Iran quickens path towards the atomic bomb
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
I don't understand how someone would take any chance to live in a world where a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics have the nuclear bomb.
Are you unaware of Pakistan?
The truth is, in a lot of ways, those bombs are Pakistan's bombs, but they're also China's bombs, balancing out the Israel-India axis.
Israel has around the same number of nuclear weapons as Pakistan, is not a majority Muslim nation but is very antagonistic towards majority Muslim nation. Israel is not a member of the NPT, and has been extremely uncooperative in non-proliferation efforts. Israel has engaged in terrorist activities in the past, their government includes many religious fanatics (like Itamar Ben-Gvir), and are currently being accused of engaging in an ongoing genocide.
My observation is that you aren’t afraid of a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics getting a nuclear bomb, but rather of Muslim majority nation having them.
For that matter, I bet Japan has them. If the conflict between Iran and Israel goes nuclear I could see Taiwan also developing their own. The proliferation is only restricted by time, money, and expertise.
NPT countries such as Iran can also acquire nuclear weapons without braking the treaty via Nuclear Weapons sharing[1]. This is how Germany, Turkey, and Belarus have nuclear weapons. If Japan or Taiwan wanted nuclear deterrence that is a route available to them (maybe that is even one of the goals of the potential Pacific Partnership military alliance; This is how Taiwan had these horrible weapons in the 1970s). It is probably harder for Iran though as they lack nuclear capable allies, but for e.g. Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, they could probably keep some USA weapons in at one of the many USA military bases (though I doubt Iraq would actually want that).
But you are wrong to omit politics as a barrier for proliferation. The NPT is strong, it has and most countries either comply with it, resign from it (North Korea) or don’t sign it. If Taiwan wanted to develop their own nuclear weapons they would need to resign from the NPT and potentially make any military aid from the USA infinitely harder in the process. I think their best strategy is to do enough nuclear research and have enough nuclear infrastructure so they are on the threshold of being nuclear capable without ever stepping over it (I think this is actually their strategy; as is Iran’s) that way they get the benefits of the NPT while still offering some nuclear deterrence, as in “we can develop them quickly if the need arises”.
Imagining what it could do if its territory became a safe haven all of the sudden is simply terrifying.
You're going to have to come up with an incredibly convoluted definition of terrorism in order to have it include only people, groups or countries you dislike, but not include people, groups and countries that you do like. And if you do that, then it goes back to the comment by the person you replied to that said that "terrorist" is a subjective term. If you apply consistent rules and definitions, then most governments in the world will be found to be conducting terrorist activities, and mutual accusations of it lose any meaning.
There aren’t any nuclear-armed nations that have not, while being nuclear powers, been either practitioners of internal state terrorism (the original sense of “terrorist”) and/or sponsors of such regimes and/or of non-state terrorists working against their geopolitical rivals.
Russia, as a nuclear state, has armed the Wagner Group, which France, a nuclear state, has described as terrorist.
Israel, a nuclear state, has armed settlers in the West Bank, which can be described as terrorists.
Israel, a nuclear state, has engaged and participated in terrorist activities in the past. Israel probably got their first bomb in 1963, Israel was using car bombs against PLO officials as late as 1981 via terrorist fronts.
(and no, israel and the US never aimed at civilians. They've used armies to fight armies.. which doesn't mean there hasn't been civilians casualties of course).
The hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 which targeted and hit the Pentagon—a military target—was a terrorist attack, albeit with heavy civilian casualties. The suicide bombing of USS Cole by al-Qaeda in October 2000 is considered a terrorist attack. It is hard to find less civilian target then a military attack missile destroyer.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 are not considered terrorist attacks despite the targets being civilians and the goal being political (unconditional surrender and a regime change of imperial Japan).
Wikipedia describes terrorism as “the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims.” Wikipedia also warns this is a very broad definition, hinting that it is not that simple. Later in the article Wikipedia admits: “The definition of terrorism lacks universal agreement” This is in contrast to e.g. Genocide, which Wikipedia offers a precise criteria outlined by the UN Genocide convention. The truth is there is nothing simple about what is and isn’t terrorism. It varies by who is using the term and in what context. It is one of these Wittgensteinian prototypical terms which only gets defined via its use.
