No one anywhere is going to do anything until it is way to late.

They never do. It's human nature. It's in a way too much to ask people to do more than nothing. There has to be a nuclear Pearl Harbor before anyone will take it seriously.

It has become inevitable, in a way that I never felt it inevitable during the Cold War. In hindsight, it became inevitable within 2 weeks of 9/11, as it became clear that all consensus in the West was illusionary, based solely on the mutual expression of grief and not on any real agreement about what the event meant or how it should be responded to. Without that consensus, the West has remained more or less paralyzed, working against each other concerned more with meaningless domestic advantage than any sort of solution - a failing damning to both sides - and can be only but paralyzed so long as consensus remains elusive.

As such, History is now running away long past anyone's ability to control. It has become a force of nature, backed by the collective inertia of just about everyone on the planet and its too late to steer the avalanche of billions of opinions. We collectively are choosing nuclear war, and that consensus is the only one that is meaningful at this point.

There is no longer any question of stopping the event. The only question is what should we do to prepare for it.

This was changed in December 2003 (AKA after Libya turned "states evidence" on its WMD programs to the UN) to a prediction that Libya would have them in 2007

Page 158 of Shopping for Bombs at the link in Trent's post.

During the Cold War, I thought Sagan's belief that humanity would eventually be destroyed by nuclear weapons as an eventuality as alarmist. Thanks to China offering free nuclear technology with the opening of a checking account, I don't know that there won't be some serious impact on human living due to nuclear proliferation.

Events to look forward to:

-Nuclear attacks by non state agencies.

-Nuclear strikes in a territorial war of aggression.

-A nuclear strike to settle a civil war.

-A major and persistant economic downturn caused by nuclear impact on a fiancial sector institution.

-Denial of strategic resources through nuclear threat or detonation.

Basically, these are all the high spirited shennanegans that go on with just conventional and chemical weapons. Now, feature all of it with nukes.

We are far from finished with the consequences of the Clinton administration's foreign policy bumbling.

The only two Democrat presidents in the last forty years have been the governors of dinky-$#!+ little southern states. In both cases their foreign policy was a disaster that will echo across the American landscape for generations.

Does anyone here see the slightest possibility of a Democrat administration from '09 to '13 being any different?

Here we go again... I though Iran was supposed to test their own nuclear weapons last spring?

You know the 'boy who cried wolf' was only scary because the wolf did come in the end.

celebrim

Indeed.

This morning as I was helplessly watching the talking heads pontificate on the meaning of 9/11 I was trying to internalize my own feelings. Mostly poorly.

Your comment expressed the thing at a level of eloquence and understanding that I am incapable of and the talking heads cannot even dream of, or if they do, would never be allowed to express publicly.

Alas, Babylon

Mark B.,

How many times are you going to say that given my prediction of no earlier than October?

This months Atlantic has a pretty good article by Robert Kaplan on North Korea and what would happen after the fall that pretty much places China as the only power that can handle the DPRK (a nuclear DPRK at that).

When North Korea Falls The fall is all but inevitable, what is up for debate, is who will be there to pick up the pieces.

"How many times are you going to say that given my prediction of no earlier than October?"

Until I see a nuclear test.

Not to be complacent, but the net benefit to military intervention to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is not obvious to most of the world.

Given the almost certain world economic catastrophe that would follow an invasion of Iran (loss of all oil in the Middle East is a distinct possibility) along with the instability and danger that such catastrophe's bring (1930 anyone?), you want to be absolutely certain that this is the only option for survival of the United States.

I remember talking with someone who quite seriously stated that the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the USSR right now when it would only lose 20-30 cities (this was a long time ago) because waiting would only make the inevitable exchange far far worse. I think it's pretty obvious that in this case it turned out far better not to confront a nation that was a self-admitted implacable enemy ("we will bury you").

Given the utter economic destruction that will follow from war in Iran, the standards for proof, not just of the imminence of the weapons, but also of the certainty of their use against the West, are very high indeed.

It's easy to look at Pearl Harbor and say we should have acted first. But that ignores the dozens of situations that we didn't act first, and that was the right thing to do.

