US officials believe Iran sanctions will fail, making mil...

[Simon_Jester]

"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...

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.

Grumman, how much do you know about real nuclear attack plans?

No one drafts serious plans involving "kill everyone in the country by carpeting it with nuclear fireballs." No, you make a list of things you want blown up, and you figure out how many bombs need to be dropped where to blow them up. Which is probably how you'd go about it if someone really needed you to do it, so think carefully.

I am a country fighting another country. We both have nukes. Which of their stuff do I blow up first?

1) Their nukes. If I can possibly blow up any of their nuclear weapons on the ground, I should do so whenever I can. I should also target any facility that can be used to launch their nukes. Enemy missile silos are obvious targets. So are airbases that contain planes which can drop nukes. So are facilities that house ships or submarines that might carry nuclear weapons- if I can blow up one of their missile submarines while it's tied to the pier at a naval base, that's about the only way to be sure of killing it before it lobs missiles at me and blows the shit out of millions of my people.

2) Their conventional armed forces. This is especially important if I'm relying on aircraft to drop the nukes, because enemy air defense will do everything it can to shoot down my nuclear bombers. Throwing enough nukes to destroy the entire enemy army is impractical, though, so my missiles will be concentrated on targets like HQs, supply dumps, and air defense radar installations.

3) Command and control centers. But I have to be careful here- what if I win and do enough damage that the enemy is willing to surrender? Who will still be in a position to issue that surrender? I have to leave someone alive with enough authority to give up, and to issue stand-down orders to the armed forces. This is one problem with fighting a nuclear war against Iran: who has authority to issue a surrender that will be honored by all the different factions in their government? Especially the really hardcore ones?

4) Key industrial and transportation centers. This is if I'm worried that they will be able to quickly rebuild, or cobble together some improvised nuclear strike capability (say, loading up a cargo plane with a nuclear bomb, flying it toward my own country whose air defenses were crippled by the nuclear war, and shoving the bomb out the back of the plane instead of using a military fighter jet). These become targets proportional to the amount of damage that is done to me- if I somehow manage to stop all their bombs, I don't actually need to hit the targets on list 4, not the way I need to hit 3, 2, and 1.

Now, there are many variations on the theme of this kind of plan. One thing to notice is that cities are in trouble. Cities are transportation centers, are often centers of government administration, and are often located very close to military production and maintenance facilities. This is why during a nuclear war it's a bad idea to live in Washington DC- not because the attacker is trying to kill the people living in DC as such, but because they're damned sure going to want to kill the Pentagon, the White House, and the other government agencies that reside in Washington. But an attacker would be most foolish to go out of their way to kill extra millions of people just to kill millions of people. If I have any bombs left, it gives me an incentive to retaliate against his own population (instead of, say, lobbing a second wave of missiles at an enemy airfield to make sure it's wrecked permanently). And it contributes nothing to decreasing my ability to strike back, when the whole point of fighting a nuclear war is to reduce the enemy to a state unable to fight a nuclear war as soon as possible.

Realistically, if I try to base my nuclear attack plan on killing "whoever ordered the attack..." Well. I can't know just by looking at a missile who pushed the button that launched it. The shape of a mushroom cloud does not offer clues as to the intentions of the attacker. So I have to be sure of hitting the person responsible- probably a senior official in their government or military... which means I'm hitting command centers, military HQs, airports by which they might leave the country.

I'd hit those anyway. I'd also hit their nuclear forces, just to make sure they don't fire off even more megadeaths my way while I'm dealing with the attack.

When the smoke clears, the result looks very much like it would if I hadn't been methodically trying to kill specific individuals in the country. Because to be reasonably confident of hitting them, I have to hit all the places they might be. And if any of them happened to survive the bombing, I run into the problem I was just talking about- they will be hard to find and constantly muddying the waters, in the sheer, incredible, nightmarish chaos that would result from a serious nuclear attack on a civilized country.

From that point of view, do collaborative international efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons have any value at all?

I would argue that they do.

In the 1950s, sober theorists predicted that by 2000, virtually every developed nation on Earth would have its own nuclear weapons, and it was taken for granted that small nuclear wars would break out on a semi-regular basis. Thankfully, that prediction did not come true. One of the reasons it didn't happen is because of the NPT, and the idea the NPT represents, which is that major nuclear powers will not help small nations acquire nuclear capability as proxies.

