Well, to be fair, Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon and wants to wipe out Israel.
While technically true, in Hiroshima were multiple military headquarters and Nagasaki were industrial city and shipyard. Just saying there there was a bit more reasoning behind the selection then "where we could kill the most civilians".
Iran isn't alone with the rhetoric of 'destroy your enemies'. North Korea and the US sell the same story, just the enemy changes. Whether the enemy is Israel, the US, or the arbitrary definition of a terrorist, the sell is ultimately a strategy to sustain support for military spending. It's hard to defend vast military spending when you have a poverty problem in your country - unless you can say you have enemies to defend against.
Perhaps they feel threatened.
And the "wipe Israel off the face of the map" quote is contested.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-a...
> Then, specialists such as Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project pointed out that the original statement in Persian did not say that Israel should be wiped from the map, but instead that it would collapse.
> Cole said this week that in the 1980s Khomeini gave a speech in which he said in Persian “Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” This means, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” But then anonymous wire service translators rendered Khomeini as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the face of the map,” which Cole and Nourouzi say is inaccurate.
Sure there are some in Iran who will probably say that. Just like there are some in the western countries that if inteviewed will say the same of whoever the current bogey man is. Hell, John Bolton is back
I think Israel is much more in the business of targeted strikes on personnel and infrastructure to keep their enemies in check, something they're very capable of.
I think the reason Trump and Netanyahu are so enraged by the JCPOA agreement is that it makes concessions to Iran in exchange of.. nothing, since Iran already didn't have any active nuclear weapons research. The purpose of the continued insistence on Iran's nuclear threat is to weaken it, and the JCPOA effectively kills this strategy.
> Iran has nuclear power plants though, and uranium enrichment is needed to fuel them.
They have a single commercial reactor[0], and it doesn't need the enrichment levels they are producing.
Most reactors are light water reactors (of two types – PWR and BWR) and require uranium to be enriched from 0.7% to 3-5% U-235 in their fuel. This is normal low-enriched uranium (LEU). There is some interest in taking enrichment levels to about 7%, and even close to 20% for certain special power reactor fuels, as high-assay LEU (HALEU).[1]
Iran has over 200kg(!) of 20% enriched uranium[2]. I guess it could be for an unbuilt, experimental reactor like they claim. It seems unlikely, since they haven't pursued any contracts for a reactor like that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushehr_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
[2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...