In the second case, Odom awakened Brzezinski in the middle of the night to tell him 220 Soviet missiles had been launched at the United States. Then Odom called back to say NORAD was reporting 2,200 missiles had been launched - an all-out attack!

One minute before Brzezinski was set to call President Carter, Odom called again to say other warning systems had detected no missiles. False alarm. As it turned out, someone had mistakenly fed military exercise tapes into NORAD's computer system.

NORAD officials say they have made changes to ensure such mistakes are not repeated.

1) People can be more trigger-happy and quick to launch than 1970s American or Soviet systems, by which point the height of Cold War tensions had declined a bit.

The thing is, neither the US or the USSR wanted a nuclear war. No question they were hostile as hell towards each other but neither wanted to go to war with the other. Yes, there were proxy wars and proxy wars, being real wars, are horrible and nasty but the two great superpowers did not actually want to attack each other. During the Cold War there were always attempts at dialogue, at trying to keep things from boiling over, attempts to make war less likely. Bizarrely, attempts at limited war even if that sounds like an oxymoron and is no comfort to those who died or were maimed.

What happens when a country that wants war acquires a nuclear weapon?

There are countries that want war in a way we haven't really seen for awhile. Germany in the 1930's, for example, conquering other countries. Imperial Japan. More recently, Iraq invading and taking over Kuwait. That's just considering wars to acquire territory and resources.

Iran hasn't invaded anyone, but is that simply because they lack the means to do so, while America does not?

Also, you can't exactly call Iran peaceful, what with the brutal crackdowns on their own people and backing terrorists abroad. While they might not have invaded anyone, you can't say they haven't attacked anyone.

Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets

WASHINGTON — Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.

That is the assessment of American defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon, who say that an Israeli attack meant to set back Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge and highly complex operation. They describe it as far different from Israel’s “surgical” strikes on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

“All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going to be that easy,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official and who planned the American air campaigns in 2001 in Afghanistan and in the 1991 Gulf War.

Speculation that Israel might attack Iran has intensified in recent months as tensions between the countries have escalated. In a sign of rising American concern, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, warned on CNN that an Israeli strike on Iran right now would be “destabilizing.” Similarly, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that attacking Iran would not be “the wise thing” for Israel to do “at this moment.”

But while an Israeli spokesman in Washington, Lior Weintraub, said the country continued to push for tougher sanctions on Iran, he reiterated that Israel, like the United States, “is keeping all options on the table.”

The possible outlines of an Israeli attack have become a source of debate in Washington, where some analysts question whether Israel even has the military capacity to carry it off. One fear is that the United States would be sucked into finishing the job — a task that even with America’s far larger arsenal of aircraft and munitions could still take many weeks, defense analysts said. Another fear is of Iranian retaliation.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be done — handful of planes, over an evening, in and out,’ ” said Andrew R. Hoehn, a former Pentagon official who is now director of the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force, which does extensive research for the United States Air Force.

Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009, said flatly last month that airstrikes capable of seriously setting back Iran’s nuclear program were “beyond the capacity” of Israel, in part because of the distance that attack aircraft would have to travel and the scale of the task.

Still, a top defense official cautioned in an interview last week that “we don’t have perfect visibility” into Israel’s arsenal, let alone its military calculations. His views were echoed by Anthony H. Cordesman, an influential military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There are a lot of unknowns, there are a lot of potential risks, but Israel may know that those risks aren’t that serious,” he said.

Given that Israel would want to strike Iran’s four major nuclear sites — the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak and the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan — military analysts say the first problem is how to get there. There are three potential routes: to the north over Turkey, to the south over Saudi Arabia or taking a central route across Jordan and Iraq.

The route over Iraq would be the most direct and likely, defense analysts say, because Iraq effectively has no air defenses and the United States, after its December withdrawal, no longer has the obligation to defend Iraqi skies. “That was a concern of the Israelis a year ago, that we would come up and intercept their aircraft if the Israelis chose to take a path across Iraq,” said a former defense official who asked for anonymity to discuss secret intelligence.

Assuming that Jordan tolerates the Israeli overflight, the next problem is distance. Israel has American-built F-15I and F-16I fighter jets that can carry bombs to the targets, but their range — depending on altitude, speed and payload — falls far short of the minimum 2,000-mile round trip. That does not include an aircraft’s “loiter time” over a target plus the potential of having to fight off attacks from Iranian missiles and planes.