NPT is not and never was perfect, but it bought us decades of 'nuclear peace.' I don't know what could replace it and do a better job, aside from something like a world enforcement arm that had a monopoly on nuclear weapons which it would itself enforce with nuclear weapons. Since we couldn't possibly create an organization like that which would use its power justly (people have been suggesting that we do it since a few weeks after Hiroshima, and it never caught on)...

I don't think there is a better way. I don't think dropping all the arms control treaties is a better way, or even a good-ish way.

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.

I wish to God I knew how to address the Iranians in a way that would make them calm down. I can't figure out how to do it except by building a time machine and giving Dwight D. Eisenhower a smack upside his big bald head.

I can't blame the Iranians for being constantly pissed off. I don't like them for it, but I don't blame them.

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 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.

You're probably right- the US did a lot to bring this about with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was very much an unprovoked attack and proved beyond doubt that the US would attack nations it disliked, NPT status or not.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya just underlined the point.

[Crown]

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.

Actually they can be trusted quite a bit. They can be trusted to not sign their own death warrants by launching a nuclear attack on the US (and maybe Israel depending on the US's policy), which is what would happen if they did fire nukes at Israel.

This cognitive dissonance that is held by the (generally) right wing regarding the mullahs in Iran is rather staggering; they're not the ones strapping bombs on themselves, they get others to do it for them. Launching a nuclear attack is the geopolitical equivalent of strapping a bomb on yourself, they won't do it.

[Simon_Jester]

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.

Actually they can be trusted quite a bit. They can be trusted to not sign their own death warrants by launching a nuclear attack on the US (and maybe Israel depending on the US's policy), which is what would happen if they did fire nukes at Israel.

This cognitive dissonance that is held by the (generally) right wing regarding the mullahs in Iran is rather staggering; they're not the ones strapping bombs on themselves, they get others to do it for them. Launching a nuclear attack is the geopolitical equivalent of strapping a bomb on yourself, they won't do it.

...Did you ignore the whole rest of the argument?

The problem is not that the Iranian leadership is insane and suicidal. The problem is that they are fractious. If there is a political crisis within Iran, the chain of command becomes unclear. It is hard for us to know in advance whose orders a given general will take under given conditions. There are large armed forces under the personal control of various political figures in the country- practically private militias.

There is very little evidence that the Iranians are willing to do the hard, complicated work that other nuclear powers do when it comes to establishing firm lines of control over their weapons. The USSR, US, and other first-line nuclear armed states put a lot of effort into making sure the missiles will launch when told to launch, will not launch when not told to launch, and (this is important) will not launch if some single person happens to be struck by a fit of paranoid idiocy about communists contaminating his precious bodily fluids.

These are all very real concerns which every nuclear power has about the others, and which most of the powers take pains to reassure their peers about. Iran is not reassuring on this account. If the command and control system isn't done carefully, it might only take one hard-souled man who's willing to order many deaths (including his own) to start a nuclear war. And Iran has people like that- every nation does.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Since we couldn't possibly create an organization like that which would use its power justly (people have been suggesting that we do it since a few weeks after Hiroshima, and it never caught on)...

It was actually suggested before this, before Trinity even, by the Franck Report. They suggested that nukes should be placed under international control immediately, and that the agency must not be a paper tiger, any sign of reneging on the treaty would be seen as a cause for immediate attack. They also proposed uranium rationing as a way to prevent new nukes: allow each nation to only etract/enrich a small amount of fissile material, and only for reactors.

The report is really fascinating reading.

[Crown]

...Did you ignore the whole rest of the argument?

....Did you see me responding to anything more than what I quoted?

[ChaserGrey]

3) Command and control centers. But I have to be careful here- what if I win and do enough damage that the enemy is willing to surrender? Who will still be in a position to issue that surrender? I have to leave someone alive with enough authority to give up, and to issue stand-down orders to the armed forces. This is one problem with fighting a nuclear war against Iran: who has authority to issue a surrender that will be honored by all the different factions in their government? Especially the really hardcore ones?

