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The Missile Impasse In the Iran Negotiations
Lasrick writes: Upon resuming talks to end the nuclear crisis with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) in 2013, Iran made it clear that its missile program was behind a redline and would not be negotiated away. The missile program, Tehran argued, was an entirely separate issue from the nuclear program, part of the country's conventional capabilities and not aimed at deploying non-conventional weapons such as nuclear warheads. Last week, Tehran's missile program arose—seemingly suddenly—as an obstacle with the potential to derail the process altogether. Ariane Tabatabai explores the fascinating history of Iran's missile program, the largest in the Middle East, and asks whether negotiators for countries that hold such diametrically opposed views of the Iranian missile program can reach a compromise. We should know the answer to that within the next day or two.
Really, the engineering to make and guide a missile is not formidable these days. Iran is more than capable, though testing is probably hard for them being landlocked. A good machine shop and a knowledge of F=ma is all that is really needed. The rest is detail, easily accessible on Wikipedia.
The nuclear capability is a bit harder, but only a bit harder, than missile technology. Again, testing is probably the hard part. But Pakistan figured it out. Iran certainly has the capability.
Iran is (or soon will be) a state capable of nuclear weapons delivered by missiles. The genie is out of the bottle. Life sucks, deal.
Either Iran nukes Israel or Israel nukes Iran (or both) within the next 10 years. Place your bets.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
IMHO, one of the remaining hurdles to us getting past the Great Filter is the proliferation of technology and doomsday weaponry to all corners of the globe.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
without a solution.
To show how it's done.. and who's boss.
Iran decided they were going to try to make an issue out of the arms embargo. In response, everyone else has decided to make an issue of their missile program.
It would have been better if both of those issues had been left alone. Now we're seeing an ever-decreasing chance of a deal in the end.
Not that I have any faith the US Congress would approve the deal anyhow with all the warmongerers and haters in that lot of losers.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seems apropos.
The Munich Agreement
October 5, 1938. House of Commons
...
I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week - I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:
"Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting."
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
Let the Jews do it and that'll be that. Peace on Earth!
American style - if everyone had a gun, everyone would be safe right? So if everyone has nukes, world peace!
Obama and Kerry are dangerous fools. Obama's top advisor, Valerie Jarrett, is an Iranian. Don't trust them.
an ill wind that blows no good
Who brought up missiles this late in the negotiations? Someone with a vested interest in screwing up a settlement.
Three guesses who is running around behind the scenes queering the deal. And you will have two to spare.
Have gnu, will travel.
Iran's Quds force is skilled at guerra warfare. If Iran had a nuclear device, they could have humans deliver it. Iran is trying to develop its indigenous industries and scientific base. Iran wants to build 20+ nuclear reactors. Iran doesn't have much coal, but it wants to export its oil, and natural gas.
I'm more worried about Iran's ties to North Korea, than an Iranian rocket.
But he has lost 50% of those countries to ISIS
The real threat is small nuclear weapons smuggled into the country through ports, on private boats, or across porous poorly secured borders.
Sure, the government has drones and tanks and gunships etc.... but none of those will protect the individual government minions who show up on the doorsteps of people with the intent to screw with them. THAT is the deterrence. An armed citizenry is less-able to be pushed-around by the technocrats and paper-pushers of an out-of-control government. It's hard for the government to recruit a bunch of guys to wear brown shirts and round up the Jews if all the Jews and all their neighbors are well armed; such thugs love to be the ones pushing other people around when it's a risk-free endeavor, but the fun slips away when the people are well-armed and in a bad mood. It's not hard for government to push an armed population around because the government lacks the firepower, but rather because it becomes hard to recruit the pawns to be the ones who die at the front doors of some poor innocent citizens who have been targeted.
Are YOU suggesting the US government would and could use Warthogs and tanks against it's own citizens? You appear to be, and in doing so you appear to miss the irony that you are legitimizing the very arguments you seem to be attacking (doh!)
Oh, and the stupid Red Dawn flick was made by liberal morons in Hollywood.... try to remember that dopey Hollywood movies are not reality. History is full of examples of totalitarian governments killing their own disarmed people, but remarkably light on examples of governments slaughtering their own people when their own people had arms as good as the front line troops.
