It's been a few years so I lost the source, which was a book. I don't even remember the name, but that one little fact just gets kicked around in my head. I'm going to call bullshit on myself for that because I can't produce any credible evidence, and I'm also wondering if the author of my book was wrong because France cut its supply of fissile materials to Israel in 1966, and Seymour Hersh claiming that Israel wasn't confirmed to have suitcase bomb capability until 1973 at the latest.

When did I say it was better? It's an important distinction to make because it speaks, like Chaser said, to the mindset of the people ordering them, and trying to understand how people think in order to predict their reactions to things is pretty much the cornerstone of international relations. Just saying 'well they're crazy' doesn't help with that.

It depends on how you think about it.

This all started with Skimmer saying "Also, generally people who use massed human waves, not once or twice but for years to clear minefields are not to be trusted. Just a little rule of thumb some people have on what is and is not rational leadership."

If a national leadership cadre is willing to use massed human waves to clear mines, they may be rational, but it still says something about their mindset. If that's what they do to their own people, how do they view you? How likely are they to deal honorably with you if they don't think it's to their advantage? Considering what they're willing to do- to lie to their own people and herd them to their deaths for trivial tactical advantage- they may be sane in some sense, but they're sure not trustworthy.

So, do we dwell more on the word "rational" or on the word "trustworthy?" He was talking about the instability and fractiousness of the Iranian regime; I think the point about "trustworthy" matters more to his argument. Even if the Iranian leaders are sane, their government is packed with men who have proven willing to do terrible things to their own people for the greater glory and power of the regime. Combine that with fractiousness and you get a dangerous mix, when nuclear weapons are available.

It's the Sampson Option by Hersh. Page 220.

EDIT: Fixed quote.

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I am the hammer, I am the right hand of my Lord. The instrument of His will and the gauntlet about His fist. The tip of His spear, the edge of His sword. I am His wrath just as he is my shield. I am the bane of His foes and the woe of the treacherous. I am the end.

-Ravus Ordo Militis

"Fear and ignorance claim the unwary and the incomplete. The wise man may flinch away from their embrace if he girds his soul with the armour of contempt."

They might not care about the cannon fodder, but do they care about themselves? Threatening to nuke uninvolved civilians is pointless and evil, but what about threatening the people in the actual chain of command? IOW, if Bob pushes the button, kill Bob, Bob's boss, Bob's boss's boss, and so on until you get to someone who wasn't complicit in the nuclear attack through neglicence or malice.

Oh, thank you. So they had the capability by 1973 but that's still not the same as my original claim. Still, back to what we were talking about. I have to agree with whoever said that nuclear facilities don't just turn into mushroom clouds. As a way of shutting down Iran, that'd be a last minute preemptive strike to try and remove the possible threat before they can build their own weapons, and if Israel went that far, they might just yank the rods out and let the thing melt down before they resort to nuclear warheads. I didn't think my idea out far enough because smuggling a suitcase nuke would be hard, but a few guys yanking the rods could do it and run.

No matter what though, the second one of those Iranian facilities becomes a crater, it's on.

It all depends on what sort of claim is being made, actually. More elaboration on this point further down the post.

He cannot prove it is raining because the hat is wet. It may be below the dew point, or someone could be spraying a hose (assuming he does not have a priori knowledge about such things, because in reality one can simply stick one's head outside and see if it is raining). It is the classic problem of induction, and why one cannot actually know by induction, only strongly suggest. He has to construct a deductive syllogism that he can falsify. Then, and only then, because we are relying on observation and not artificially or naturally constructed categories or mathematics, can he arrive at truth value he can prove.

If he sticks his hat out of a visual null field and brings it back wet, he cannot know whether it is raining or not. He can suggest, but not know. If brings it back dry, he can be certain that it is not raining. Not there and then, anyway.

Rhetorically yes, he is looking for positive evidence of rain. But epistemologically, he is proving a negative. That is is not raining. That, I think, is where you are getting hung up.



That is not true at all. Falsification--proving the negative--is the only absolute proof one can get when trying to explain an observed phenomena set using a cause we cannot directly observe. I cannot demonstrate that an unseen force called gravity exists by dropping a cannon ball off the tower of Pisa. I must construct a model of the universe that generates testable predictions using deduction, and then attempt to falsify the model. Because even if my predictions are true, something else could be causing it.

Proving a negative may not be what we are doing in rhetoric. However, it IS what we are doing epistemologically. This is, I think, there the both of you are becoming confused and end up talking past eachother.

Now, and here is where things get special. That system of falsification only works when you are building process models. Trying to determine the existence of a causal mechanism currently in operation that explains a set of observed phenomena which can readily be observed. There are other cases where it does not work. In some cases, the truth is literally impossible to know.