In any possibility, Israel would have to use airborne refueling planes, called tankers, but Israel is not thought to have enough. Scott Johnson, an analyst at the defense consulting firm IHS Jane’s and the leader of a team preparing an online seminar on Israeli strike possibilities on Iran, said that Israel had eight KC-707 American-made tankers, although it is not clear they are all in operation. It is possible, he said, that Israel has reconfigured existing planes into tankers to use in a strike.

Even so, any number of tankers would need to be protected by ever more fighter planes. “So the numbers you need just skyrocket,” Mr. Johnson said. Israel has about 125 F-15Is and F-16Is. One possibility, Mr. Johnson said, would be to fly the tankers as high as 50,000 feet, making them hard for air defenses to hit, and then have them drop down to a lower altitude to meet up with the fighter jets to refuel.

Israel would still need to use its electronic warfare planes to penetrate Iran’s air defenses and jam its radar systems to create a corridor for an attack. Iran’s antiaircraft defenses may be a generation old — in 2010, Russia refused to sell Iran its more advanced S-300 missile system — but they are hardly negligible, military analysts say.

Iranian missiles could force Israeli warplanes to maneuver and dump their munitions before they even reached their targets. Iran could also strike back with missiles that could hit Israel, opening a new war in the Middle East, though some Israeli officials have argued that the consequences would be worse if Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon.

Another major hurdle is Israel’s inventory of bombs capable of penetrating the Natanz facility, believed to be buried under 30 feet of reinforced concrete, and the Fordo site, which is built into a mountain.

Assuming it does not use a nuclear device, Israel has American-made GBU-28 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that could damage such hardened targets, although it is unclear how far down they can go.

Earlier this month, a Bipartisan Policy Center report by Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, and Charles F. Wald, a retired Air Force general, recommended that the Obama administration sell Israel 200 enhanced GBU-31 “bunker busters” as well as three advanced refueling planes.

The two said that they were not advocating an Israeli attack, but that the munitions and aircraft were needed to improve Israel’s credibility as it threatens a strike.

Should the United States get involved — or decide to strike on its own — military analysts said that the Pentagon had the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the United States has plenty of refueling capability. Bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.

Nonetheless, defense officials say it would still be tough to penetrate Iran’s deepest facilities with existing American bombs and so are enhancing an existing 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” that was specifically designed for Iran and North Korea.

“There’s only one superpower in the world that can carry this off,” General Deptula said. “Israel’s great on a selective strike here and there.”


Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Also, what could Iran possibly do towards other nations with an atom bomb? They may be able to sponsor more terrorists (hard to believe) but really, do you think they will go "Got the bomb. Gonna invade X now"? Who is X then?

By that standard, America, as an aggressor far worse than any other nation since the 1990s, should not be allowed to have nukes. It is blatantly hypocritical to complain about the evil Iranians having nukes when last I checked they have not a single boot on foreign soil. The USA meanwhile has occupied two sovereign nations and continues to do so, while building bases in the middle and far east. For all that screaming about how aggressive Iran is, they have not invaded a single one of their neighbours. The US, meanwhile, is occupying left and right to them while propping up "allied" dictators to the north and financing terror groups in Iran.

I don't like Iran myself, but going "they cannot be trusted. They want a war" is hypocritical to the extreme.

There are countries that want war in a way we haven't really seen for awhile. Germany in the 1930's, for example, conquering other countries. Imperial Japan. More recently, Iraq invading and taking over Kuwait. That's just considering wars to acquire territory and resources.

Then we have ideological genocide. What happens if a nation that wants to not just conquer but eliminate another nation gets a bomb?...

Right now, I think Iran falls into the "self-defense" category. They think merely possessing an a-bomb will make invasion of their nation by the US extremely unlikely. They're almost certainly right. Fine. So Iran will almost certainly get one soon...

I am not saying Iran will be that [genocidal/suicidal] - honestly, I don't know. I'm assuming that the current guys in power over there want to live just as much as the average politician and aren't, themselves, suicidal. I think it's most likely that if Iran gets the bomb they'll do what every else has these past 70 years or so and just sit on the fucker.

The problem is that the more people who get nukes, the more likely it is something will go wrong with the concept of deterrence and MAD....

