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The United States Just Might Be Iran's Favorite New Nuclear Supplier
Lasrick writes: Nick Gillard from Project Alpha points out that for more than 3 decades, Iran has purchased goods for its nuclear program largely from the shadows. With the Framework Agreement, that will almost certainly change: "According to the US State Department, one of the agreement's provisions creates a dedicated procurement channel for Iran's nuclear program. This channel will monitor and approve, on a case-by-case basis, the supply, sale, or transfer to Iran of certain nuclear-related and dual-use materials and technology." That is terrific news for US companies, because Iran is known to covet US-made parts required for their program, most of which are "dual-use."
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Their shiny new centrifuge bearings seize up, ruining a few hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment, and they end up waiting 20 minutes for help from a Manila call center?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Diplomacy, old definition:
"The art of saying 'Nice Doggy' until you can find a rock". - Will Rodgers
New definition:
"The art of handing rocks over to the doggy until it can bury you, while hoping that it is nice".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We kept the Shah in power for our own interests
s/kept/put/
In 1953 they had a democratically elected, very westernized government. The US and UK staged a coup when that government wasn't generous enough with "our" oil.
Worked out about as well as all our other efforts to tell the rest of the world how to run their countries.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Rubbish.
Nukes are a thoroughly shit offensive weapon. If you throw a nuke at anyone you will get stomped out of existence. Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days. Nukes, chemical weapons, biological weapons, they are all weapons that change the status quo too far. If you deploy any of them against an external party it is game over. As a result they are useless for offence.
Defensively though they are brilliant. The make your borders essentially inviolate to other state actors. Yes you can have rebel or guerilla actions (think Pakistan) but you are safe from someone like the US or Russia. And given the US and Russia have a history of invading countries in that region it seems like a fair incentive to want them.
For Iran to start WW3 after obtaining nuclear weapons would require them to have the drive and the motivation to fight against major obstacles to get them combined with a desire to eradicate themselves from existence. Not normally the sort of thing you get in the one person.
All we have to do is nothing. The sanctions are working, it's greatly slowing progress they are making to obtaining nuclear weapons.
If we lift the sanctions, we CANNOT restore them (the Iranians have said repeatedly it's absurd to think we could). They will absolutely have a nuclear weapon inside a year, probably much sooner.
The real assholes are the people like you willing to put the world to the torch because of your imaginary fears of invading Iran, which no-one wants to do. It makes no sense because what do you invade? The people are generally friendly to the U.S., it's only the rulers that are not - and they will use the entire populace as a human shield (that is also incidentally why they rightfully think they can use nuclear weapons against enemies without similar reprisals).
If the sanctions are lifted and millions die I hope you have the decency to at least feel a tiny bit guilty.... but then people like you so often rationalize all repercussions of your mistakes away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even if we didn't nuke Iran in response to an attack on Israel, you really don't want to be using high-yield nuclear weapons on someone that close to you - fallout blows in the wind quite a long way. The USA, Russia, India, and China are all good targets for strategic nukes, but smaller countries are likely to end up not containing the effect and Iran would be very unpopular if they covered their neighbours in radioactive dust. Given that they're already quite unpopular with their arabic neighbours, they'd likely expect a fairly large conventional response if they fired nuclear weapons anywhere in the middle east.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is no guarantee that we'll nuke Iran just because they nuked Israel.
There doesn't need to be. Israel is certainly capable of destroying Iran completely in a retaliatory strike.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>The reality is that we're not just trying to keep nukes out of the hands of the Iranians, we're trying to make sure that the rest of the ME doesn't enter an arms race which puts nukes in the hands of other countries.
And who exactly appointed you to do that ? Americans elect an American government to govern America. It has no jurisdiction anywhere else and "protecting your interests" should have been unconstitutional. Unless somebody actively asks for your help, stay the hell out of everybody else's business and America would be a lot less hated.
Do I like the government of Iran ? Hell no, I live in a free country and I despise autocracies, but I also don't believe I have a right to interfere in Iran's business unless Iranian people ask my help.
Seriously - the US should watch a lot of Star Trek and simply replace their ENTIRE foreign relations doctrine with the prime directive and not only would the rest of the world be a lot happier, the US would be too.
You fear chaos ? I am quite confident that there will be a lot less suffering around the world for which you are (rightfully) blamed, and thus a lot less people who want to kill you. If you believe the Iranian style theocratic autocracy is primitive, fine, believe that, but stop interfering in their natural development - they won't thank you for it, nobody has EVER thanked you for it.
America has more than enough problems to solve at home - like when you're going to do SOMETHING about Puerto Rico - either give them statehood or given them back their independence but right now you're conquering overlords there - no better than Iran's government.
Let me put it very simply: because I have no power to vote for or against American politicians, they should have NO power to influence my life.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
For the record, the United States is not the problem in Peurto Rico. They've held multiple referendums about independence, statehood, etc... They continue to choose the status quo each time, by a narrow margin. We've never even had the opportunity to address statehood in Congress because they've never gotten that far, and we can't force statehood OR independence down their throats. So maybe back off on that one.
There are two problems with this idea. The first is that EMPs, like other EM phenomena, disperse via an inverse square law. Anything high enough to be line-of-site to the ground in most of the USA would need to have an enormous explosive yield (even by nuclear weapon standards). There are some designs that try to channel more energy into the EMP than normal, but they're very complex to build (a good 10-20 years more R&D beyond the Fat Man / Little Boy style bombs).
The second problem is the delivery. Iran does not have a significant ballistic missile capability. Getting something into space above the USA would require launching something in a suborbital trajectory. A very high suborbital trajectory if it were intended to explode that high up. The size of such a rocket would be such that it would be pretty hard to miss on satellite observation. The time in the air would give the US a very long time to formulate a response and destroying it would be relatively easy (remember, the problem with strategic defence shields in the cold war was not shooting down a missile, it was shooting down the large number of real and decoy rockets that the Soviet Union was capable of launching).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News