los Alamos. It's that small thing called spying.

Re:More civilians would have died in conventional

[AmiMoJo]

But the estimates at the time were running at ~2 million soldiers and ~10 million civilians dead in case of conventional invasion of Japan. And of course, Russians would probably have been there in time to "help" with invasion

Okay, but demonstrating nuclear weapons would have probably forced surrender anyway, and if it hadn't they could then have moved on to attacking military targets. They didn't, the first thing they did was nuke two cities full of civilians. They didn't even wait long enough between the attacks to contact the Japanese government and try to negotiate a surrender.

I'm not sure what your point is here, conventional warfare is irrelevant in this debate. The only possible conclusion is that they had two bombs they wanted to test on civilians, and the lives of a million or two Japanese people were considered a price worth paying to gather data that would protect Americans.

How? how about why?

[geekoid]

Really, why should he have been stopped? Iran is a sovereign nation, and of they want to develop nuclear then so be it.

Could you imagine the Russians telling us we aren't allowed to developed anything nuclear? Or the Canadians? What argument could we have given then that Iran couldn't use now?

It would be better to help them develop a nuclear program. That way you have close ties with the country. Alienating them won't help.

How could he have been stopped?

[frank_adrian314159]

That's the question? The answer is that you couldn't have stopped him. Information wants to be free. Especially when you have someone willing to pay for it. And I don't think you want to go to a world where anyone with sensitive knowledge is better off dead once they leave the employ of those who provided them with that knowledge - because that's the only way to stop it - bribery (which turns out to be ever-increasing in costs) or death.

Occupy the bat cave!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Pah! Typical statement from a member of the 1% who fears the equalizing power that guns give to those who can't jet around the world training to be a superhero, or drive a personal battle tank.

"It's times like this I'm so thankful Batman doesn't use a gun!" -- The Joker, escaping from Arkham for the 100th time.

FYI

[Rix]

Iranians are Persian, not Arab.

How could he have been stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try with money? It works for most other people.

Making a livving

[Anonymous Coward]

So I heard they shutdown the nuclear industry over there. So are you in the market?

Iranian physicists

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this related to the killings of Iranian physicists?

Really?

[InspectorGadget1964]

If this information comes from the same sources that claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it should be considered just another lie from the US government to start a new invasion.

You want to stop people selling secrets?

[Nyder]

Very simple. Do NOT have secrets. If everything is open, then no one can surprise you buy selling secrets.

I'm going to get very hippy here, but how about we trying being nice to people in other countries, instead of telling them what to do, what to buy, and what corporations to let fuck you in the ass.

How about we go in and build up infrastructures, ie water, electricy, housing, instead of killing people?

Being dicks, only makes everyone not like you.

How about we share, instead of hoarding, and give away instead of charging everyone for everything?

ROFL, like that will happen.

oh, ya, and people selling secrets, that won't stop ever either, not if you keep on being the same dicks, i mean, treating everyone like they are lucky to have us.

Nuclear scientists

[Michael Woodhams]

If any state out there wants to pay top dollar for a nuclear scientist who'll tell them all about s process nucleosynthesis while asking no questions about what the knowledge will be used for, for a 10% finder's fee I may be able to put you in touch with someone.

Re:More civilians would have died in conventional

[mjwx]

This fact is often forgotten. But the estimates at the time were running at ~2 million soldiers and ~10 million civilians dead in case of conventional invasion of Japan. And of course, Russians would probably have been there in time to "help" with invasion and occupation and raping and pillaging and they would have turned the occupied areas into puppet communist regimes as in europe. --Coder

And China would be a communist state today.

In 1945, the Russians were reluctant to fight Japan, even though the Japanese were in retreat across Asia. Russia would have done to the Allies in Asia what the Allies did to Russia in Europe, let the Allies fight the hard battles. Stalin didn't want to invade Manchuria, but did so only because they US and Britain forced his hand, he had no interest in occupying China, Japan or Asia militarily.

Another thing is, the Empire of Japan was seeking a means to surrender as early as late 1944. They sent emissaries to negotiate with the United States. Their mistake was to send their emissaries through the Soviet union, so of course no word of these attempts to sue for peace ever reached the US or Allies until after WWII ended. It's important to remember the Soviets were not necessarily our allies, but the enemies of our enemies.

I dont disagree with the US's decision in hind sight, they had no idea of the things we know today and someone had to be first to use a nuclear weapon (the Nazis were working on them as well, an SAS/Norwegian resistance operation against a heavy water plant in Norway was the biggest step towards halting the Nazi nuke program). I'm simply glad that no-one has used them again.

Brain Drain

[Anonymous Coward]

The downside of bubbles bursting is expertise 'offshored' by the unemployed or underpaid experts. AKA - Brain Drain. 1. Destroy and prosecute the Fed, 2. Issue the New Treasury Dollar, 3. Implement social credit's national dividend, 4. So the system can correct itself - thus 5. There is no desperate need to prostitute offshore. Exposé

Re:More civilians would have died in conventional

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Considering that the only condition of surrender was that Japan keep their Emperor and that was rejected, but after their unconditional surrender the petition was granted indicating that that was a irrelevant point for Allied powers, then, it is clear that the atomic bombs have been used only like experiments and not as a mean of reduce casualties in either side.

How he could have been stopped

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like the current method is an attack on motorcycles in the streets of Tehran. Very effective, and nobody ever gets caught...