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Israel launches attack on Iran | US bombs Iran nuke sites

nycfan said:
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So there is no actual evidence that Iran was close to building a bomb. Trump wanted to bomb Iran because it looked easy after Israel destroyed most of their air defenses and he was played by Netanyahu into getting directly involved in a war they started. At least it was successful in the sense that none of our military personnel were killed or injured in the attack, so that god for that.
 
Duke Mu said:
But there's a much higher risk that Iran now mines the Straits of Hormuz or China finally invades Taiwan. That's what happens when we think in isolationist or "America First" terms.

Superrific - congrats on your success. My daughter's on the Spectrum. I feel ya.
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I don't think the risk of China invading Taiwan is tied to our strike on Iran's nuclear program. I do agree that is a risk of an isolationist foreign policy which is why I am generally not supportive of that philosophy.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
I think one thing that Trump may have in his favor vs Iraq is that the goal is not stability. It is to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity.

Bush’s argument was not just WMD’s but also regime change to free the Iraqis from a brutal dictator. If you pretend to be acting in the best interest of a country, you have tied your goals to stability.

Trump may just say to hell with Iranians as long as they don’t develop nukes or continue to threaten US interests.

That isn’t a morally sound goal but something that may be achievable without boots on the ground.
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That doesn’t make it better though, it makes it worse. At least the Iraq war pretended to be about democracy. This is an open admission that we’re willing to destroy a nation’s infrastructure purely to maintain our global power advantage. That’s not some perverse moral clarity, it’s just imperialism without euphemism.

Preemptively bombing a sovereign state to prevent them from acquiring a deterrent is not a narrow, tactical objective. It’s a declaration that only certain states are allowed to feel secure. And it all but guarantees the exact escalation we claim to be avoiding.

Again, we’ve seen this logic before: destroy capacity now, deal with blowback later. It’s how we got ISIS after destabilizing Iraq. It’s how we turned Libya into a failed state. Saying “Trump isn’t trying to help Iranians” doesn’t make the strike more honest, it just makes it openly lawless.
 
North Korea suffers from a horrific leader, who is disturbed and egomaniacal. The reason we don't attack North Korea is because they have nuclear weapons.

Iran and its leadership have just learned the meaning of this, in personal and real world terms, and will proceed like never before to gain such security.

It's likely North Korea, China and to what ever extent, Russia, will help them.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
Seems like projection, once again. And once again, this seems like a pretty straightforward statement:

At the Fordow plant, located near the city of Qom, the Iranians have enough centrifuges (including IR-6s, their more advanced type) and uranium hexafluoride gas to produce several nuclear weapons. They could probably produce enough weapon-grade (90 percent) enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon within five to six days.

I even made the portion in question bigger for you in case you missed it the first 3 times. Hope this helps.
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The highest enrichment cited in the government link you provided

Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015)

and dated May 31, 2025 is 60%. This is what our US Intelligence has declared as well. Trump is on videotape in response to a question stating emphatically that "They're wrong... and I'm Bibi's b*tch" (I made up the last part - but he thought it). You might want to READ the documentation when you post a link. Otherwise, posters might consider your posits unreliable and poorly considered. Limbic forward, in other words.
 
Duke Mu said:
The highest enrichment cited in the government link you provided

Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015)

and dated May 31, 2025 is 60%. This is what our US Intelligence has declared as well. Trump is on videotape in response to a question stating emphatically that "They're wrong... and I'm Bibi's b*tch" (I made up the last part - but he thought it). You might want to READ the documentation when you post a link. Otherwise, posters might consider your posits unreliable and poorly considered. Limbic forward, in other words.
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That's not my link, that's an0maly's link. I already stated that I didn't think the "one week away" claim was accurate.
 
OK, let me be clear: there is absolutely nothing that has happened in the last week in regard to Israel, Iran, and the United States that will turn out well for the United States. And by "not well" I mean even worse than what the functionally illiterate, trust-fund baby that we elected to be President, twice!, would have otherwise done. That said, I did find the following quote from Israel funny: "That tactical edge also helped when Iran struck a building that belongs to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. "Iran claims to have attacked a Mossad building with missile strikes," the post read. "Fortunately, no one was there ... everyone is in Iran.""

Link: MSN
 
superrific said:
Out of curiosity, what do you know about nuclear physics to make you confident in this claim? It's actually not tremendously complicated, which is why we were able to develop one in the 1940s, when nuclear physics was in its infancy and we didn't even really understand how it worked.