Historical irrelevance (well, maybe) but: this is exactly why USAAF bombers in 1944-45 were forbidden to drop so much as one bomb on the Imperial Palace, even though we burned down the rest of Tokyo. US planners knew damn well the Emperor was the only person who could make a surrender stick, so they avoided killing him at all costs. [His son was 12 at the time, wouldn't have had any authority of his own, and given how things were at the time his Regent would have been handpicked by the Japanese military.]

[Grumman]

No one drafts serious plans involving "kill everyone in the country by carpeting it with nuclear fireballs." No, you make a list of things you want blown up, and you figure out how many bombs need to be dropped where to blow them up.

I was not responding to a serious plan - I was responding to someone who asked "...how do you deter someone with that attitude, short of having a big enough arsenal to completely destroy their civilization?"

I do not think taking "a big enough arsenal to completely destroy their civilisation" as a starting point is particularly unreasonable there.

The more interesting discussion is whether your objective is to nuke the silo that fired the nuke (or am I incorrect in thinking we can work out approximately where a ballistic missile was fired from?) or to nuke the silos that didn't fire the nuke. I say the former to get rid of the psycho that just started a nuclear war, you say the latter to stop the others joining in the festivities.

[Alyrium Denryle]

No one drafts serious plans involving "kill everyone in the country by carpeting it with nuclear fireballs." No, you make a list of things you want blown up, and you figure out how many bombs need to be dropped where to blow them up.

I was not responding to a serious plan - I was responding to someone who asked "...how do you deter someone with that attitude, short of having a big enough arsenal to completely destroy their civilization?"

I do not think taking "a big enough arsenal to completely destroy their civilisation" as a starting point is particularly unreasonable there.

The more interesting discussion is whether your objective is to nuke the silo that fired the nuke (or am I incorrect in thinking we can work out approximately where a ballistic missile was fired from?) or to nuke the silos that didn't fire the nuke. I say the former to get rid of the psycho that just started a nuclear war, you say the latter to stop the others joining in the festivities.

You have failed to think this through. Failing to think things through is really bad when it comes to nukes. Only the targeting has to be "pretty close". Your reasoning must be spot on, or everything you love dies in fire and gamma radiation.

What purpose does nuking the nuke-firing the silo serve? It is an object. Last I checked, the order to fire nukes is given off site. It is just some guy following orders down in the silo--if there is a guy there at all, and the launch is not automated.

You you are busy doing that, the guy who DID order the firing of that nuke is either long gone, in which case your firing your nuke just gave the legitimate authorities of the country who fired first a really good incentive to wipe you off the face of the earth before you fire a second missile... Or that same guy is ordering the other silos to join the festivities.

Either way, your best option is to at the very least, destroy said country's nuclear weapons capacity.

[Grumman]

What purpose does nuking the nuke-firing the silo serve? It is an object. Last I checked, the order to fire nukes is given off site. It is just some guy following orders down in the silo--if there is a guy there at all, and the launch is not automated.

An automatic launch is a valid counter-argument (plus it removes my reason for not nuking the other silos), but my argument from the beginning has been that if that guy does not refuse the order, he's on the list.

[TimothyC]

It's economics.

The reason you don't target the empty silo if you have a choice is that you don't have a near-infinite supply of weapons to use. After the silo fires, the individual who ordered the launch at the local level is less dangerous than hundreds, if not thousands of other possible targets. Even at the peak of nuclear weapons deployment there were always targeting trade-offs that had to be made.

In short, every weapon expended on an empty silo is a weapon not used to reduce the war-making potential of the opponent's regime.

[Alyrium Denryle]

An automatic launch is a valid counter-argument (plus it removes my reason for not nuking the other silos), but my argument from the beginning has been that if that guy does not refuse the order, he's on the list.

Oh please. He is just some guy following orders from someone he has been trained to follow orders from, and who knows more than him. For all he knows, he is responding to your launch. Dont fault him for bad information. Additionally, he is the LEAST of your concerns. The absolute least. Chief among your concerns are the other nukes that are bound to be heading for you as soon as you fire the first. You have the alpha strike. You can take out their entire arsenal prior to launch if you dont waste that first one, and then you might actually, you know... live.

