Report Claims Iran Has Data To Build a Nuclear Bomb 630
reporter writes "According to a startling report just covered by the New York Times, 'senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable atom bomb.' In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing a nuclear bomb. This conclusion was contradicted by German, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London also concluded that the American assessment is incorrect. So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is apparently able to create the components (e.g. enriched uranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is communicating with the Kremlin about a list of Russian scientists it believes are assisting Iran's efforts to develop the bomb."
Anyone else consider it ironic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd agree with Australia and New Zealand... but are you fricking out of your mind about the others?!
America has proven to be untrustworthy repeatedly. So has Israel, war mongering bastards that they are. Being surrounded by EU countries, let me tell you that I trust them as far as I can bloody throw the lot of them.
If it's a matter of trust, frankly I trust no single country to have nukes. I want OPPOSING forces to have nukes in order to generate a stalemate. That's the only security there is.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:5, Interesting)
Terrorism is desperation. The ONLY way to stop determined terrorism is to hear the claims of the terrorists and negotiate. If someone blows the fuck out of himself and a bunch of other people, it might be a good idea to hear what they're mad about. Do it covertly if you want, so that it doesn't seem you negotiate with them, but do it.
Anyway, a nuke would vanish forever any chance that a terrorist has of further advancing their cause. And before you start saying that their cause is already lost, please consider Israel. It was made out of terrorism - Menachem Begin & Co. - see the King David Hotel bombing, and many others. Conclusion? They got a country and nukes. How about that?
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing you weren't alive in 1979 when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and everybody inside taken hostage.
For roughly 400 days they Iranians held those hostages. Why? Nobody remembers why, but they did it - and if nobody remembers why, it must not have been a very memorable reason (if any.)
Well, Wikipedia "remembers" [wikipedia.org].
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
Europe, countries like Germany, Norway, France (which is aggressively secular, which I like), Switzerland, Sweden, Holland and others I think you'd also be hard pressed to find a religious government within recent time.
England though... I think that Blair had said some pretty stupid things. But I think that was a bit of an anomaly in recent British governments. Of course England is an officially religious nation, the Queen is the head of the church. But I don't think in reality that religion wields much power there, thanks to better education and living standards.
And I really have no idea about Spain.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:1, Interesting)
I doubt any terrorist would use a nuke anyway. Terrorism is not madness, in spite of what the western countries want you to believe, because it gives them an excuse to keep doing all the shit they want to do around the world.
Terrorism is desperation. The ONLY way to stop determined terrorism is to hear the claims of the terrorists and negotiate. If someone blows the fuck out of himself and a bunch of other people, it might be a good idea to hear what they're mad about. Do it covertly if you want, so that it doesn't seem you negotiate with them, but do it.
Anyway, a nuke would vanish forever any chance that a terrorist has of further advancing their cause. And before you start saying that their cause is already lost, please consider Israel. It was made out of terrorism - Menachem Begin & Co. - see the King David Hotel bombing, and many others. Conclusion? They got a country and nukes. How about that?
Terrorism is most definitely not desperation. It's an attempt to use any means at your disposal to obtain your goals. For example, the Hamas wish to destroy Israel and found an Islamic religious state with Jerusalem as its capital (according to the Hamas charter). With their current means, terrorism is the best course of action for them to obtain that goal, as they see it.
The problem here is that there is actually no room for negotiation with extremists - they have goals for which they are willing to sacrifice much more than you or I would be willing to sacrifice.
Negotiation is possible when there are two parties that have a basis for an agreement, for example, in this case, two countries for two peoples. In Israel the consensus in the general populace is that this is the solution (There are some rather large details on which people differ, but that outline is there). Hamas sees one country for one people, and they aren't Israel and Israelis. At least that isn't the opinion of the general Palestinian populace.
As for "a nuke would vanish forever any chance that a terrorist has of further advancing their cause" - that depends on the cause. If you're talking about a Palestinian organization, you're probably right. If you're talking about an extremist Islamic organization, the cause may be to remove the non-Islamic presence from the middle east, and then using a nuke would reach the goal. If such an organization (The state of Iran, for example) were to decide that there is no other way to reach their goal, nuking is an option.