A court of law is really good example of this. I can never prove that I did not cause the death of a person named Sonya Stevens on september 17th, 2004 (assuming such a person existed in the first place, and was found dead). The mechanism for her being dead (a stabbing implement) is no longer active, so no deductive tests designed to falsify the hypothesis can be done without a specific scenario that generates said predictions.

The prosecution has the burden of proof because they are capable of constructing a scenario by which I caused her death, and then adding inductive evidence in favor of it. Said scenario generates predictions that I can falsify. For example, I could falsify the prediction that I had access to the weapon that killed her. However, that still does not mean I did not do it. I could have hidden my tracks. Another scenario could be how I killed her. I could have, for example, hired someone to do the dirty work, or hidden the murder weapon sufficiently well. The prosecution's case being accepted by the court also does not mean I did do it, but there is at least some certainty. The possibility of a false positive is minimized.

If however, I am presumed guilty and left to try to disprove a nigh infinite number of possible scenarios for my guilt... I cannot do that. However, there is little chance of a false negative.

This is not an epistemological burden of proof. It is a heuristic. A rule of thumb designed to generate the smallest number of false positives (because a false negative is preferable under any sane utilitarian calculation, and under any post-enlightenment theory of justice...unless you are Antonin Scalia).

Now, let us presume it is the 18th century. It is impossible to prove the non-existence of an object. Not a process, but an object. If I came to you in the Royal society and claimed that there was a creature in Australia with the pelt, feet, and tail of a beaver, the bill of a duck, that laid eggs, suckled its young, and had venomous spurs on its feet... You could never prove me wrong. You could generate no degree of certainty that I was not telling the truth. Instead, the burden of proof is on me, and I can drag you down under and show you a platypus. But of course, if I cannot find one, that does not mean they do not exist...

In this case, you can in fact absolutely prove the positive by showing someone a platypus, but the negative cannot be proven. Ever.

And then of course there are things so poorly defined as to be meaningless. Like garage dragons, god etc.

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GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/
Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences

There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.

Are you seriously saying that some guys are going to pull out a few fuel rods out of the Iranian reactor and put these rods in a pic-a-nic basket and go Yogi Bear with them, while the Ayatollah sends Ranger Smith to try and catch them?



I just find it sad that the conditions that led to all this proliferation bullshit will just continue on even when the nation/s gets nukes, and the form of its continuation will be no better and will possibly be worse when the actors get nuclear arms. The biggest losers are the people who actually live there, who are being victimized by factors both internal and external that they have utterly no control over, factors that have mutilated the entire region and all its nations, societies and peoples, to create an indecent and inhumane situation for everyone there. No one will let them live in peace, and the blame games will continue on and on, and all the bluster and the bullshit justifications and the jingoism and alarmism and militarism will just result in people losing their lives. It's a beautiful thing, how all these extraneous things just makes people lose their humanity, how these things make people forget that others are also human beings who just want to live their lives, all because of their pursuit of nebulous goals. Well, I hope that if and when all these actors reach these goals, after everything that's been said and done, that it'll make them happy.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

Great theory, but it revolves around being able to figure out after the fact who was and wasn't responsible, in a country that's probably in chaos from the inevitable nuclear counterattack launched by Israel/US/whoever the hell. And where anyone still alive who had any involvement will be trying to muddy the water and cover their ass.

It also assumes there really are no fanatics in the Iranian regime, and while I doubt that any Iranian senior leaders are actively suicidal, it's not like there haven't been heads of state before who weren't afraid to die for what they thought was right.

I agree. I wish I could at least think of a mechanism that would really help, but the Middle East came pre-fucked up before I was even born.

Thing is, that's not some special problem with Iran, it's a problem with every nation. You can use that as an argument against any nation getting nukes, but it doesn't give a reason to care more about Iran having nukes than about America or China or Israel or India having nukes - any government can have crazy people.

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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

Not really. Or rather, there are different levels of probability.

The US hasn't had a really fundamental problem with the chain of command in living memory. Anyone who makes a realistic assessment of the present state of the US military and the civilian government will come away with this in mind. The US has spent a lot of effort making pretty damn sure that the people who have the nuclear arsenal physically in their hands will obey rational orders, but will move to restrain the president if he blatantly loses the plot and starts ordering things that would lead to the country's ruin. That they will launch on a duly authorized order, but not without one. That only specific individuals are authorized to use nuclear weapons, and that tampering with them will lead to a swift death, not your own personal private nuke. That they have assets in place to communicate in good faith with other countries that might fear sudden nuclear attack, so that they can defuse any sudden crisis without it going nuclear by accident.