That said: You completely ignored the rest of my post. Good job.

[Uraniun235]

If I have any bombs left, it gives me an incentive to retaliate against his own population (instead of, say, lobbing a second wave of missiles at an enemy airfield to make sure it's wrecked permanently).

Hey, wait a minute. Communications and administration are going to be an absolute wreck no matter what targeting doctrine gets used; how are you going to be able to figure out, in anything approaching a timely fashion, whether your enemy prioritized military facilities or population annihilation? I mean yeah if every military base and installation was left unfazed that'd be one thing, but what's to prevent someone from doing a 33/67 split where most bases take a hit and the cities and towns get totally razed?

Additionally, assuming both countries have sizable arsenals, you've already shot your load on trying to take out your opponent's military. You've certainly inflicted a lot of civilian casualties along the way, but odds are you don't have enough weapons left to perform nearly as thorough a job of annihilating him as he has of you.

If at the end of the year, your enemy is struggling to rebuild but still surviving, and your population has all died or are starving to death (or just barely sustaining themselves), doesn't your enemy win? Put another way: Isn't the surest way of preventing a country from ever being a threat again to make sure that that country doesn't have anyone left to rebuild?


This is really grisly thinking, and I don't at all advocate population annihilation or nuclear warfare, but I'm not entirely convinced that nuclear targeting is as clear cut as "nope it never makes sense to go after the population" (or else that it is not quite as absolutely, coldly logical as may have been described).

[Simon_Jester]

No one drafts serious plans involving "kill everyone in the country by carpeting it with nuclear fireballs." No, you make a list of things you want blown up, and you figure out how many bombs need to be dropped where to blow them up.

I was not responding to a serious plan - I was responding to someone who asked "...how do you deter someone with that attitude, short of having a big enough arsenal to completely destroy their civilization?"

You have missed an important point, Grumman.

Once nuclear war begins, you are no longer asking the question, "how do you deter them?" You are asking the question "how do you fight them?"

By analogy, how do you fight a man who attacks you? Kick him in the balls, then pound his head against a wall until he falls unconscious. Or break his leg and walk away. Or any number of other methods that work for incapacitating someone so they cannot fight you, no matter how badly they hate you. Once in a real fight, intentions matter very little. What matters is doing enough harm to your enemy that they stop trying to hurt you. It can take brutality or even cruelty- that's why fighting is bad.

The power of deterrence lies in the idea that you can convince someone that fighting you at all is a bad idea, because they fear injury. No one wants to be the target of brutality or cruelty, so if they expect to be hurt in a fight, they usually avoid it unless backed into a corner.

Deterrence works pretty well, on average. It doesn't work as well against Iran, because the Iranians are fractious, and deterring one bunch of them may not deter another, or because one bunch of them may think they can fool us into attacking their rivals, or because of a simple lack of communications between factions that causes one side to do something rash because they don't know what kind of deal the other side is negotiating.

The more interesting discussion is whether your objective is to nuke the silo that fired the nuke (or am I incorrect in thinking we can work out approximately where a ballistic missile was fired from?) or to nuke the silos that didn't fire the nuke. I say the former to get rid of the psycho that just started a nuclear war, you say the latter to stop the others joining in the festivities.

The psycho who started the nuclear war is definitely not in the silo. The guy in the silo did not make the firing decision; guys in silos do not do that. The danger lies in the command structure- the politicians, the generals, the people who have the access codes and the Big Political Ideas.

And it's the people in the command structure who are hardest to localize, and whose responsibility for their actions is hardest to pin down.

And what's this absurdity about wasting nuclear missiles on silos you know to be empty? Whoever is responsible for launching that nuclear attack is one crazy man, who might not even be at the silo. Whereas a live nuclear missile in a silo is a big metal tube that can kill one million people. Would you rather slay one crazy man by blowing up a hole in the ground? Or would you rather prevent the deaths of one million of your own people by blowing up a nuclear missile? Choose... I won't say "choose wisely," because you don't actually need wisdom for this call. Just choose without gross stupidity.

If I have any bombs left, it gives me an incentive to retaliate against his own population (instead of, say, lobbing a second wave of missiles at an enemy airfield to make sure it's wrecked permanently).

