From the comments yesterday, the following:
I find it depressing that people keep believing Iran is developing nuclear weapons in the face of no evidence to that effect. The only people saying otherwise are the same exact people who fed the public the WMD bullshit of Iraq.
So here is the challenge to all of you- what actual evidence is there that Iran is developing nuclear weapons? Not trying to prove they are not, as I just sort of assume all nations (particularly after watching the difference between what happened to Iraq and North Korea) covet them. Reliable sources only, so that excludes the Pipes dreams and various drive-by assertions at the Weekly Standard and NRO.
Actual facts. What is there out there? What do we actually know?
DBrown
Iran want to develop nukes? Why? I mean our military only occupies countries on both the west and east of its borders. Please! They have no reasons to fear our fearless coward bushie; just because bushwhack with bloody hands cheney pulling his strings want to bomb them, you’d think that would make them realize how safe they are! Shit, if they just tell the truth about WMD they have nothing to worry about – look how well that did for Iraq!
Also, even though they realize peak oil is coming and they too will need another energy source, that doesn’t give them the right to develop nuclear power – fuck what the treaties say – the puppet king says they are dangerous and that is enough for any honest dumb fuck 20 percenter … besides, these Iranian fuckers really do care about their people (these dumb fucks treat their drug addicted and don’t put them in jail – stupid!), unlike the North Korean loonies and if they ever do develop one or two nukes in ten to fifteen years, this might tempt them to conquer the world and we would then have to protect Israel from these bad, bad A-rabs.
I mean, Israel only has two hundred or so nukes with missiles and aircraft, and we only have six to ten thousands city killers with a few thousand ICBMs and we would never stand a chance against a country with two nukes that might be powerful enough to damage a city! (under ten kilotons if they are as good as India’s; the butt packers or Pakistan bomb, like the North Koreans, was under five kilotons); US/Israel nukes are 100-200 kilotons.
Damn, besides, I heard that these Iranians have jet transports (737’s!) that can carry people and these could be used to kill a few thousand people if flown into a big building! We need bushwhack to declare martial law, put the nation under lockdown so all the twenty percenters can stick their heads up their asses and piss them selves in fear. Look to the sky’s, the sky is falling – cheney is our slaver … I mean savior, all hail bushwhack the puppet king.
dlw32
What I find so bizarre is how some folks keep talking like attacking Iran will be easy. It’s like they think it’s Grenada. It’s got the world’s largest army and they haven’t been weakened by years of sanctions the way the Iraqi military was.
With our forces spread thin already and apparently worn out, why are these folks so confident an attack on Iran is won as soon as we give the order??
John Cole
I suppose there is always the possibility we will be greeted as liberators.
/ducks
cleek
attacking Iran would be relatively easy – we already control the air and the sea. we could decimate the country without ever setting foot inside. occupying it would be a completely different story.
pacato
Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power: “It is always the enemy who started it. Even if he was not first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it. The wish to see death is everywhere and one does not have to go deep into men to bring it to light.”
Bush certainly seems to have this wish.
saucy sauce
The best one-stop shop for nuclear issues and knowledge is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They managed to uncover the AQ Khan network out of Pakistan something like 18 months before the US government noticed it.
A cursory search of their website for “Iran” came up with this:
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/when-could-iran-deliver-a-nuclear-weapon
and this:
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/behind-irans-nuclear-weapons-halt
The first describes the details of Iran’s nuclear program based mainly on the declassified Dec. 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. It’s a worst-case scenario piece. Take it with a grain of salt, as it’s penned by a former Rumsfeld advisor.
The second dives into the credibility of the NIE itself. Both articles are worth skimming at the least.
I also suggest you check out David Albright’s work at ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security). He’s highly trustworthy, deeply scrupulous, and knows his science. He’s also come under fire from a few former Bush flunkies (Scott Ritter), which only adds to his appeal. The relevant page is:
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/index.html
Long story short, Iran is definitely building nuclear plants and is making progress with missiles. The key issue is whether those plants are creating highly-enriched uranium (U-235) and whether that uranium is then being forwarded to research reactors. No one can say for sure if this is happening. Hope this helps!