Forget talking about sanity here - what happens when someone decides the LOGICAL thing to do is to launch? It doesn't require insanity for that, just the right circumstances where someone with a nuke thinks the most expedient manner to achieve a goal is to set off a nuclear weapon...

It's nuts to think nuclear weapons won't be ever used again, either. Sooner or later they will be. The more the memory of the last time fades, the more people who start to think like Elfdart, that it's OK for these weapons to spread and multiply without an attempt at limit, who think passing them out like party favors is just fine, the more likely someone is to decide their use is acceptable.

I'm hoping I'm gone before that happens. Preferably of old age, but gone. I don't want to see that happen, not even to my worst enemy. Not to anyone, for any reason. I don't want to see any city burn. I don't have that much anger in me, or bitterness, or evil.

Did you read Broomstick's post?

a more general note, it seems like we get another poster in here making the same strawman argument every damn day:

"Americans say "Iran is evil and aggressive, they should not have a bomb!" But this is hypocritical, because the US has invaded countries, and is therefore more evil and aggressive than Iran!"

Why is it so hard to grasp a political model where things can be good or bad for reasons that have nothing to do with the US? Why can't Iran having nuclear weapons be troubling for reasons that have nothing to do with some bullshit macho neocon huffing and puffing about 'mad mullahs?' Why is it off-limits to be worried that Iran might have an unstable government, in light of the violent suppression of major protests in the country, or the private religious militias they have? Why is it somehow not permitted to worry that someone, some unspecified future country, might use the threat of nuclear weapons for conquest?

Why do the same strawmen keep coming back in this thread over and over?

I wouldn't say Iran's military is exceptionally twitchy. Iran did not actually conduct rogue attacks on other nations with WMDs or something. As for Israel, they're paranoid, but far from insane. Realistically, how many warheads could Iran field? Israeli C and C would survive an iranian attack, I believe.

Yes. I've snipped out the rest because it was pretty bad rambling without a point. My specific response was to her hand-wriging over aggressive nations, which hilariously left out the most aggressive nation of today.

Because a large faction of your political establishment is doing exactly the "evil and aggressive" routine. A much larger part is all for helping Israel to bomb Iran. All of which comes off as extremely hypocritical, if only for the reason that a lot of it is "we don't want nukes in the hands of those evil Iranians" because they can't be trusted to have some professionals.

And because the people who scream the loudest are Israel and the USA, not countries who are known for taking a honest approach to a political problem.

And because a lot of the same rhetoric was used with regards to the Al-Quida threat and the Hussein threat. Track record plays into this at some part. Heck, the exact same "Saddam Iran might give nuclear materials to Al-Quida Hezbollah" concern is raised over and over again.

How are those two things at all mutually exclusive? Pakistan would sell to the Gulf States for money; that sale doesn't in any way mean an end to Iranian oil.

Those last two are so wrong as to be laughable. Who wanted to turn the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam into all-out wars, and when were they deterred by nukes? You realise China didn't have any until 1964, right? That didn't stop them intervening in Korea in the face of potential US nuclear reprisals.

Pakistan would sell its A-bombs to the Gulf States? And invite reprisals if one of those states used it? I think not.

MacArthur certainly did. He even wanted a cobalt barrier at the border. Fortunately Truman fired him before he could carry out his nuttiest ideas. Why did Truman refuse to commit to all-out war against the communists in Korea? Because he believed Stalin might use his atomic bomb if he did.

I am not cheering for unilateral aggressions, or for nuclear proliferations. I view all these things that are happening with great trepidation and fear, because they either make people die now, or could make even more people die in the future.

What disturbs me is that Elfdart seems so busy cheering for nuclear proliferations that he has forgotten that nukes are scary, and should be taken seriously. Having nuclear weapons makes a nation unconquerable, because it can do so much horrible damage that no one would be willing to back it into a corner ever. Being unconquerable is generally good, and I would be pretty happy with the idea of a world where everyone was unconquerable, although I might have some reservations because some things are really horrible and you might want to put a stop to them, like how Vietnam put a stop to the Khmer Rouge, which was pretty righteous of them.