Hey, wait a minute. Communications and administration are going to be an absolute wreck no matter what targeting doctrine gets used; how are you going to be able to figure out, in anything approaching a timely fashion, whether your enemy prioritized military facilities or population annihilation? I mean yeah if every military base and installation was left unfazed that'd be one thing, but what's to prevent someone from doing a 33/67 split where most bases take a hit and the cities and towns get totally razed?

That's why the US and Russian militaries (and presumably many other nations) have huge, elaborate, massively redundant networks of communication and control. In the hours after the attack, the hope is that someone will be able to piece together enough information to know what they've got left, and send out the codes. Billions of dollars go into things like satellite networks, airborne control centers, networks that can route around damage, and so on.

Of course, in the event of an actual nuclear war it might all fail in a puff of smoke, but you get the idea.

Also, not every nuclear weapon gets fired in the first minutes of the war. Some things will be held in reserve- particularly ballistic missile submarines. So you can be reasonably sure that the enemy has some remaining nuclear deterrent, which can and will be used on you if they get the idea that you're trying to wipe out all traces of their civilization.

Additionally, assuming both countries have sizable arsenals, you've already shot your load on trying to take out your opponent's military. You've certainly inflicted a lot of civilian casualties along the way, but odds are you don't have enough weapons left to perform nearly as thorough a job of annihilating him as he has of you.

If you actually launched an efficient "counterforce" plan (i.e. blew up his nuclear forces), and it worked, then he will lack the capability to use his forces effectively. Many of his missiles are gone- blown up on the ground or tried to launch through a nuclear fireball. Many of his planes are gone, likewise. His submarines are still out there, that's a problem... but your reserves are still in place.

You have, or should have, more than one bullet in the gun. You have airborne bombers with nuclear cruise missiles that can hit anything they're ordered to attack. You have, again, the submarine force. You can say "We've ripped the guts out of your nuclear arsenal, your bombs hit us but didn't do enough damage to break us, now quit shooting or we start killing three of your people for every one of ours."

Remember that cycles of communication can still (with difficulty) go on during a nuclear war.

If at the end of the year, your enemy is struggling to rebuild, and your population has all died or are starving to death, doesn't your enemy win? Put another way: Isn't the surest way of preventing a country from ever being a threat again to make sure that that country doesn't have anyone left to rebuild?

Doing this is actually much harder than knocking out their armed forces and enforcing a peace with the lingering threat of the nuclear reserve force. You have to hit a lot more targets to wipe out civil society than to break down military capabilities.

This is really grisly thinking, and I don't at all advocate population annihilation or nuclear warfare, but I'm not entirely convinced that nuclear targeting is as clear cut as "nope it never makes sense to go after the population" (or else that it is not quite as absolutely, coldly logical as may have been described).

The professionals mostly figure in terms of counterforce- hitting the enemy's nuclear launch capability, to preserve the lives of as many people and military units on their own side as possible. In general, the importance of making sure military targets are dead, dead, dead is pretty high compared to the importance of any "murderize them so they don't rebuild and wipe us all out!" argument.

Even cracking all the military targets gets hard when you remember that it may take many direct hits to wipe out a large, sprawling airbase or a major complex of nuclear missile silos... and that for each point you must nuke, you have to fire three or more missiles because even a 10% or 20% failure rate (missile fails, goes wild, or the warhead doesn't blow up)... even with two missiles, there's a noticeable chance they'll get a shot off.

[Grumman]

And what's this absurdity about wasting nuclear missiles on silos you know to be empty? Whoever is responsible for launching that nuclear attack is one crazy man, who might not even be at the silo. Whereas a live nuclear missile in a silo is a big metal tube that can kill one million people. Would you rather slay one crazy man by blowing up a hole in the ground? Or would you rather prevent the deaths of one million of your own people by blowing up a nuclear missile? Choose... I won't say "choose wisely," because you don't actually need wisdom for this call. Just choose without gross stupidity.

I want to avoid the same sort of perverse incentive that encourages countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons in the first place. If Bob launches a nuclear attack, either on his own initiative or because he's just following orders, I do not want him to be made the safest man in Iran just because he already blew his load. The US has six thousand of the things, are we really in danger of running out of available nukes before we run out of targets in a country like Iran?