Other major nuclear powers have taken similar steps along these lines. Words like "positive control" and "negative control" have been devised to describe the complicated systems that surround nuclear weapons, to make sure that they can't be used carelessly or by renegades, and that known individuals are responsible for all the decisions involved in starting a nuclear war.

But every single nuclear power in the world has a government more stable and unified than that of Iran. The next most unstable country with nuclear weapons is Pakistan... and Pakistan makes people worry, too.


It's not about sanity, that's a common mistake in this thread. It's about reliability, about the ability to communicate and the strength of a known chain of command. About being sure that the Iranian nuclear arsenal can't be launched by a single general who thinks he Knows What Must Be Done to save his country, and simply isn't afraid to die or to let many others die. Such men are not unique to any one country; it's just that Iran is good at making them and doesn't have a promising track record of restraining them.

It's arguably worse, IMO. The bombs in question (there were what, 4? 5?) were pretty precisely targeted, against specific "assets". The last cross-border attack I cited above started with Hizbullah rocketing Israeli border towns.

I was referring more to the absolute totality of warfare signified by the heavy use of Agent Orange, for example. You weren't just hitting military targets. You were fucking up the land for good.

Of course there is, Eisenhower came up with it decades ago. It's called the "New Look" policy of foreign relations.

Sure preemptive annihilation of potential upstarts with strategic weapons has its downsides but it has been proven out in the past to be pretty damn effective. After all, would anyone have anticipated Imperial Japan surrendering if it wasn't for being faced with nuclear annihilation?

Um... yes. Without their posessions in China and a sunk Navy, Japan might have surrendered. The decision-making process inside the imperial bureaucracy is not well understood by historians to make a definite judgement one way or the other.

In theory that should do it. In practice deterrence requires you not only be able to do this, but make it a certainty in your enemy's mind that it will happen if they order an attack. An uncertain deterrent can be worse than none at all, because all it does is make the other guy nervous.

"Nuke me and I'll nuke you" is pretty easy- I have a nuke, I have a delivery system, since the probability of success is less than 1.0 I have two to make sure one gets through, and I have a good enough warning system that you can't knock both out with some kind of Pearl Harbor attack. Done. "Nuke me and I'll kill specific people inside your country without using nukes" is a lot harder- I have a conventional force able to do the deed, I have good enough intelligence to figure out where to aim it that you can't spoof, I have enough redundant firepower to make sure it will hit its target no matter what, and these things will all continue to function even if you burn my country down around me. It's a tall order...

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Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS

Even if it's with nukes - if nuclear counterattack is inevitable like Simon suggests - making some kind of effort to aim the minimum number of nukes at the right people would at least be less bad than systematically exterminating their entire civilisation.

And yet... the USSR got the bomb shortly after the US, didn't they?

No, there is no method to prevent others from getting nuclear weapons indefinitely. Can't be done. The concept has been demonstrated to be feasible, the knowledge genie is out of the bottle, and eventually other nations will obtain those weapons. That's why Pakistan has one, North Korea has one, and Iran will get one in time.


Aside from what Stas has pointed out, we anticipated they would surrender after we had firebombed every hamlet above, if I recall correctly, 500 people and sent a million man invasion force up their beaches. At the time atomic bomb seemed less catastrophic for everyone than the alternative. And honestly, the US wasn't sure the atomic bombs would work. The firebomb-and-invade plans and preparations were not cancelled until after the formal surrender.

The NPT (even with Soviet and US participation) failed to stop most independent nuclear programs from producing a necessary result.

Hell, South Africa's nuclear program reached completion and was voluntarily dismantled. Which once again proves that the only thing which matters is the capabilities of the nation itself and the desire of its leaders to have nukes. The disagreement of other nations does not matter. DPRK's withdrawal from the NPT is a recent example of the same.

With Iran, I think, it has more to do with Israel's defense considerations and paranoia than anything else.

From that point of view, do collaborative international efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons have any value at all? I do agree that current efforts to contain the spread of nukes are....lacking. I'm wondering if you think the NPT still has value, if a new framework should be developed, or if we should simply do away with a global arms control regime all together and let nations sort these issues out on an ad hoc basis. I honestly don't know what the right answer is, or if there is one.

As far as Iran goes, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that some sort of military action will happen. The hawks in both America and Iran are strong enough that they would be able to scuttle any kind of diplomatic agreement reached between Obama and the Supreme Leader, in the unlikely event that they would be inclined to negotiate some sort of deal.

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"A country without a Czar is like a village without an idiot."
- Old Russian Saying

"What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this."
Steven Schmidt, chief strategist for the McCain Campaign, you FAIL.