Look at other coutries around around them, most of them were either attacked, bombed, are now being attacked or bombed, or are already occupied and have military bases built by other nuclear-having countries. Some of them have to even travel across half a planet to build bases there.
Iran would need to be insane to give up their nuclear program and we could actually see Eastern European countries coming together to build their own nukes if USA will continue to be unreliable ally. Sanctions be damned.
Like I understand what you’re saying, but you’re also asking for basically a dictatorship in practice. Political winds can always change, and that’s something that cannot and should not be entirely forestalled.
(Although for example drug laws kinda do this - the us is beholden to international law on scheduling etc - we just don’t do that for military situations to the same extent as we use it for jailing minorities. But nato-style alliances with trigger conditions etc are a rarity, and ultimately still subject to the parties having to actually take action. If a nato trigger event has taken place, and everyone simply ignores it… what then? If trump says Slovenia are low-energy losers who incited the conflict themselves, therefore nato doesn’t apply (which is iirc more or less his stance on Ukraine during this conflict)… what do you propose doing about it? Code is not law, ethereum smart contracts can’t drop bombs.)
The rise of Russian-aligned parties and neofascist groups within western culture is the problem. And while there’s some root causes, like letting party-controlled media sources spread actual libel and falsehoods, once the neofascist party is getting 30%, or once trump takes the presidency, it’s too late, now they get the color of state power and state legitimacy, even as they dismantle the next election etc.
The real problem is that Russia and china are using western liberal values against us. Only westerners are concerned about protecting the speech of Nazis, or the right of Fox News to broadcast lies that the election was stolen, etc. China and Russia don’t have to care. And the fact that we have to work our politics within this framework that coddles vicious and violent movements and rhetoric is an angle that they can exploit to disrupt us.
Like yes, if you allow china to have their fair say in media, and allow them to purchase a major media outlet to spread that perspective, you’re going to get china-backed media causing disruption to domestic US politics. It’s just more controversial to say it with political parties than with tiktok, but, Fox News and newsmax really ought to go too, for all the same reasons. And as long as you can come up with a veneer of American control the problem will remain.
The bizarre part here is you imagining Nazi logic has to make sense, when it notably does not, ever, have to make sense. Otherwise all the internal contradictions would fall apart - the only true tenent is strength and dominance.
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Like… never heard of “the night of the long knives” I guess. Fascists are only buddies up until they’re not.
In short: no, I don’t think a Russian-aligned fascist group would care in the least about stepping on a Ukrainian fascist group on the way to the top in their conquest of Ukraine.
Blaming israel or the US for that is just extremely short sighted.
If you read even the basic Wikipedia historical last-few-decades overviews of those countries you mentioned, you will not read that Iran invaded and destroyed governments of those countries. You know who had a major part in destroying those countries? The "good guys".
Iran is absolutely helping the Shia elements in those countries for its own geopolitical gain, but to claim that Iran has destabilized those countries after the western powers and arab gulf states ravaged them so thouroughly that they are all now considered failed states, is some absolute next level propaganda that I could not ignore.
It played a major role in ending the occupation of the southern half of Lebanon by Israel [0], has since repelled another invasion [1], and now serves as a strong deterrent to any further invasions. Sounds like an extremely successful project, given that Israel is currently occupying parts of lands of multiple surrounding countries and has no intentions of ever giving those lands back [2], in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. Hezbollah prevented the same fate in Lebanon. Yes, I understand that in the eyes of Israel it is the devil, for it has blocked Israel's ambitions of regional expansion, but that is irrelevant to everyone else.
> Calling what they're doing "help" is a pretty .. let's say special ? way of looking at it
Your reading comprehension is special. I said helping the Shia elements, not the countries themselves necessarily. The exact quote: "Iran is absolutely helping the Shia elements in those countries for its own geopolitical gain [...]" Anyway, given the above about ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, it seems that Iran has absolutely helped Lebanon at least. That Iran also gained regional influence through that act, and thus did it primarily for its own benefit, does not take away from that fact.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lebanon_conflict_(1985%E...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War#Ground_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
Stuff like "your reading comprehension is special" doesn't belong on HN.
