Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says that the continued access to
nuclear sites given to IAEA inspectors is intended to show that even as
Iran’s civilian enrichment improves, they are not seeking nuclear
weapons.
Rouhani made the comments on state TV, saying some were expecting them to move toward weapons after installing the centrifuges, saying Iran will not limit or in any way reduce inspections to avoid any doubts on that point.
The IAEA has repeatedly confirmed, for years, that Iran’s nuclear
program has no military dimension. Though Iran has subsequently
increased enrichment at civilian levels, they are not attempting
enrichment anywhere near the levels required for weapons-grade uranium.
Iranian officials have made clear that the whole reason for enhancing
enrichment was to try to force the EU parties of the P5+1 nuclear deal
to come up with sanctions relief, assuring that the increased enrichment
is easily reversible.
But, but, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or some such.
Truth is, Caliman, both the deceased Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor – Khameini – issued a Fatwa (religious decree in Islam) against the development, production, and procurement of nuclear weapons.
In other words, Islam forbids the development, production, and procurement of such weapons. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been allowing IAEA inspectors into the country’s nuclear plants proving that the centrifuges are being used for both electricity production and for medical isotopes in the treatment of cancer patients.
At this point I’m inclined to believe the Iranians than I am my own government which has an atrocious record when it comes to telling the truth.
I cannot see why Iran would not seek Nuclear weapons because the moment she achieves nuclear weapons capacity Western powers listen and stop harassing. It is the only weapon that gets the attention of the SC members to listen.
That is the lesson India and Pakistan learned. Without the bomb no one pays attention. with Israel already armed with nukes it would be natural for Iran and other powers in the region to become nuclear armed nations.
It doesn’t work like that.
North Korea is the appropriate example. NK developed nukes to bring the US to the negotiating table. But Trump continued to threaten war – until (presumably) it was pointed out to him that NK’s *conventional* military would be able to inflict fifty thousand US casualties in the first ninety days of a war according to Pentagon war games. Even Trump couldn’t stomach that level of “hot war” – so he backed down and turned to negotiations (such as they were, mostly just PR events and some tweets.)
Nuclear weapons are useless unless 1) you have enough of them to be a credible threat (NK’s ten or twenty don’t count compared to *one* US nuclear sub with 16 multi-warhead missiles); and 2) you have the means to deliver them (which it is not proven, despite a lot of media hype, that NK has.)
Iran is already being threatened with war over a nuke program they don’t even have and never did. How would they fair if they actually *tried* to get nukes? Israel would attack them immediately and the US would join in immediately. There’s no way Iran could develop nukes and delivery systems sufficient to make a difference – and if they did, they would be nuked out of existence just like NK.
So why spend billions on weapons you will never be able to use without dooming your country?
NK would never use nukes against the US even if they had them. They were negotiating ploys, just like Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium were negotiating ploys.
Pakistan and India are different. They aim at each other (and India at China.) If they aimed at the US, they would have been destroyed long ago. No one cares if they kill each other (except Pakistanis and Indians, of course.)
Iran has no use case for nuclear weapons – except back when they were afraid Saddam had a program. Iran had a “feasibility study” back then because Saddam with nukes was an “existential threat.” Once the US invaded Iraq, Iran stopped that program cold.
Iran isn’t afraid of Israel or the US unilaterally using nukes against Iran because 1) they know the international community would condemn it, and 2) the blowback from a billion Muslims would be intolerable.
When India detonated her first bomb in 74 the reason the Indian media gave was to get the world’s attention. If you read their media one of the reasons of having the nuke is the power it brings.
The SC are made of members who have the nuke. They have special voting rights. By all rights India, Pakistan, N Korea and Israel should now be in the SC
lacking that institutional power the world’s nuclear nations are within a club, the nuclear club.
I understand what you wrote but you need to understand that Tehran is seeking a voice that now New Delhi, Beijing and Moscow have.
Diplomacy changes when dealing with a nuclear power.
This supports my point that the goal of developing nuclear weapons is to bring the ability to negotiate to countries that never had it before.