[Elfdart]

He's saying that Sunni powers in the region will pursue nuclear technology, likely from Pakistan, in response to an Iranian bomb.

Why would Pakistan want to supply nukes to the Gulf states or anyone else? As a counter against Iran? That's funny, in light of the fact that Pakistan has now joined Afghanistan, India, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and China in announcing that they are more than happy to keep buying Iranian oil no matter what Iran is doing with its nuclear research. In fact:

Iran is still being supported by its neighbors, who need its aid. Iraq wants a waiver, being deeply dependent on trade with Iran. And, at a tripartite summit between Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari underlined that outside pressure could not undermine good relations between Islamabad and Tehran! Pakistan has an energy crisis and is seeking electricity and fuel from Iran. So, basically, US allies Afghanistan and Pakistan are paying no attention to American attempts to get them to join a boycott of Iran; in fact, they are openly defiant on this score. The three are even talking of some sort of regional bloc that would include China!

The last crackpot Neocon plan, the invasion of Iraq, ended up costing Americans about $1 trillion so far and nearly 5,000 soldiers killed. their Iran gambit looks set to triple all the costs of the Iraq fiasco, or more. Write your congressmen and put blame where it is due, on AIPAC.

Indeed.

EDIT: I don't particularly buy the 'mad mullahs' stuff but the idea that from a regional point of view Iran getting the bomb is bad is totally valid. Nuclear proliferation is generally recognised as a bad thing for this very reason, no matter the motivation of those acquiring the weapons.

What kept the peace in Europe for the better part of 50 years? Nukes.

What stopped Korea and Vietnam from turning into all-out wars with tens of millions of people being killed? Nukes.

Nuclear proliferation is a good thing. If Iraq had some nukes in 2002, a million or more Iraqis wouldn't have been killed off thanks to the Crawford Caligula and his idiotic war. I wish the Iranians already had a few nukes plus the ability to drop them on DC, London, Tel Aviv or any other capitol where war whores have such a raging hard-on to murder Iranians and/or steal their oil.

[Simon_Jester]

He's saying that Sunni powers in the region will pursue nuclear technology, likely from Pakistan, in response to an Iranian bomb.

Why would Pakistan want to supply nukes to the Gulf states or anyone else? As a counter against Iran?

Because the Gulf states are going to pay them a lot of money?

That's funny, in light of the fact that Pakistan has now joined Afghanistan, India, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and China in announcing that they are more than happy to keep buying Iranian oil no matter what Iran is doing with its nuclear research. In fact:

So? In the runup World War One, all kinds of countries traded with each other, while swapping around heaps of powerful weapons to use against each other, and no one felt any compunctions about trading with a country that they were planning to go to war with.

Yes, Iran's neighbors want to trade with Iran. That doesn't make them friends of Iran. It's not like they'd refuse to consider doing anything to displease Iran- they just prefer trading to not trading.

EDIT: I don't particularly buy the 'mad mullahs' stuff but the idea that from a regional point of view Iran getting the bomb is bad is totally valid. Nuclear proliferation is generally recognised as a bad thing for this very reason, no matter the motivation of those acquiring the weapons.

What kept the peace in Europe for the better part of 50 years? Nukes.

What stopped Korea and Vietnam from turning into all-out wars with tens of millions of people being killed? Nukes.

Nuclear proliferation is a good thing. If Iraq had some nukes in 2002, a million or more Iraqis wouldn't have been killed off thanks to the Crawford Caligula and his idiotic war. I wish the Iranians already had a few nukes plus the ability to drop them on DC, London, Tel Aviv or any other capitol where war whores have such a raging hard-on to murder Iranians and/or steal their oil.

You seem really... stupidly gung-ho about nuclear weapons here.

A lot of money and effort and fear went into making the world's nuclear arsenals into tools of deterrence that could make the world safer, instead of being giant lethal swords of Damocles hanging over our heads. A nuclear arsenal is an incredibly powerful, dangerous thing, that could wreck whole civilizations in hours, if not kept in check by a complicated balance of security procedures and careful diplomacy. There are a lot of ways for them to go badly wrong, and it's partly luck that we've never had it happen to us.