Finally, yes, Israel was founded on terrorism. Right. That's why there were things like "The Hunting Season" (feel free to google). There were terrorists, but they most definitely did not enjoy majority support, and were actively interfered with by the mainstream organizations. And, of course, they didn't proudly target children.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've observed, the Israeli government is secular.
Israel was founded as a "Jewish state".
Israel's claim to the land of Israel comes from their holy religious texts.
Israel does not consider you to be a Jew, and will make it difficult for you to immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel, unless you're certified Jewish by an Orthodox rabbi.
Israel is a country where a reform rabbi can't perform a marriage recoginzed by the government, only an officially recognized Orthodox rabbi can. (special rules allow secular marriage for Muslims and Christians)
Some Jews, even some non-Israeli Orthodox Jews, have to convert to Orthodoxy in order to be Jewish enough for the Jewish state.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually not true. A british liberal paper went through the Japanese records and found that:
a) Japanese terms for surrender negotiated through the Russians would have basically given them China. Japan made no territorial concessions.
b) Russia had no navy to get troops onto Japan. Part of the reason for Russian success on the Continent against Japan was because Japan was busy moving the Imperial Army back to Japan to prepare to fend off an American invasion. Unlike the battered air force and virtually destroyed navy, the Japanese Army was a million man strong and essentially intact.
c) Americans had underestimated the strength of Japan during the planning of Olympic. And, unlike the Germans, the Japanese did't fall for any American deception and knew exactly where the Americans were to land.
d) The Emperor was actually a prime mover in the war and he would rather take the whole island down with him than give up the throne. It was -only- because of the atomic bombings that he realized that the Americans could literally kill everyone in Japan without even a shot fired back.
e) The Emperor never actually surrendered in his speech to the Japanese people. Go read it.
The great tragedy of the atomic bombing was that, really, the emperor was not deposed and tried as a war criminal. But McArthur liked him and to some extent Americans read Japanese aggression as a mishandling of a trade dispute. If you put in free trade, the story goes, Japan could get raw materials and export, and thus, would not need an empire.
Let's not repeat the last 50 years of history (Score:2, Interesting)
Get real.
Let's not repeat it with nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable or theocratic regimes.
45 years ago, had the nuclear weapons states been regimes characterized by fanaticism and fundamentalism rather than ultimately by secular rationality, we might well be living, or not living, in a post-apocalyptic world. We almost were.
30 years ago Iran was overthrown by religious fanatics and angry, vehemently anti-Western mobs who established a theocratic regime that still rules unopposed today.
It's not about fairness or deserts. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." Iran having a nuclear weapon is simply not in our rational self interest. Is it worth a few billion in military hardware to Israel and giving them the greenlight to take out some nuclear sites like then did in 1981, in exchange for being damn sure there is one less nuclear weapons state? It sure seems that way.
Re:Mod parent Informative. (Score:4, Interesting)
"A lot of talk about "terrorism" is really a discussion designed to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israel's security."
Exactly. For some insight, people should research Israel's economy. Basically, they don't have one. They subsist primarily on the inflow of funds from around the world. The US government is probably the single largest source of funds, but money comes from everywhere. If the donations dried up, Israel would be hurting.
And, that may well happen soon if the recession isn't cured.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be hard to say at what date Israel acquired nuclear and/or atomic weapons - but they certainly had them before 1970. Most certainly. I'll put my money on about 1961, possibly as late as 1963. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that they had a bomb before 1960. If you google hard enough, you can find floor plans for Israel's nuclear processing plants and research labs. Google a little more, and you might find the hints needed to find educated estimates regarding their arsenal. The arsenal isn't nearly as huge as that of the US - but it's big enough to be scary. Unless you happen to be Israeli, and a member of the military with a "need to know" you will NOT find any hard numbers, so don't try to pin anyone down for them.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:1, Interesting)
Israel deserves more trust than Iran? Are you serious?
Don't for the Liberty. Israel deliberately attacked and tried to sink the Liberty. If Iran (or any other country) tried anything like that, they would be wiped off the face of the map.
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
hose centrifuges are not easy to make (they spin up to 90,000 RPM) and something as a fingerprint on one of them will make it shatter when it's spinning that fast.
