"The Iranians aren't building the bomb". Yeah, Right. They are busy enriching uranium, and that is the hard part of building a nuke. It may be that they haven't fabricated a bomb yet, but they will, as soon as the enrichment program furnishes enough weapons grade (90% U-235) uranium.
The ever clueful NYT befuddles the issue here.
It's probably true that the Iranians haven't fabricated the sub critical masses for a gun-type fission bomb yet, but so what? The only reason to enrich uranium is to build a bomb. So long as they are enriching, they are building a bomb in my book. Just 'cause they haven't performed the very last step in the process doesn't mean they are not building a bomb.
The NYT offers some silly talk, "The Iranians want the capability but not a stockpile." That's how Saddam Hussein got the Americans to do a regime change on his ass. Thanks to CIA, we really thought Hussein had, or was close to having, nukes. And we took steps. Unless the Iranian mullahs are dumb as rocks, they will understand that the same thing might happen to them. Until you actually have a nuke, you are vulnerable to invasion. The mullahs watched the US Army chew up Saddam Hussein in a few weeks. They know we could do the same thing to them.
Only when the Iranians can threaten to nuke our invasion force, and/or nuke Israel, can they feel safe from an American imposed regime change. They don't dare sit around on a stockpile of weapons grade fissionables without making a fission bomb.
3 comments:
The BBC has a really good article on what Israel could do to try and stop Iran.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17115643
I find it moronic when people say that Iran isn't building a bomb, especially when the IAEA says that they're working towards a bomb. The IAEA has been really careful to avoid saying that until last year. Also Iran let in IAEA inspectors to the country this month but didn't let them go to all of their nuclear sites.
I don't think Israel can neutralize the Iranian nuclear program with their arsenal unless they choose to use nuclear warheads.
Only the US with GBU-57A/B (30,000 lb) has the only non-nuclear capability to blast their sites.
The whole situation is a mess. The other Arab states don't want a nuclear armed Iran and may support a strike. I suspect a strike if any would come after the Iranian elections in 2013.
"Moronic" ? How about "deceptive"? Israeli Air Force is marginal in this scenario. They would have to have superior intel (Mossad might come thru) and a lot of luck. If the Israeli's thought they could do the job, they would have launched the strike already. Since they haven't, they must be worried that it would not work.
USAF is bigger and supported by a bigger industrial base, naturally USAF has a better chance of doing the job. But even that might not be enough. And if we are gonna strike Iran, we better make sure we can strike to kill. We don't want to just piss them off.
Back in WWII, the RAF struck Penemunde with a max effort one night in August. They did a lot of damage, but they didn't slow the Nazi V2 program down much.
I read the BBC article, nothing all that surprising there.
BTW, 30,000 lb is 15 tons. Takes one helova plane to even get off the ground with that much ordnance. Back in Viet Nam, we never took off with more than 4000 lb of ordnance.
The only delivery system for the GBU-57A/B is the B-2. It supposed to be ready in 2012 (live fire tests completed already), but it received an $81.6M boost in February to get all the B-2's ready. They somehow can fit two of these suckers into a B-2.
The catch is that there isn't a lot of confidence that a B-2 can evade the heavy SAM defenses. We'd likely need to pound out their SAM sites before sending the bombers in.
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