Dennis - SGMM
Found this letter (It’s a .pdf) on the IAEA website. It’s worth reading because it lays out what we, the Europeans, Russia, and China are offering the Iranians: pie in the sky but they have to drop their uranium enrichment program first. One of the signatories is Condoleeza Rice.
The gist of it, for the lazy, is that because the IAEA can’t “provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran” there is a lack of confidence and mistrust regarding Iranian intentions.
Remember when Saddam had to prove that he didn’t have any WMD? If you do then you’ll remember that Saddam gave Hans Blix and his inspectors free access to anywhere in Iraq – including the presidential palaces. A few weeks after that America attacked. Proving a negative is always a tough go (George W. Bush: prove that you don’t jerk off in one of your mom’s old gloves). In Iraq, when the no-WMD negative was on its way to being substantially proved the bombing started.
After Iraq, can anyone blame Iran for not wanting to play that same game? No matter what kind of inspections are carried out there will be some in the US and Israel who will declare that they didn’t look hard enough, or in the right places, or they sent the weapons to Syria, so bombs away again.
Napoleon
The absolutely only proof I have ever seen is that they are enriching uranium, and even at that they are only enriching it to 5%, which is far short of weapons grade. By the way, my understanding is that the Iranian nuclear power program got its start under the Shah. Its not like that wack job of a president they have was elected a few years ago and suddenly they fired up the uranium enrichment plant.
Redhand
How about this:
“There is no doubt that
SaddamAhmadinejad has [is developing] [has the capability to develop] Weapons of Mass Destruction. We must act now to stop him before a mushroom cloud sprouts over Manhattan.”Sounds like a good enough reason to start another war to me.
Dennis - SGMM
From The Council on Foreign Relations, January, 2006 “Loose Nukes”:
Now Kazakhstan is a just a quick boat ride up the Caspian Sea from Iran. Seems to me that if Iran was really intent on building nuclear weapons a quick shopping trip on the Kazakh Black Market would provide them with enough material to do so.
conumbdrum
Leaving our troops in Iraq as the proverbial sitting ducks.
Seriously, what do the neocons think is going to happen to our soldiers when the Iraqi Shia go berserk with rage at the bombing of their Iranian brethren?
How do they plan to supply our troops with food, fuel and ammo when our supply line gets cut by the Iraqis?
What happens to the price of oil when the Iranians render the Straits of Hormuz impassable?
What if we have to bug out of Iraq altogether? How are we going to get 150,000 troops and God knows how many civilians and contractors out of the country? What happens to our equipment? Do we take it all? Do we leave some behind? Must we destroy what we abandon?
Amazingly enough, I have yet to hear anyone in the mainstream media take on a single one of these questions… just plenty of debate over whether Iran is as bad as everyone thinks, or if they’re even worse.
I need a drink. Or maybe a kick in the head.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Scott Ritter is a former Bush flunky?
In a different direction, who is Bush going to appoint as first ambassador, Neville Chamberlain?
cervantes
Essentially, the only “evidence” is that the Iranians are insisting on developing their own capacity to enrich uranium. They have every right to do this under the NPT, to which they are signatory (unlike our good friends Israel, Pakistan, and India, whose nukes we think are just ducky), so there actually is no legal issue whatsoever.
The problem is that if you have the technical capacity to enrich uranium to reactor grade (around 5% U235) there’s nothing to stop you from keeping on going — it’s the same process, you just continue it longer. While so-called “weapons grade” uranium is enriched to 80% or more, and that’s what you would need in order to make a bomb compact enough to fit on a missile, the truth (seldom mentioned) is that it is possible to make a nuclear explosive device with uranium enriched to only 25% or so, possibly even less. Furthermore, such a device is technologically very simple to make — you don’t need any classified info or fancy designs. It would be bulky and of uncertain yield, but do just fine as a truck bomb.
So, if the Iranians can enrich uranium, then ipso facto they can make a nuclear explosive. The two propositions are the same. The question is whether they have any intention of doing so, and as far as I know, there is no evidence for that, although I don’t know how you could rule it out.