Gas centrifuge technology, which has been available since the '80's, gets around most of this problem. It was predicted at the time that it would be hugely proliferating because it would make uranium enrichment relatively cheap and easy. Iran's programme is just proof of this.
As other posters here have pointed out, making a uranium bomb is incredibly easy. Little Boy was detonated operationally without the design ever being tested. Fat Man was a plutonium implosion design, and it the Trinity test was run to ensure it would actually work.
Also, remember that plutonium implosion was tricky because of the exact timing requirements... in 1945. The trigger switches used involved TUBES of one kind or another. In these days of high-speed solid state electronics, where off-the-shelf chips with 1 ns switching times can be bought for a few dollars and drive a few cm of transmission line with ease, the problem of plutonium implosion is vastly easier to solve.
Making a big deal out of some people in Iran knowing how to build a nuclear bomb is silly, and plays in ignorant stereotypes of how difficult it is to actually do the job. Canada has the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb too, and has for decades. We'll only build one if we decide the nation of idiots to the south of us has gone completely off the rails, and starts trying to overthrow our democratically elected government, as it did in Iran back in the '50's. On that basis, if I were an Iranian, I'd bloody well want my country to have the Bomb.
On the other hand, Canada also has a large peaceful nuclear programme, despite sitting on a whole lot of oil. So anyone who suggests that Iran doesn't want a peaceful nuclear programme just because they have oil is clearly an anti-empirical idiot.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
The scientists though that, and they were wrong. The scientists had basically no clue as to the psychology and politics at play in the Japanese Empire. This is not surprising, someone like the scientists who came from a liberal, humane religious or secular background would not be able to understand why the Empire kept at war for so long. Had they been in charge of Japan, they likely would have surrendered a year or more earlier, when any rational person would have decided Japan had no hope of winning the war.
The leaders of Japan, on the other hand, continued the war until the summer of 1945. Those in Tokyo leading the country personally saw the firebombings of Tokyo starting in February of that year, with the raid in March, 5 months before the atom bombings, killing more people than either atom bomb and burning down a quarter of the city. They saw this, and still continued the war. In fact they continued it after the first atom bomb was dropped and only after the second bomb and the Soviet invasion did they stop.
I think we have to conclude that something other than rational thought or concern for the ordinary citizenry was what motivated the Japanese leadership.
>So the excuse of saving lives is bullshit. As most of the - we are using disproportionate force to save lives - excuses generally are.
That's probably correct, I'm sure saving the lives of Japanese civilians did not factor into US war plans either. But you must remember that China suffered greater civilian casualties from Japan during the war, and it was only after Japan's surrender that it stopped.
Re:IQ Test #2: How Stupid Are Americans, Anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think its uncommon for any government, especially democratic ones, to "build a case for war" against "the enemy".
If "the enemy" thinks that the will of the people is behind war, then the threat is that much more real, and real negotiations can begin.
The difference most former presidents (and the current president) with the prior administration, was that Bush and company actually went ahead and waged war. The vast majority of the time, its just rhetoric. Take the entire cold war for example.
Re:Not the first middle east nuke (Score:1, Interesting)
As a Jewish atheist friend said: "We're a religion when it's convenient, and a race when it's not."
Re:Tehran can build a nuclear bomb. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, that is, shall we say, a "gross oversimplification". Briefly: the formation of modern Israel in '48 was at best a rather high-handed move by the UN, and even by the UN's standards, Israel has been a rogue state since it's 1967 land-grab. Beating up on Lebanon periodically has not done much to improve it's reputation, either. Few people have kind words to say for Hezbollah, but it's hard to get from there to a justification for Israel's recent actions in Gaza (e.g. using banned weaponry on civilian populations).
But even if the US wanted to reign in Israel, it could turn out to be difficult to do, because of all those nuclear weapons they don't have. (On the other hand, we could stop bank-rolling their military expenses... that much would be easy.)
That is, of course, the reason that governments like to have nuclear weapons. Why shouldn't Iran want nukes? If you look at US behavior in the last decade, we went ape-shit bombing two countries, but left North Korea alone. What lesson can we draw from this, class?