Israel launches attack on Iran | US bombs Iran nuke sites

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.
 
superrific said:
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.
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Forgive me from citing Wikipedia, but you can see why Israel doesn't think that is a risk worth taking. See the section on "Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy." The threats made over the past couple of decades have been consistent and have been alarming.

en.wikipedia.org

Iran–Israel relations - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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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That's interesting and all, but modern nuclear weapons are not made from uranium. I very much doubt Iran is trying to recreate the Hiroshima bomb, which was the only nuke I'm aware of that was made from enriched uranium. Fat Man was plutonium, as are pretty much every nuclear weapon produced these days. I think Pakistan has only assembled a uranium bomb but they have plutonium in reserve in case they are planning to actually use them.

North Korea uses plutonium, as do all Western countries and China.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
Forgive me from citing Wikipedia, but you can see why Israel doesn't think that is a risk worth taking. See the section on "Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy." The threats made over the past couple of decades have been consistent and have been alarming.

en.wikipedia.org

Iran–Israel relations - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Yeah, over a couple of decades. That doesn't cut the way you think. You should hear the things North Korea says. It's all talk, and everyone knows it. It's an excuse for Iran to support its regional proxies.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
Yes, and I also stated that I didn't buy that estimate.
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Not in that post or another. Perhaps further down the line you retreated but if you want to know why people are ascribing this position to you, it might because you expressed it in two posts.
 
superrific said:
Not in that post or another. Perhaps further down the line you retreated but if you want to know why people are ascribing this position to you, it might because you expressed it in two posts.
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I simply highlighted what the article said....the article that was posted by someone else. Yet that poster has not received any flack whatsoever for posting the article. Strange, really.
 
Bobfripp said:
The sooner we can move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the sooner we can banish the turd that is the Middle East to the dustbin.
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All the more reason to push forward with moving to electric cars, among other things. But of course under Dear Leader we're moving backwards in that area, thus ensuring that we'll continue to remain hostage to the whims and endless feuds of various Middle Eastern powers.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
All the more reason to push forward with moving to electric cars, among other things. But of course under Dear Leader we're moving backwards in that area, thus ensuring that we'll continue to remain hostage to the whims and endless feuds of various Middle Eastern powers.
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I suspect that the MAGAs want us to remain embroiled in the Middle East - that, and they don't give a shit about the environment or global warming.
 
So Iran has voted to move to block the Strait of Hormuz for the first time ever, apparently. Whether they are capable of doing so or not, it would appear that there are already consequences to our bombing of Iran. Would they have chosen to do this (or try to) if we didn't bomb them? Likely not.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
So Iran has voted to move to block the Strait of Hormuz for the first time ever, apparently. Whether they are capable of doing so or not, it would appear that there are already consequences to our bombing of Iran. Would they have chosen to do this (or try to) if we didn't bomb them? Likely not.
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The body that voted doesn’t have the authority to make that decision
 
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