That is entirely separate from the military reality that a few nukes are irrelevant to those who have hundreds or thousands of them. India is nowhere near China or Russia or the US in that respect. Israel is only because it is the only nuclear power in the region – which is dependent on having a minimum of 80 nukes and possibly as many as 200.
Iran will never bother to try to catch up to either Israel or any other major nuclear power. And they’ve said so repeatedly.
Wouldn’t it take only one nuke to begin and end a war? having thousands of nukes is overkill and renders the land that is being conquered to toxic. If China wants to conquer India she cannot use hundreds of nukes since that would make the subcontinent too radioactive.
Another use of the nuke is on one’s own land. If India faces an invasion a nuke would stop the invasion even if Indians have to die.
Then there is the fallout. If the prevailing wind is heading your way you do not want to nuke since the radioactive cloud will also come your way. That would be the case in the ME where the prevailing winds move from the West to the East. that means Iran will have to wait till the winds are favorable to nuke Israel or Iran will face the fallout.
The problem with using nukes is the consequences if your opponent also has nukes – and especially if they have more than you do.
If North Korea used a nuke to stop a US invasion, one US nuclear sub would then devastate the entire country. Trump’s threat to “kill ten million people” in Afghanistan is not idle. The US would do that to North Korea – or Iran (if Iran had nukes and used one or more.)
The reason a country like the US has thousands of nukes is because they cost money – which means someone makes money making them. In the case of Russia they probably have them because the US has them (and no doubt even under the Soviet system someone was making money making them.)
China has just enough to be a credible threat to the US.
Israel, being a small country, has just enough to be a credible threat to its neighbors – and to the US by being able to threaten using them if the US doesn’t support them, as it did in the 1973 war when they threatened to use them if the US didn’t resupply them.
India and Pakistan have mostly nuclear parity with each other – and India enough to be at least a reasonable credible threat to China, although China has twice the missiles. Keep in mind that both China and India are big countries with a huge population.
How many nukes a country has doesn’t indicate how many will actually be used in any given war – first, because the first salvo will likely destroy the ones not used, and second because a country will only use as many as they think is necessary to defeat the enemy. This means 1) enough to overwhelm any defensive systems, 2) enough to destroy the military capability of the opponent and 3) possibly enough to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the opponent (this is called “total war.”)
In the case of the US vs Russia, that would only be perhaps 100 missiles to destroy the defensive capability, another 100 to destroy US bases, and 50-100 to destroy US cities. The US would use at least 100 to destroy the 100 anti-ICBM defenses of Moscow (and probably more to overwhelm them and guarantee the destruction of Moscow) plus as many as needed to destroy Russian military concentrations.
When it comes to nuclear war where both opponents have nukes, “overkill” is the goal because by definition you can’t afford to allow your opponent any capability at all.
So having a few nukes just isn’t going to help except with getting the attention of whoever you’re making the nukes for. But in an actual military confrontation with the US (or Russia or China), a few nukes aren’t going to prevent you from being destroyed. Which makes them useless in an actual war.
So again, why spend a ton of money developing weapons that you can’t use? There are cheaper ways to get the attention of an enemy to force them to negotiate. North Korea didn’t have to develop nukes for defensive purposes given their huge conventional military capability. I don’t know why they bothered – other than that the threat to be able to deliver them to the US – due to their location and their missile systems – made them more of a threat than the US could ignore.
Again, this was more an attempt to force negotiations than a practical military reality.
Iran is too far from the US to be a credible nuclear threat to the US. Iran could threaten Israel with nukes once they had a delivery system – but then Israel and the US would attack them first, as I said before.
Iran on the other hand understands this – and has a religious proscription against doing so to boot. So Iran will never have nukes – even if the US attacks them.
America would not survive if China, Pakistan, N. Korea, Russia all nuked America at once. All they have to do is hit the major cities where most Americans live. America’s 330 million occupy less than 8% of the land. the rest are Federal lands or national parks. If you include Agriculture it goes up to 14%
Because America is isolated by 2 oceans the fall out will have less effect on the rest of mankind.