As I say however, there is no legal reason why they can’t do it, and it is the height of hypocrisy to insist that they cannot while Israel possesses 200 nuclear weapons, and missiles and bombers with which to deliver them.
Napoleon
I have always been into science and as a kid got a bunch of books on nuclear power and the like, and was stunned when it struck me how very simple it would be to make a bomb if you had the material available to you (although it would be big as hell if you didn’t know the technology to make it small).
Phoenix Woman
The big irony is that the West originally encouraged Iran and Iraq to develop nuclear power (as opposed to nuclear weapons) so they could free up that much more oil for us to use.
Robert Johnston
There is very little direct physical evidence. Of course given Iraq North Korea, and the psychotic psychology of Bush, Cheney, and McCain, Iran’s leadership would be crazy not to try to get its hands on some nukes, and not the kind of crazy that you might actually argue that they are. The best evidence of Iranian efforts to develop or buy nukes is that the mullahs aren’t suicidal.
My real worry at this point is that Russia is going to see selling or even giving away nukes to Iran as a way to prevent the United States from further destabilizing the region. I worry about that because it’s true, at least if McCain wins in November. If not for the fact that such an act would almost certainly spill over into broader conflict and a new cold war, it would be a very easy call for Russia to make. But if U.S. belligerence and threats to international stability become severe enough that a new cold war looks good to Russia, then it will happen.
DBrown
Some good posts (besides my rather silly one) so I feel I should add some more detailed information:
– first, as some have correctly pointed out that if you can enrich uranium (nearly 99.3% U238 which is useless) to 5% U235 you can just keep on going. While true, this is far, far more difficult (to get well past the 5%.) It requires orders of magnitude more centrifuges, and far more time and a vast infrastructure. But in principle, is a straight forward extension of the basic enrichment process.
– Next, while a primitive and very low yield nuclear bomb is possible with 80% or less enrichment, the resulting device is of little military value (very low yield but a great terror weapon.)
– Is a nuke simple to make? Complex question. Short answer: yes but the yield will be well under five kilo-tons (using low grade U235 and a simple gun type activator.) Such a weapon could hurt a small city but is small potato’s compared to the high yield weapons of the US. To really threaten Israel, only a high yield weapon, fully tested (which is a give away, ask the North Loonies) could ever really do that.
– Would Iran give it to terrorist? Realistically, no one who partly understands the Iranian people’s attitude (remember, they protested in support of the US after the 9/11 attacks), culture, and current government would believe they have the mentality to commit suicide but anything is possible. But than, we really were preparing to nuke their sites last year (see (http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/08/hersh-joint-chiefs-opposed-to-iran-nuke-attack-members-of-congress-gung-ho/))
– What would they achieve by really building a nuke? While really having one would enhance their safety it would take ten or more years (CIA estimate) and they know that we are looking for reasons to attack them.
Finally, I find it hard to believe that since peak oil may be closing in that their nuke program is anything more than what they claim: for energy. You really need 5% enrichment to run a cost effective power plant; however, in the far future, who knows what they would do?
Bill H
I do not believe Iran is developing nuclear weapons or, if they have such a program, that it is within a decade of success. In a choice between believing the Bush Admin or the IAEA, the latter has my vote in a heartbeat.
Further, even if Iran obtained (or built) a nuclear weapon, there is no credible reason to suspect they would use it for anything other than a deterrent, to prevent the US from attacking them. Their rhetoric is no more beligerrent (sp) than ours or Isreal’s is. It is rhetoric.
Iran is not and never will be a threat to this country. They may be a threat to Israel, but our government needs to quit acting as if Israel was the 51st state of our union. A friend, yes, but not a state vital to our continued vaibility as a nation ourselves.
dlw32
Let me try a different brand of heresy. Why do we care if Iran gets the bomb?
It makes me nuts when I hear people talk about countries using nukes. It’s like these people set their expectations based on bad Bond villains.
No country is going to use a nuke and survive. Even if the target country was powerless, the world would stop at nothing to end the regime that next launches a nuke. It would be universally condemned.
Even ignoring the world as a whole, I’m not sure there’s a country left on the planet that is so powerless so as to be a target. Everyone’s got allies and most of the allies have nukes. Japan doesn’t have a nuke only because they know they can borrow ours. That is if North Korea were to nuke Japan, we’d nuke North Korea.
