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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.
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."
Just out of curiousity... why exactly should Iran NOT have a nuclear weapon ?
You got them... you have THOUSANDS of them and your track-record with them is atrocious, you've accidentally dropped some on your own people at least 50 times, you've left them unguarded and forgotten on civilian runways more than once. On at least one occasion they were discovered by the damn catering staff.
You have not been very responsible with yours. Yet you maintain you have the right to have them. If you do... so does Iran. Either EVERY country has that right, or NO country has that right.
You can't make selective laws for countries anymore than you can for people.
Now take that as a fundamental premise and rethink your entire view of hte world. You'll find you come up with one that doesn't make the rest of the world hate Americans. One that produces a world where Al Queda could never have existed. One where your nation is not seen as a bunch of arrogant imperialists comparable to Elizabethan and Victorian England.
Take it as a basic premise that your country can ONLY do what it allows EVERYBODY ELSE to do as well - if something is truly to scary for North Korea to do - you can't do it either. Give COUNTRIES equal rights.
Then maybe we can negotiate in good faith. Then maybe the world can know some peace and stability. Then you'll have gained some philosophical soundness in your arguments. Go on. Think about it. I'll wait.
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