But to hear you talk about it, it feels like nukes are the best thing ever because it's a defense against imperialism, which is surely the worst of all possible evils. No danger of anyone actually fighting a nuclear war. Or of an accidental launch, or some other fuckup. Or of nukes getting waved around in a civil war. No sir! All they are is a deterrent.

"Nuclear proliferation is a good thing."

It's... kind of disturbing.

[Baffalo]

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.

Are you being serious?

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

I'm being completely serious. In fact, you wouldn't even need to get to the controls themselves if you really wanted it to go down. Just kill everyone in the facility, set charges on the control rods to make them stick in place, then blow the coolant lines. Same effect actually. And unlike the suitcase nuke, there's no EM pulse to tell the world you detonated a nuclear weapon.

I'm being completely serious because all three scenarios are on the table. How viable they are depends on how much they want to make it look like an accident.

[Shroom Man 777]

It's... kind of disturbing.

They're in a position where it seems like there's no other choice but to disturb people. Maybe disturbing people makes them do disturbing things.


Baffalo, if anyone had the magical ability to send Kosher Krieg Korps Mazeltov Mossad Marines Ooorahooah tacticool special forces to storm the facility, kill everyone in it, and sabotage the reactor with a wad of boogers semtex, without being detected and without encountering resistance and defense, and disappear magically without a trace... ya think that they, in all their great powers, would be currently stuck whacking random Iranian scientists with car bombs ineffectually?

Man. Did you stick a fuel rod up your nostril or something?

[Baffalo]

Baffalo, if anyone had the magical ability to send Kosher Krieg Korps Mazeltov Mossad Marines Ooorahooah tacticool special forces to storm the facility, kill everyone in it, and sabotage the reactor with a wad of boogers semtex, without being detected and without encountering resistance and defense, and disappear magically without a trace... ya think that they, in all their great powers, would be currently stuck whacking random Iranian scientists with car bombs ineffectually?

Man. Did you stick a fuel rod up your nostril or something?

You leave my nasal insertions alone!

Anyway, I never made the claim that their special forces wouldn't encounter resistance. Not once. They will expect resistance but I'm talking a preemptive strike against Iran. I'm not saying it'll be successful or anywhere close to it, nor am I saying it's doomed to failure. I'm outlining what might occur should Israel decide to kick off hostilities. Whether they use terrorists, commandos, or a man in a bear costume is irrelevant. The point will be to shut down Iran's ability to produce nuclear weaponry, which is dependent upon those facilities being operational to produce plutonium, before the Iranians can procure enough to harness it.

[Simon_Jester]

Baffalo, this is folly. To accomplish this, you would have to infiltrate a small army of commandos deep into Iranian territory (remember the last time the US tried that?), flawlessly storm a nuclear research facility that is surely guarded by Iranian troops, and take it before reinforcements arrive.

How to sabotage the reactor is not the problem. How the fuck you plan to get into position to do this is the problem.

The reason the suitcase nuke is easier is that it doesn't require total control of the facility- one man with one big damn bomb is all you need, which means your plan is less sensitive to casualties and Murphy's Law.

It's... kind of disturbing.

They're in a position where it seems like there's no other choice but to disturb people. Maybe disturbing people makes them do disturbing things.

I understand why the Iranians are doing it. They want nuclear bombs for logical reasons, some of which I am sympathetic with (security) and others not so sympathetic (power projection in the Middle East). That they disturb me, but I understand, for they do not give a fuck what I think and have their own problems and interests and goals. This I can comprehend, man to man as it were.

But Elfdart, personally, he is disturbing because he seems so mode-locked on the whole FUCKAMERICA thing that he cannot take a step back and see that there are HyPoCritical Assholes on both sides, or that massive proliferation of nuclear weapons is not a good thing (insert quotes from Ace Combat 5 here) because there are all sorts of ways that the nukes can be used for dickery, or just used by accident, and that the world already has enough troubles with these things.

I would be cool with Elfdart if he were thinking "it is understandable that Iran wishes nuclear weapons, and while I fear and oppose this, I do not reflexively condemn it or want a war about it." I could even understand if he were just a partisan of Iran who thought Islamic theocracy was the shit and wanted Iran to be super-powerful.