Ironically, one major consequence of North Korean nukes is that there's now zero chance America will unilaterally decide to "liberate" the country, Iraq style. Being South Korean, I'm okay with that.
This is an extremely apt description of Israel and the US though?
Nonproliferation is pretty much failed though. Iran complied with some of the most onerous and invasive inspections of its nuclear program for years, and the US still unilaterally withdrew from the agreements and demonized them. So what is the benefit of complying at all?
Now, the US doesn't have them anymore and so this is extremely unlikely because Biden has zero interest in military adventurism.
The Shia/Persian state is a sad little mound in the middle of a Sunni and - before Gaza, anyway - Sunni/Israeli block. I imagine the primary reason for the October attacks was to drive a wedge into that developing relationship, knowing Likud would react very Old-Testament-y.
People will make scary color coded maps with all the Iranian proxies, but proxies are just proxies, and some of those proxies - like in Syria - are as dangerous to Iranian policy as they might be to Iran's enemies. Ask America how relying on dangerous third parties went for it in South America - they might have established a firm anticommunist platform, but at the risk of destabilizing the whole continent.
Atomic bomb would give Iran an extra layer of protection from those few countries that can do whatever they want, start wars based on lies, steal oil, commit genocide and worse, and the "international community" turns a blind eye most of the time.
Luckily we have UN, which can vote against sanctions,... oh wait, they did that:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112
> General Assembly votes overwhelmingly against US Cuba embargo
> Those in favour: 187
> Those against: 2 (the US and Israel)
> Abstentions: 1 (Ukraine)
Guess what, sanctions are still in place :)
Chemical weapons are a bit like Age of Sail line of battle, with an awful lot depending on the weather. Biologicals are even worse, since neighboring populations - surprise! - turn out to be pretty closely related, making it difficult to target foreign ethnicities. Humans in general are pretty tightly clustered, although I would imagine one of the great weapon uses for AI systems in this century (or decade) will be biologicals very tightly targeted at micropopulations, very small cell factors (so, with your new AI-designed bioagent, instead of 80% enemy 40% friendly [which was the estimate for an Anti-Black People agent in South Africa] it goes to something like 70% enemy 10% friendly). Both biologicals and chemical can have unpredictable weapon effect, which is the primary reason we don't see them more often. A really great rifle that shoots backwards even .1% of the time would still be the world's worst rifle.
Nuclear states have a form of "super-sovereignty" that effectively makes them a different kind of state. No one's chucking rockets or missiles at you anymore, no one's going to risk an airstrike or putting you on the Regime Change list. The long term effect of holding a nuclear arsenal has some nasty follow-on effects internally, for a nation, beyond just the sanctions and such, but it's such a cost-effective method of deterrence that such factors fade into the background.
Except, you know, that’s not actually true. Recently, a greater share of nuclear states have had direct strikes on their territory by foreign enemy states than is the case for non-nuclear states.
[0] In your FACE, "chuck"! There's plenty of verbs in the sea.
[1] This is a fun one. "No One" would be "another state", someone that has land to lose. Stateless entities - religions, ethnicities, corporations - have sort of a secret superpower when dealing with nuclear states. We kind of see that in the post-ww2 era, and the "Cold" War, for the nuclear powers, was a war of stateless factions (a little bit like the European Wars of Religion). A follow on from this is that an unstable land border of a nuclear power is more or less the exact definition of trouble: Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza/West Bank[a], and going back, the Soviet breakup of course. The real horror story would be a nuclear state run by a stateless minority - like a religious government that hates the bulk of its own people - because they're at least partially incentivized to take nuclear casualties.
[1.a] Yeah yeah I know "Israel Doesn't Have Nukes", but c'mon.
As fanatical as the religious rulers are in Iran those leaders do have a theological problem with weapons of mass destruction ie nukes. Therefore they have chosen to perfect ballistic missiles.
No way Russian and China want Iran to have nukes.
Israel, however, is not a member of the Non-proliferation deal, and very likely are own a few nuclear weapons. If anyone is are afraid of Nuclear Weapons, they should not support Israel under any circumstances.