To hear the pundits talk it seems that the fear is that Iran will nuke Israel. Really?? No one is stupid enough to believe that they would survive much longer than half an hour after they nuke Israel. Israel is something like 4th in number of nukes.
No country wants a nuke to use it. They want one so that they’re a player. So the rest of the world has to take them seriously. So an adventurous cowboy won’t invade them.
So I say, let’s give Iran a nuke.
DBrown
Hey,
I always wanted to know how to do a strike through but never did. Could someone tell me what I did to get the strike through but still don’t know?
Thanks
peter
You can check the archives at Arms Control Wonk for “Iran”.
Long story short, while Iran doesn’t have anything resembling nukes, and are quite some time (possibly up to a decade) away from being capable of producing them, they are increasing the number of centrifuges to give the appearance that their program is closer to being able to achieve that goal than it actually is. Whether this is a “full speed ahead” push for nukes (unlikely because they are putting out increasing numbers of still crappy centrifuges) or an effort to increase their bargaining position for a final brokered deal with the West or internal propaganda meant to impress the mullahs- no one can say.
There is no proof per se that they are actively working on weapons, but they are certainly trying to walk the line by signaling to the west that if they chose to they could do so much more quickly than they actually can. As a source quoted in one of the posts at ACW noted (paraphrased) whatever the ultimate intention, the program is being run for political rather than technological goals.
b. hussein canuckistani
Given the reports that Iran has a large stock of Exocet and Chinese Sunburn missiles, I wouldn’t put too much faith in the “command of the sea” part of the equation. especially when the sea is narrow and easily choked off.
cervantes
Yeah, I was wondering about those strike throughs. It’s just a simple formatting tag — <s>. You take it off with the usual closing tag — </s>. Now, do you want to know how I got the tags to display rather than being parsed by your browser?
You have to sign up for the course.
cervantes
Hmm, now that’s interesting — although my comment previewed correctly, once posted, the entity references I embedded actually got parsed as tags. Very odd, to say the least. Apparently the post somehow gets read twice during the posting process. Anyway, the tag is s and /s — you need the greater than and lesser than signs to surround the tags.
Now, with that out of the way, I wonder why you downplay a 5 kiloton truck bomb as not “militarily significant.” That’s plenty good enough to destroy, for example, the Baghdad Green Zone, or the White House, executive office buildings, Treasury Dept. and a big chunk of downtown DC. You have to smuggle it in somehow but the effect is quite impressive.
I don’t necessarily worry about Iran doing such a thing but it’s a legitimate broader concern, not to be dismissed so lightly.
Nicholas Weaver
Their refusal to compromise and have Russia host the fuel cycle/provide uranium (proposed by the russians) and/or external supplier build a light water reactor.
If Iran wanted nuclear POWER, that is what they could do. IT would be much faster than an indigenous program (they could have been online already), much cheaper, and they could easily stockpile a large quantity of LEU so they would have a stable fuel supply under IAEA seal.
Because of these options, QED, they don’t just want nuclear power, they want indigenous nuclear technology. The reason for indigenous nuclear technology, including a full fuel cycle, is to provide the capability of building nuclear weapons, either by using HEU or plutonium production.
Halteclere
For those people who say that Iran, being flush with oil, is only pretending to want nuclear reactors for power plants as a guise to get nuclear bomb technology and manufacturing processes, consider this: Iran, due to a shortage of refineries, is “heavily dependent on imported gasoline and diesel”. By building nuclear reactors Iran can reduce their dependency on foreign countries and companies and make them less susceptible to sanctions or other leveraging.
cervantes
Iran’s right to build nuclear power reactors is not in dispute at all. The plutonium in used nuclear fuel can be extracted easily enough, as this represents chemical separation. However, it is much more difficult to make a bomb out of plutonium than out of HEU. For that you do need super-high tech capabilities, you can’t make that truck bomb thing in your garage.
