Unless one of you wants to come down to Missouri and help me write up a paper on the causes of WW1. Did you know that the Hungarians were one of the initial suspects for having assassinated the Austrian Archduke? I sure as heck didn't.
In any case, this Washington Post article (registration req'd) should be more than enough to keep the comments boxes busy on such wonderful topics as Iran, MEK credibility, etc.
See you in 24 hours ...
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And then there's this.
Exiles Say Iran Obtained Bomb Design, Uranium.
Dan Darling,
If you have time (ha), might want to check David Fromkin's revisionist (anti-Tuchman) thesis on how Franz Ferdinand's assasination led to the outbreak of war: Europe's Last Summer : Who Started the Great War in 1914?
The Amazon page and this quickie review will telegraph enough to let you know if it would be of interest.
Of course the Iranian Government is developing nukes. They'd be fools not to, good or evil. They have the USG on two (three?) fronts now, and if they don't want to get ousted, they'll need nukes. They've seen what happened to Hussein and what didn't happen to NK. The mullahs aren't that stupid.
Simply possessing nukes won't be enough. They'll need some reliable means of delivery. Missiles might be ok, but they might just all get wiped out before they could be launched.
If I was involved in the defense of either Iran or NK I'd want to have nukes pre-positioned in the US and Israeli cities I'd want to target for retaliation in case of invasion. Then I'd have to find some way to subtly let it be known what was going on -- the doomsday weapon isn't worth much if your enemy doesn't know you have it.
The question is: how smart are the mullahs? Apparently not smart enough to keep their mouths shut about their intentions with Israel. Publicly threatening a nation with 200 fusion weapons when your team has 0 is Not Smart.
The USG can threaten other nations all it wants because it has the war machine to back those threats up. Iran doesn't.
TJ Madison (5:34pm):
> Publicly threatening a nation with 200 fission weapons when your team has 0 is Not Smart.
Vanunu's security breach seemed to indicate the capability to create at least fusion boosted weapons. Though not as sophisticated or powerful as modern US designs, they can be quite devastating.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Israel/
Remember this was in 1986, 18 years ago.
Given the long and productive history of nuclear weapons espionage against the USG by Israel, it seems not improbable that their designs could have improved further without the need for additional testing. The Iranians should logically assume that those 200+ weapons are at least 200kt each, for a total of 40 MT of heat.
40 MT is a lot of heat. Nobody should say the kinds of things the Mullahs are saying in the face of that much heat. If the government where I lived started saying the sorts of things the Mullahs are saying, I'd seriously consider either an assassination plot or moving.
Unless - and here's just a really cheery thought: they believe they have or soon will have a deterrent.
What might that be?
The only other good deterrent I can think of would be IL-4 based airborne biological weapons. I would hope that nobody would be dumb enough to be playing around with this stuff. Unfortunately, I know better -- the morons at Ft. Detrick are trying to make IL-4 based ratpox and cowpox more efficent. (Really, somebody should shoot those guys.)
If the Iranians are messing around with this stuff, under the assumption that Allah will protect them from the plague on the infidels, then we're just SOL. Another good reason to be spending money on CDC/NIH based immunology research rather than flushing it down any number of other ratholes I could list.