But I am not cool with "rah rah nukes for everybody," because this ignores all sorts of questions about what people would do with the nuclear weapons, whether they have a stable government that can keep them under control, and about what happens to the risks of nuclear war in a world where there are suddenly a lot more, much less stable, nuclear powers. And he should not ignore them, because they are legitimately scary and could kill lots of people, and would be just as scary if the US had never existed.

So that is what I find disturbing.

Baffalo, if anyone had the magical ability to send Kosher Krieg Korps Mazeltov Mossad Marines Ooorahooah tacticool special forces to storm the facility, kill everyone in it, and sabotage the reactor with a wad of boogers semtex, without being detected and without encountering resistance and defense, and disappear magically without a trace... ya think that they, in all their great powers, would be currently stuck whacking random Iranian scientists with car bombs ineffectually?

Man. Did you stick a fuel rod up your nostril or something?

Yeah. That's what's bugging me too.

[Lord Zentei]

For goodness sake Baffalo, let's keep the scenarios at least somewhat plausible. If Israel were to use a military strike, they would not send in special forces for the simple reason that special forces are not sacrificial troops, much less sacrificial troops that get sent on a mission that is almost certainly doomed to failure. If they do anything, it will be airstrikes - and those are far from perfect since Iranian nuke sites are fortified against such attacks, and with good reason. There is only one country which has the resources to attempt a serious attack with ground forces, and they're not in a political or financial position to do that right now. Unless they say "fuck the costs, were taking this shit out", which is not likely (though granted neither is it beyond the realm of possibility going by their historic record).

[Shroom Man 777]

I guess instead of outright cheering for everyone to proliferate, Elfdart should instead cheer unilateral aggressive and/or imperialistic actions that will then prompt the victimized or the vulnerable to seek nuclear arms. Outright saying "yes! let them have nukes!" won't grant you as much flexibility as "you are one of the axes of evil, we'll bomb the shit out of the nations right next to you, and guess what, you're next fucker!", cause either way proliferation is likely to happen, but by using the latter proclamations, it gives you the flexibility to go "oh god, they're proliferating, look at how sharp their axe of evil is, let's go bomb them" while also giving the proliferators more reason to be afraid and defensive and irrational thus giving the scaremongers and warmongers more reason to militaize and jingo-ize and freedomize. He can tag-team with Baffalo's suitcase nuko-nunchuck-wielding Netanyahu Ninjers.

And the gift goes on.

[thejester]

He's saying that Sunni powers in the region will pursue nuclear technology, likely from Pakistan, in response to an Iranian bomb.

Why would Pakistan want to supply nukes to the Gulf states or anyone else? As a counter against Iran? That's funny, in light of the fact that Pakistan has now joined Afghanistan, India, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and China in announcing that they are more than happy to keep buying Iranian oil no matter what Iran is doing with its nuclear research.

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.

EDIT: I don't particularly buy the 'mad mullahs' stuff but the idea that from a regional point of view Iran getting the bomb is bad is totally valid. Nuclear proliferation is generally recognised as a bad thing for this very reason, no matter the motivation of those acquiring the weapons.

What kept the peace in Europe for the better part of 50 years? Nukes.

What stopped Korea and Vietnam from turning into all-out wars with tens of millions of people being killed? Nukes.

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.

[Simon_Jester]

I guess instead of outright cheering for everyone to proliferate, Elfdart should instead cheer unilateral aggressive and/or imperialistic actions that will then prompt the victimized or the vulnerable to seek nuclear arms. Outright saying "yes! let them have nukes!" won't grant you as much flexibility as "you are one of the axes of evil, we'll bomb the shit out of the nations right next to you, and guess what, you're next fucker!", cause either way proliferation is likely to happen, but by using the latter proclamations, it gives you the flexibility to go "oh god, they're proliferating, look at how sharp their axe of evil is, let's go bomb them" while also giving the proliferators more reason to be afraid and defensive and irrational thus giving the scaremongers and warmongers more reason to militaize and jingo-ize and freedomize.

And the gift goes on.

Shroom, you are not understanding me.

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.

This disturbs me.

[Shroom Man 777]

I know.