While the Iranians have so far rejected the idea of getting reactor fuel from Russia, they still might agree to it. However, they are asserting a legitimate national privilege, and it’s a bargaining chip that they have good reason to hold onto. How about proposing that Israel abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for a Middle East nuclear free zone in which nobody enriches uranium and everybody’s nuclear fuel cycle is based in Russia and/or France, your choice? That walks us back one big step toward the pre-NPT situation with just five nuclear powers. Same deal should be worked out with India and Pakistan if possible, maybe with China as an additional option for locating the fuel cycle.
Pipe dream maybe but at least the idea has legitimacy and doesn’t give special privileges to some countries that other countries aren’t allowed to have, with the exception of the pre-NPT 5.
b-psycho
The fear-mongering over Iran touches on a longtime pet peeve of mine when it comes to foreign policy: failure to consider what your reaction would be if the tables were turned.
Far as I can tell, by STILL being hostile to Iran regardless of what they’re doing, claiming every time a bomb goes off in Iraq “oh, they got that from Tehran!” (meanwhile completely ignoring the amount of SAUDIS among the foreign jihadis…), treating Israeli threats as no big deal rather than as batshit crazy destabilize-things-further talk, and having a frickin presidential candidate that takes to making jokes about randomly killing Iranians…we’re basically daring them to go nuke. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ahmadenijhad is rethinking the purpose of those centrifuges as we speak: “hell, they think we are anyway, notice they’re not invading North Korea”.
Kevin
<strike>Looks like you may need to re-take the course.</strike>
Code to thwart cross-site scripting attacks tends to make it harder to have tags show up in your comments.
brendanm
Second what Nicholas Weaver said. More here:
http://www.swordscrossed.org/node/1640
liberal
cervantes wrote,
Remember, however, that the destructive effect of a nuke exploded at ground level is severely lessened because (if you look at the solid angles involved) most of the energy is directed either skyward or down into the ground.
DBrown
Thanks for the strike through info.
As for little boy being a crude bomb, it had a yield of 13-16 kiloton so it does not qualify for that term. As the Japanese found out, that can level a good part of a city.
As for my reference to a crude bomb in the yield range of 1-5 kiloton, yes, such a weapon would do terrible things, no argument there but like all things, everything is relative. In US terminology of bombs, that is very low yield and crude weapon. H-bombs are in the 100 – 1000+ kiloton range for most types used in warheads.
But for Iran to be taken seriously as a nuclear military power, that is to really have the ability to harm a country, much less destroy a country, an under 5 kiloton bomb is far too low of a yield. It should deter an attack but little else and that is what I was getting at. I hope that confuses everyone – it does me. Talking about the unthinkable is what bushwhack has got all of us doing. And more to the point, the loon really was trying to get a nuclear war (limit, surgical strike) going. What a shithead! Now that is not just insane but truly scary. For what? To prevent a third rate power from having a third rate (for nukes) nuclear power in ten years at best? And then what – they would get nuclear revenge someday and THAT would be far, far worse – don’t you think?
liberal
Nicholas Weaver wrote,
Wrong. They know that if they did that, they’d be at the mercy of the powers who had control. In a different but related sphere, ask Ukraine and the Czech Republic what they think of Russian control of a good chunk of their fossil fuel supply.
Not that I don’t think they want to build the bomb in the long run, given the unmitigated hostility they face from the US and other Western powers.
liberal
DBrown wrote,
Mostly true, except that I’ll bet 5 Kton is enough to vaporize the core of a civilian power reactor. That’s the worst possible attack on a country, aside from some currently-unrealized bioweapon. Decades ago, Scientific American had an article about the effect of such an attack on the US. It would render a huge swathe of country uninhabitable for years.
DBrown
As for not wanting an outside country controlling your main energy source, get real (and in the not to distant future, nukes will be many countries main source – coal is not plentiful in a number of countries that have oil).
No one who has nuclear reactors wants to beg another country for fuel. Notice that only five countries could possibly supply such fuel (US, France, England, Russia and China) and I don’t think an Islamic country wants to depend on any of them for a life line.
To claim that they only want to process fuel to build nukes is not a valid statement just because you can beg one of these countries to sell the fuel. This is not like oil where many countries are available to sell it. Even coal is mostly only available (in large quantities) from a few countries, many on the previous list. So, importing coal is a big issue too.)