But even though nuclear bombs are tools that make you unconquerable, they are not just tools that make you unconquerable. They are also weapons of horrible power, and are incredibly hard to stop, even for someone who has the same power. So there is responsibility that goes with the power- responsibility that good, bad, and neutral regimes alike must take seriously. Because it is not about how moral or nice or "rational" you seem to some foreigner, it is about having your shit together and making sure the nuclear weapons are not used irresponsibly.

Elfdart seems so happy that Iran might become unconquerable that he is just laughing and mocking the question of whether Iran will be responsible. And indeed, he seems to totally deny that this responsibility thing is a problem, or that there is any country whose leaders might, by their irresponsibility, become dangerous and bad people to entrust nuclear weapons to.

The US has had a nuclear arsenal for a long time, and has not used it to wage wars of aggression. The wars go on- if you think you can find an era that's abolished war you're dreaming- but If you're worried about nuclear weapons being used for aggression and conquest, or by rogue factions within a government, the US doesn't do it. Other wars go on- we can point to American actions, including violent actions, that have caused massive suffering, just as we can for Russia or China. Being a nuclear power does not confer moral status.*snip irrelevant rest*

The operative question is whether all governments can match the track record. I am not so sure of this. Iran is close enough to the wrong side of the line to make me nervous. Is that hypocritical? Is it hypocritical for me to think Iran's nuclear forces won't be as coup-proof and organized as those of Russia and China? Or to worry that if they turn out not to be, they might manage to kill as many people in an hour as the American war in Iraq killed in a decade? Twice as many? Ten times more? That is well within the power of a nuclear state, if something goes wrong.

Here's a hypothetical for you. Suppose the US suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth. Just *poof,* gone, transported off to Never-Neverland, replaced by big open stretches of seawater. Heck, let's say Israel disappears too.

Suddenly, what you consider the two worst things in world geopolitics are gone.

How would you revise your worldview?

Would the Iranian nuclear program still seem like a good thing?

Would you turn your mockery on, say, a Russian who thought it was a bad thing for Iran to have nukes, because of the horrible things Russia does in Chechnya, and their total lack of real democratic government? Would nuclear proliferation still seem like such a good deal in a world where you couldn't kid yourself into thinking the US was about to launch another huge war?

If only all Americans and American politicians had a single voice, so that you could debate the ones you disagree with all the time, instead of having to deal with only the ones who are actually present in the room...

Oh, wait. You do that already.

If your argument is with Obama, kindly take it up with someone who's defending him. If your argument is with the idea of bombing Iran, kindly take it up with a country that's actually stated the intention to do that, instead of the US. If your argument is with encouraging Israel to bomb Iran, take it up with a country that's doing that, instead of with the US, which is doing the opposite and telling them NOT to do it.

In other words, take your goddamn strawman and burn it. Or go troll some forum full of neocons, where you might find someone who actually believes the things you want to argue with.

Israel is, if we are to be honest about political problems, the one who the missiles are going to be pointed at. What "honest approach to a political problem" would get them around that?

I mean, are they supposed to be happy about this nuclear program belonging to someone who tolerates, from the head of their executive government, rhetoric demanding that Israel cease to exist? Is it somehow dishonest for them to consider this a bad thing, and potentially a dangerous thing that they might seriously consider fighting to avoid?

It may be aggressive, belligerent, stupid, but is it really dishonest?

What 'honest approach' do you want from them? What would placate the Iranians to the extent that Israel would no longer have a logical reason to worry about Iran's intentions?´

Let's assume the Israelis are the very minions of Satan. If you want, condemn them for a million words, each more damning than the last. But when the smoke clears, what do they do next? Without creating any illusions about Iran, how is Israel to convince Iran not to take steps that would put them in greater danger? If Israel suddenly saw the light and became a beacon of good faith, human rights, and antimilitarism, would it actually stop Iran at this point?

So... because someone else ten years ago said someone who didn't have a nuclear program might give nuclear material to someone they have no connection to, I am now out of line to worry that someone who does have a nuclear program might give nuclear material to someone they do have a connection to?

I mean, I'd understand your position if it were George Bush you were talking to. But you seem to regard any expression of these opinions by any American as invalid- hypocrisy by association. I live in the same country as them, and my fellow citizens have allowed them to hold power, so I must agree with them. And if I express any opinion that anything else going on in the world is bad, then it becomes an opportunity to unroll the litany of American crimes.

I wonder, do you think all Russians are Putinists, or that all Iranians really think theocracy is the best of all possible governments?