The US wouldn’t survive if either China or Russia nuked us. It only takes 50 missiles to hit the 50 Major American Cities where almost everyone lives.
One Russian SS-18 “Satan” missile has enough warheads – ten 550-750 kiloton – to take out every significant city in New York State or Texas.
The death toll in the US from nuclear war used to be estimated at 70-100 million or more back in the 1970’s. I just searched for an updated estimate based on the heavier missiles with more warheads, but can’t find one. Apparently everyone is too scared to make one. I’d bet the figure is closer to 200 million today – assuming cities were actually targeted and not just military targets (what is called a “counterforce strike”.)
And of course the 100-200 million would be in the first 24 hours or so. The remaining 100-200 million would be so messed up from radiation effects and resulting disease and starvation that a significant percentage of them would die within weeks or months. How many would actually survive is completely unknown.
And then of course there is the damage to the infrastructure.
It would take decades – if not a century – for the remaining survivors to rebuild the US in some form – assuming the rest of the world didn’t help. And the rest of the world would lilkely say “you caused the problem, you deal with it.”
And that’s assuming the “nuclear winter” scientists are wrong in their models. If they’re right, all bets are off on whether anyone survives anywhere.
Considering how we panicked when 9/11 took place or when the Loma Pieta Earthquake happened a nuke would paralyze America. America has never faced an invasion except for the war of 1812 which is not within our memory. Even that war had a lot to do with us for we invaded Canada in order to annex it. England’s reaction to that invasion was part of the war of 1812. It was her revenge.
Actually 9/11 didn’t have that much effect on the rest of the US. Obviously it had huge effect on the American psyche. And the grounding of all aircraft had an economic impact for a while. But otherwise as a practical matter life went on.
So a single nuke on US soil wouldn’t “paralyze” the country. Losing ten cities would – especially if no one knew which city would be next.
Yes, the US is poorly positioned for an invasion – oceans on both sides and being huge. That is why the two “Red Dawn” movies were treated with such derision. There’s just no practical way to invade this country.
Chuck Norris’ movie ‘Invasion USA” made more sense – you could “invade” the US with a few hundred terrorists, but that’s about it. In fact, that would be the most effective way to destabilize this country – provided the “terrorists” were competently trained special forces and not some Middle Eastern and South American lames like in the movie. You could paralyze this country within a few months with relatively simple tactics as the Norris movie demonstrated rather well.
The old time invasions would not work on America but the Soviet Union was highly successful in gutting America’s culture from within. At the end of the Cold war America won when the Soviet Empire collapsed but the Soviets won when Cultural Marxism gutted America’s cultural and moral pillars. it has been a far more effective way of bringing down a superpower without ever sending troops or bombing cities.
The reasons why 60 million fetuses have been killed, the death of the Church, the rise of Pornography, the rise of a drug culture where on average 70 thousand die each year. the dumbing down of America. the Obesity epidemic that kills 40 thousand Americans per month, the collapse of the family, the cultural collapse of the Father and Husband rendered useless and the rise of Feminism and Atheism has done and continue to do far more damage than any bomb. the mind has been destroyed through the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism.
The pen is greater than the sword and books like the Authoritative Personality gutted the role of the American male. Eros and Civilization helped bring about the Sexual revolution.
Today our soldiers defend such a corrupt and empty nation filled with the very social problems America tried to avoid. Defending the Pornography industry or the drug culture or institutionalized Corruption is what it has come down to.
Something that makes on surface no sense.
Why threaten a country without nuclear weapons — for thought crimes of wanting them?
And come up with mega lies that Iran supports terrorism, while it has been acknowledged by everyone that ISIS in Iraq was defeated with the help from Iran. Hezbollah is Lebanese militia, represented in Parliament, part of society. Houthis have their own war to fight, with or without Iran.
Then why target a non-nuclear country that bothers no neighbors. Because it looked like an easy prey. Another Iraq. But no more.
Iran is wise to stay away from nuclear weaponization. Iran is in fact banking on the fact that Russia and China cannot allow the destruction of Iran. They are nuclear — that is enough.