I'm all for playing dirty. The Iranian government has generally been awful and disruptive. Israel and the US aren't exactly been paragons of virtue, but Iran is MUCH worse. I support slowing down their nuke program by almost any means necessary.
That being said, the strategy of suppressing Iran's nuclear program can't run forever. Nukes are almost 100 YEAR OLD TECHNOLOGY. If the country is determined to get them, they will get them, sooner or later. What then? When they do manage to build a small nuclear
The only thing that makes nuclear weapons hard to get is getting the nuclear material itself. For a primitive weapon, like the Little Boy device, you can literally buy most of the parts from the local hardware store. That device was so primitive and we where so sure it would work we didn't even bother to test it. Just built it and tossed it out the back of a airplane.
The only real deterrent to having nuclear weapons used by nation states is to make the consequences of such use so terrible to contemplate. Against stable national states this works reasonably well. Not even the leaders of a "rogue state" such as Iran are going to be the first to use such weapons when the results would be them being annihilated in retaliation.
Nation states with complex nuclear weapons are not what we need to be afraid of. What we need to be afraid of is terrorist with access to primitive nuclear devices.
Long term, this won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, the strategy of suppressing Iran's nuclear program can't run forever. Nukes are almost 100 YEAR OLD TECHNOLOGY. If the country is determined to get them, they will get them, sooner or later. What then? When they do manage to build a small nuclear
Re:Long term, this won't work (Score:3)
The only thing that makes nuclear weapons hard to get is getting the nuclear material itself. For a primitive weapon, like the Little Boy device, you can literally buy most of the parts from the local hardware store. That device was so primitive and we where so sure it would work we didn't even bother to test it. Just built it and tossed it out the back of a airplane.
The only real deterrent to having nuclear weapons used by nation states is to make the consequences of such use so terrible to contemplate. Against stable national states this works reasonably well. Not even the leaders of a "rogue state" such as Iran are going to be the first to use such weapons when the results would be them being annihilated in retaliation.
Nation states with complex nuclear weapons are not what we need to be afraid of. What we need to be afraid of is terrorist with access to primitive nuclear devices.