Quote:
Originally Posted by Max2147
You missed both my points.
On the first point, even if we hit them now, before they have a weapon, their program will continue and they'll still end up with weapons they could proliferate.
On my second point, any of those groups you mentioned can already get a nuke today. If they have hard currency, North Korea will take it. If they are Islamist, they probably have more than a few sympathizers in Pakistan's notoriously leaky ISI. Iran's nuclear program really doesn't change the non-state actor proliferation picture.
The biggest fear with Iran's nuclear program is that they will start an arms race in the Middle East. A nuclear-armed Iran would at the very least trigger a Saudi nuclear weapons program, plus maybe Egypt and some of the Gulf States.
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No, I got both your points, and in parts even agree. I just come to different conclusions.
On your first point, since long I argue that to me a war to stop the program in the meaning of destroying it, necessarily means the selective use of nuclear weapons. that is no hooray-nukeymongering by me, that simply is what it is. That's why I say any
determined effort to kill that program would become a real nasty thing. To your relief you can assume that probably even the Israelis currently do not will the use of nukes. That's why they only will delay Iran's work, not stopping it.
On your second point, you are only partly right. That there are Korea and Pakistan cannot be an easy argument why we should not care about a third threat being added to the list, increasing our worries. Korea is rational enough to be able to differ between provoking rethorics and actual deed, they know where to stop in order to not provoke an american first strike - which they would if the CIA learns they are knowingly delivering a warhead to a facion that intend to strike the US. The Pakistani proliferated so far knowledge, but stopped short of exporting actual warheads, here the biggest risk is that the religious nutheads take over the country - in that case I would not give a penny for that country anymore. We
need to find out where they have their warheads. In case of Iran you can safely assume that they will start to proliferate actual weapon-capable hardware as soon as they have it. They would welcome a terror group nuking Israel or the West - and afterwards saying "What do you want? It was not us".
One has to make a decision sooner or later here. there are three options only, and none of them is nice.
1. Do you will to accept the risk of living under an Iranian nuclear terror thread, being left with the only option of simply
hoping they will be kind and not proliferate to terror groups, and totally depending on their
good will, needing to foster it by being the obedient servant to their ideological demands
? Do you will to knowingly enter a condition of being prone to blackmailing?
2. Do you will to plan for a future in which you need to strike Iran with extended air campaigns every couple of years in order to delay their progam time and again, always running the risk that they manage to save some components and put them together in a hidden place that you do not know of; by that causing an accumulated death toll and destruction over the years that will make mockery of your intention to wage a
civilised war that saves the population, and increases the losses of your own forces?
3. Do you will to strike them with overkill capacity to make sure that while you do not know the precise target locations of critical bunker complexes in the reaearch sites of interest, the ammount of destruction set loose will nevertheless most likely shatter the structures even if they are not precisely hit at weak points of their structures? Taking of small nuclear weapons here. To make that clear: I do not talk of nuking cities and just killing people for the sake of "bombing Iran back into the stone age". I talk about small tactical nukes as bunker busters inside the indentified restricted areas that house installations and facilities of their program. Under Rumsfeld, of whom I certainly am no friend, such tactical nuclear bunker-busters with the special intention to destroy hardened subterranean targets that could not be reached or detsroyed by conventional megabombs, have been researched, and I think it is a safe bet that such weapons exist today. Because there is a clearly defined military need for them, especially with regard to so-called rogue states.
That is what makes the Iranian problem so extremely unpleasant: we either will get our hands dirty - or we will need to accept an nuclear armed Iran, with Saudi Arabia and Egypt going nuclear next, and all the risk in that fragile strategic constellation between hostile rivalling powers, one of them being eager to indirectly strike Israel anyway. For my own part, I am not willing to accept these risks, and I am not willing to accept living in a state of being blackmailed and highly vulnerable to a nuclear and proliferating Iran. The biggest danger here is proliferation by Iran - that is the worst evil here. Taking their program out with the tools needed to
assure that, is still an evil - but a minor one, compared to the first. I would not like to do it, but i would do it when thinking that that is what is needed.
Priority before anything else is to prevent a nuclear Iran. they have had their chance for a long time to convince the world of their peacefulness and reasonability and trustworthiness, and they failed miserably time and again. That'S why I even changed my mind on the outlook to leave them the civilian use of nuclear energy, because the step from civilian to military use of nuclear technology is no big one and control mechanisms by cameras and inspections can be cheated, blocked, betrayed.
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P.S. Good German-language comment by Der Tagespiegel (not to be mistaken with the far left Die Tageszeitung)
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/meinung/k...art141,2841271