You seem to have not read much of what our founders wrote. They were not trying to setup a bloody massacre, nor were they trying to guarantee the right of people to hunt for their dinners. They were trying to guarantee that when the government eventually went bad, as they all do, the people would be able to overthrow it as peaceably as possible because the people would BE the armed force. The US is not supposed to have a standing army. It's supposed to have a standing Navy and there's plenty of evidence that our founders would have supported a standing Air Force by extrapolation, but it's not supposed to have an army that could either be used by presidents to go off on international adventures, or to turn inward and oppress the population. The vast majority of "gun nuts" in the US are not the sort of idiot who drools over Red Dawn, they are people who both want to pass on as much freedom to their grandkids as they themselves inherited, and people who know that most of the time when the police show up at a homicide, it's to draw the chalk outlines.
on Earth have gotten rid of all their missiles and bombers and submarines! Wow! If you, an obvious military expert, had not told me so I'd have never noticed that all the missiles and bombers and submarines in the world have been retired and scrapped.
Thanks, Super military strategist guy!, you're my new hero!
Oh, but then why are Iran and North Korea working so hard to develop missiles that are not useful for anything other than nukes????
No. The Iraqi regime lost half of it's territory because of the usual sectarian nonsense that plagues the entire region. They treated the factions not in power like dirt and they made no effort to resist an invading army when it came.
When you act like that you have to be a mini-Hitler in order to keep things under control. A quasi democracy made up of 3 states, 2 of which are treated like an underclass simply isn't going to be durable.
The Iraqis did this to themselves all on their own, a result of not having the same 800 years of cultural and political context that our own democracy has.
That's the problem with nation building. Ignorant gits think that 1776 just happened spontaneously in the absence of any broader historical or cultural context.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The actual genetic situation is substantially more complicated than your summary. Mitochondrial DNA indicates that Ashkenazic Jews (Jews from Eastern Europe) have a large influx of European women ancestors. See summary http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37821/title/Genetic-Roots-of-the-Ashkenazi-Jews/. However, chromosomal DNA shows a major Middle Eastern component to the point where almost any Ashkenazic Jew is easily genetically distinguishable from a generic European http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/12/09/ashkenazi-jews-are-middle-east/. Moreover, around half of all Israeli Jews are not Askenaz but are rather descended from Sephardim and Mizrachim and the like (e.g. from Morocco, Spain, Iraq, Egypt, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel and have thus essentially zero European genetic ancestry.
The president is committed to GETTING a deal here regardless of how shitty it is.
Legacy and all that.
-Styopa
At the time of our founding, the founders expected (and many wrote and spoke about it) every adult male to have the front line combat rifles and pistols of the day, and there to be NO permanent "standing army". These discussions would be far more productive if the people on BOTH sides had actually READ the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and many more of the things our founders wrote instead of just imagining what they think is right based on the weak tea version of history their unionized high school teachers spoon-fed them in place of actual knowledge.
Something, is not a "Constitutional Right" just because you want it. Something is not "Unconstitutional" just because you wish it would go away. A modern and moronic fear of guns does not mean our founders provided the 2nd amendment so people could hunt for squirrels, and a modern embrace of Marxism does not mean the government can legitimately provide it.
The men of America are SUPPOSED to be BETTER armed than the government. The colonials had guns that were superior to the guns of the world's best full-time army of that era, the British army and were the actual front-line weapons of the US. The American rifles were superior not only in accuracy but also in maintainability in the field, in part because of their design, and in part because a number of our founders were inventors themselves who embraced new tech and who had selected a partially-automated manufacturing process that produced rifles with standardized interchangeable parts.
Guns are not the problem. Until the 1920s any American could own any gun INCLUDING FULLY-AUTOMATIC MACHINE GUNS WITH HUGE MAGAZINES. We did not have mass shootings. In the twenties, a mob hit in Chicago killed 6 gangsters and the feds passed a machine gun ban and started "gun control". Now, with a partially-disarmed public, a typical Chicago weekend is more bloody and violent than that original "massacre"