It seems to me that there is a mixing of apples and oranges in this post. Iran continues to work diligently on uranium enrichment for the purposes of making a uranium bomb. Pakistan already has such, having developed its own uranium enrichment capability. North Korea is supposed to have sufficient plutonium to build a number of nuclear weapons, but I have not read anywhere that it has sufficient weapons-grade uranium for such.

It is relatively easy to build a uranium weapon, given a sufficient quantity of weapons-grade uranium. Iran does not have sufficient uranium for a weapon now unless it purchased or stole such from Pakistan (which is possible).

It is not at all easy to build a plutonium weapon. I am skeptical of Russian reports of an upcoming test of such, but we'll see soon enough. I am very skeptical of reports that Iran already has a nuclear weapon, though it seems likely that its will have sufficient uranium within 2-4 years.

I personally think that the elephant in the room is neither Iran nor North Korea but is, rather, Pakistan. It's just a matter of time until its current government falls, and it seems not at all improbable that the wacko Muslims will take over, in which case we'll have a country known to have nuclear weapons that is run by Muslim wackos.

Very sensible points, Henry Bowman #12.

However, re: "easy" and "hard," we sometimes forget that it took American scientists under three years (1942-1945) to build a working plutonium bomb. Here's why their work was much harder than the problem facing the Pu task force of country X in 2006:

• Starting out, they didn't know it could be done at all.

• Until the test, they couldn't be sure how tight the design and engineering tolerances were to achieve a full-blown fission reaction, instead of a dirty-bomb-like fizzle.

• They had to invent technologies starting from a 1940s base, rather than buying things off the 2006 shelf. Examples: slide-rule calculations, unsophisticated machine tools, few choices for implosion explosives.

I think it's unwise to assume to assume that country X's physicists and engineers are too dumb, poor, unmotivated, or poorly managed to walk the path we broke in 1942-45. Such factors may indeed derail a program; Iraq 1992-2003 is the shining example. See physicist/skeptic Greg Cochran's pre-invasion analysis here (scroll down to "Greg Cochran on the coming war").

We need a longer term solution. Iran makes billions out of the crises because they raise the price of oil. So long as it is profitable, there will be crises. Until they have the means to strike.

The only plausible long-term solution is to stop funding the dangerous regimes that are proliferating nuclear weapons. They pay for their nuke programs with oil money. Stop the oil money, stop the nukes. To keep the world economy flowing, we need mideast oil -- but we don't need to keep on paying for it. The only rational solution is to seize the oil fields. Internationalize the world's oil and stop subsidizing Islamic radicals.

The Europeans will thank us, the Chinese will thank us. Because the price of oil will go down. And because we will have control of their oil, so they'll be very cooperative.

It would have been cheaper to seize the oil fields, including rebuilding damaged wells and pipelines, than to fight the war in Iraq. It wouldn't matter if Saddam Hussein were still running Baghdad, as long as he had no oil revenue. For example, the guys running Sudan are as bad as any, but since they have no oil revenue, we don't need to worry.

Warren,

I'd like to see that myself, but I don't think it's really feasible for several reasons. A) America doesn't have the will to do it. B) The cost to do it might end up more than we get from the oil. And C) I don't agree with you about Europe and China thanking us. Would you want France or China to have the capability to shut down our economy by stopping our oil flow? That's too much power to trust anyone with, and the rest of the world wouldn't trust us with it. China, Europe, and even Russia (falling oil prices would bite them hard) would happily finance terrorists or do whatever else it took to prevent us from seizing the oil fields or to get us out of there if we did.

AMac #13:

I agree, there are many advances that make the production of a Pu weapon much easier now than 1942-1945. And, I certainly do not think that "...country X's physicists and engineers are too dumb, poor, unmotivated, or poorly managed to walk the path we broke in 1942-45...". There is no shortage of sharp people in the world, though sometimes there seems to be an overabundance of idiots.

That said, there's typically quite a bit of HE development and testing that necessarily accompanies the development of a Pu weapon, much more so that a uranium gun-type weapon. There are a number of other tricks that may not be quite as well-known as some would have us believe.

Of course, for all we know the North Koreans have tested devices several times without success, and have learned from each such test. We'll know soon enough, I suppose...there is speculation that a test will coincide with the birthday of Fearless Leader, but that's not until mid-February next year.