Hey Bobo, I gotta pic-a-nic basket. These sa-mi-ches are glowin Bobo! I'd pay to see that episode.

No what I meant was that they'd use the station's controls to pull the control rods out, the rods that control the number of neutrons actively moving about between the fuel rods. They pull them out to increase the rate of reaction, and in a SCRAM (Forgive me for not remembering the exact meaning of the acronym at this time) they shove them all the way in to halt all reaction. The result of a SCRAM is often a complete shutdown that requires a restart after everything cools down, which could take days. If they got in there and pulled the rods then detonated a charge to either destroy or damage the rods, nothing, and I mean nothing but a complete replacement of those control rods would stop a meltdown. And once a meltdown occurs, the uranium in this case is literally so hot it's burning through steel, concrete, anything in its way straight down until it hits water, where it flash boils and causes an explosion. The size of the explosion depends on how far down it is, how much water there is, etc. No matter what though, it's not very pretty.





They've been playing this awful game for millenia. They have stories in the Koran and the Torah of groups attacking each other for whatever reason, and that's used as justification. "You did this way back in the day and we're still pissed!" It's horrible that people use this as justification for genocide, but that's what it is. They want to kill every last one of the people who hurt them in the past. They associate their problems of today on what happened centuries ago, as if Greatx10^8 Grandpa was scorned yesterday.

How do the Israeli's manage to hijack the reactor's controls? Cause, like, if their abilities are so that they can actually influence and control the inner workings of the Iranian nuclear reactor, if they're actually able to press the buttons or something to that effect, then uh, I think they would be doing more constructive and/or effective or precise or specific things than bombing random nuclear scientists whose names appear on some general list of Iranian nuclear scientists.


Trying to stop nations from acquiring nukes through sanctions or military force is like trying to stop people from getting angry and blowing themselves up in acts of terrorism through the use of... sanctions or military force. Turns out there's actually a driving force that forcefully drives people and/or nations or societies or whatever to do negative actions like wanting to have combat oriented lethal devices or Hezbollah-branded designer bomb jackets and maybe even using them in anger. And unless these force-driving things are addressed or acknowledged to even exist, well, everything will stay the same. Which, I guess, is pretty okay for some people since they live oceans and continents away in great societies that are further enriched and fattened by the sufferings and exploitations of distant people who we don't give a fuck about since they're not actually people, and who can afford to go on doing the same thing over and over again and will actually be upset if anyone brings up the fact that what they're doing, or what they are allowing to be done, actually has negative effects on those faraway people whose lives are affected negatively, because the concept of regarding those people as people is depressing to these great guys and detracts from their happy fun freedom time. Whichever way this situation will resolve itself, I am sure that we will all be loving what's gonna happen, and we'll all end up being very happy and glad with ourselves. God bless us all, my friends. God bless us all.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

I think the NPT has failed, and not least because of the behaviour of nuclear powers. They demonstrated that adhering to the NPT was not protecting a Third World nation from internvetion on part of a larger nation, and on the other hand, breaching the NPT would not cause the sky to fall down on you. Right now quite a few nations don't trust the NPT, India and Pakistan (who influence quite a few Third World nations) openly deride it for being an imperialistic tool, and several examples of breaching it are known in history.

In think the NPT is dead. And no attempts to raise that zombie from the grave will succeed. Considering the "gratitude" in form of American military intervention Iraq and Libya received for stopping their nuclear and WMD programs, is there really a single Third World leader who'd still seek refuge in the NPT? He'd have to be on very good terms with either America or Russia or another nuclear power, or he'd have to be out of his fucking mind.

A new framework would fail for the exact same reason. Those who already left or broke the NPT or never joined (Israel, DPRK, India, Pakistan and possibly Iran in a short order) wouldn't support it, and perhaps many other Third World states won't do so either this time. During the Cold War the US and USSR could boss many of their client states around (also by hiding some secret elements of the NPT agreement, which could easily be interpreted as "fuck you Third World" gesture). Right now nobody would want to be bossed around by Russia, US and the EU.

Are you being serious?

Frankly, the suitcase nuke scenario was more plausible than this. Though it would make a kick-ass movie.

Thanks to Skimmer, Simon and Shroomie for some new perspectives I didn't have this time a day ago. I guess this is the reason Stuart always went on about the mammoth costs of C4ISR.

I know it's completely unrealistic, but I wonder what would happen if the US/NATO suddenly said "Hey Iran, lets end all sanctions and start free trade, bygones be bygones". I think thats the only thing that would end this vicious circle, but it's completely impossible of course.