It just takes a while to enrich the uranium. The process is not particularly complicated.
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I am going to push back on your statement that nuclear physics was in its infancy in the 1940s. By then, we knew a whole lot about nuclear forces, processes etc. Also, I am fairly confident that it wasn't the physics that was the hard part in building the bomb. After the engineering challenges were figured out, I believe the process was fairly streamlined.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
That's not my link, that's an0maly's link. I already stated that I didn't think the "one week away" claim was accurate.
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But you quoted it - you might want to read it. Or alter your
ZZLPHeels said:
I don't think the risk of China invading Taiwan is tied to our strike on Iran's nuclear program. I do agree that is a risk of an isolationist foreign policy which is why I am generally not supportive of that philosophy.
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It strengthens both Putin's unilateral invasion of Ukraine and bolsters the claim that China could also act unilaterally. Of course.
 
stankeylegjones said:
I am going to push back on your statement that nuclear physics was in its infancy in the 1940s. By then, we knew a whole lot about nuclear forces, processes etc. Also, I am fairly confident that it wasn't the physics that was the hard part in building the bomb. After the engineering challenges were figured out, I believe the process was fairly streamlined.
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We had no idea until testing whether the chain reaction could or would be contained. We had an hypothesis.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
You should absolutely be proud of being what you are good at, but you should also know when certain things come across as rude or condescending. I realize that may not have been your intention, but to me it came across that way. Anyways, I'm happy to move on from that particular discussion if you are.
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Yes, I'm aware that certain things can come across as condescending. It's much harder for me to know when. That's part of being on the spectrum.

How about you cut me some slack? After all, that's what my post was doing. You don't know Edward Said. In my line of work, that would be a demerit, and in certain fields an absolute embarrassment. But not your line of work. You have no reason to know Said, and that's fine because honestly we need more firefighters than people who can converse about Orientalism. So I actually try not to speak in overly academic terms, because it's unfair and useless (unless I'm having a discussion in that particular style, which happens here mostly with Paine). But I just fundamentally do not comprehend why people have the reaction you had, and that's not something I'm going to fix. Live and let live, or don't, but it's a two way street.
 
stankeylegjones said:
I am going to push back on your statement that nuclear physics was in its infancy in the 1940s. By then, we knew a whole lot about nuclear forces, processes etc. Also, I am fairly confident that it wasn't the physics that was the hard part in building the bomb. After the engineering challenges were figured out, I believe the process was fairly streamlined.
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Well, it's not an important point but I suspect that our greater knowledge of nuclear forces eases the engineering challenges. The neutron was discovered in 1932 and I don't think we can meaningfully talk about nuclear physics before that date. So that puts the field at age 10 in 1942. It is now 90+ years old. I think that counts as infancy, but more importantly it doesn't matter.

The point is, as you say, that the physics is not terribly complicated, and the engineering problems have mostly been solved. It's just a question of running the centrifuges.
 
Duke Mu said:
But you quoted it - you might want to read it. Or alter your
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So the problem is not with the person who posted the link and argued for its veracity, but with the people who responded to that poster? This is the problem with some posters here. They don't care about the facts or the discussion as a whole, just the posters. For example, I'm not the one who claimed that Iran was a week away from getting a nuke, yet I'm getting bombarded because I pointed out that another poster argued this fact.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
That's fine if they want to retaliate. Wanting to and being able to are two different things. I want to have a threesome with two supermodels. I would really enjoy that. But at the end of the day I'm probably not going to be able to do that. That's where probabilities come into play. Let's say that if we did nothing there was a 1% chance that Iran would somehow detonate a nuke in Israel by 2035. We have over 700,000 US citizens living in Israel. So, odds are nothing would happen to them, but that 1% chance of a bad outcome would be REALLY bad if it came to fruition. Let's also say that by striking Iran we incur a 30% risk that Iran kills 100 Americans in a terrorist attack over the next two years, but the odds of them detonating a nuclear weapon by 2035 go down to 0.05%. I'd argue that we'd be stupid not to take those odds.
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You can reach any conclusion if you get to make up probabilities. I think the evidence strongly suggests that the odds of a nuclear Iran bombing Jerusalem is far, far less than 1%. Since nobody has ever used a nuke outside declared war, and that was 80 odd years ago, the odds of Iran breaking that streak despite its obvious irrationality has to be considered far less than 1%. It's infinitessimal.
 
lawtig02 said:
Israel’s goal is almost certainly regime change though.
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Paine said:
That doesn’t make it better though, it makes it worse. At least the Iraq war pretended to be about democracy. This is an open admission that we’re willing to destroy a nation’s infrastructure purely to maintain our global power advantage. That’s not some perverse moral clarity, it’s just imperialism without euphemism.

Preemptively bombing a sovereign state to prevent them from acquiring a deterrent is not a narrow, tactical objective. It’s a declaration that only certain states are allowed to feel secure. And it all but guarantees the exact escalation we claim to be avoiding.

Again, we’ve seen this logic before: destroy capacity now, deal with blowback later. It’s how we got ISIS after destabilizing Iraq. It’s how we turned Libya into a failed state. Saying “Trump isn’t trying to help Iranians” doesn’t make the strike more honest, it just makes it openly lawless.
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For the record, I don’t disagree with anything you said.

I was not advocating for the approach Trump is (or may be) taking.
 
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