That is not to say that the ability to build nukes is not something they might want – look at bushwhack/bloody hands cheney’s response to the truly vile and sick north Koreans who killed over 35,000 Americans!
Joshua
YES. For heaven’s sake, Bush has openly talked about how they are doing covert ops in Iran to de-stabilize the government. Congress has authorized something like $400 million for those ops. Yet Iran is just supposed to stand there and let it happen? Anything they do in response is an “act of war” that justifies full on invasion?
Imagine if Ahmadinejad got on TV and said that they are conducting covert ops in the United States to destabilize the federal government. Tehran would be dust in 10 minutes!
DBrown
Good point and you need to work for insurance companies!
This is already a problem – the reactor is called a ‘Breeder’ and we had one (Detroit) and this type can explode in a limited nuclear yield and do exactly what you said (by the way, that almost happened – so, does that make American power companies terrorist? Last time I check my electric bill, I believe they were … off point.)
The French have a large number of such plants, by the way.
If you are saying that Iran could get an A-bomb into America, near a US nuclear power plant, then what you say might have merit but I do not believe that is possible. However, for the sake of argument, say they did – end of game for Iran. They would cease to exist – period. All nuclear countries would support a full US nuclear attack across the board and destroy the country. So what is your point? Iran would kill a few tens of thousands of Americans and suffer tens of millions? Not likely even in worst-case scenario.
Martin
But Iran is Evil. When you have an entire evil country – evil clerics, evil teachers, evil toddlers, evil corgis, evil ground squirrels – how could they NOT be developing nuclear weapons?
Explain that, Mr. Fancy Pants.
DBrown
But the US is like 007 – a licenses to kill. Right? That is what we have become? A country that hardly notices such things – great, as Pogo said “We have meet the enemy and it is us”.
Martin
Easy. Charter plane. 5kt is modestly sized. You don’t even need to put it on the ground – just detonate it above the target. Fly into LA and stray off course and take out San Onofre. It’s on the coast – there’d be no time to respond even with Pendleton right there.
But your larger point is right – what good would it do? If we traced it back to Iran they’re toast.
Nations don’t develop these weapons to attack us, though. They develop them to ensure that we don’t attack them.
DBrown
You are right on! The GDF squirrels in my attic are plants by the Iranians! This does mean war! The squirrels are after our nuts – hid cheney and bush!
saucy sauce
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Yep, Ritter is an odd duck, and you’re right that “flunky” is perhaps too strong a term. I’ve heard him speak twice and had the opportunity to meet him a few years ago. He’s certainly an Iraq War opponent and sincerely opposes proliferation, and as a former weapons inspector he knows quite a bit about the issues at hand.
However, he’s also one of the folks who came to the light a bit late. He voted for Bush in 2000 and didn’t begin questioning the WMDs-in-Iraq story until well into 2002, long after Hans Blix had released his report. Most of Ritter’s (very good) work since then has had the sense of a quiet mea culpa.
In any case, the Ritter story is beside my main point: check the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and ISIS if you want well-researched, accurate information on nuclear proliferation issues. FAS is another good one, while I’m thinking of it.
DBrown
The insurance companies or Homeland Security really should hire you!
Well, lunch time is over, thanks for all the good info! and thanks for all the fish! Have a good day.
Gregory
I think the equation is backwards — although the warmongers pretend (“Mad Mullahs! Mad Mullahs!”) that Israeli nukes won’t deter an Iranian first strike, the key fact is that an Iranian nuclear weapon would act as a deterrent against Israel, and therefore reduce its regional hegemony.
And, therefore, according to the neocons, Iran getting the Bomb must not be allowed to happen.
b-psycho
Wow…why bother with covert-ops only to admit it in the open? I mean, I’ve personally not been as enthusastic as many with the “it’s all because Bush is an idiot” storyline, but this feeds it rather well.
Notorious P.A.T.
Don’t forget that petroleum is one of the most fantastically useful substances on Earth. It can make plenty of other things besides gasoline, such as fertilizer, plastics, pharmaceuticals, conventional weapons, etc. It makes perfect sense for a country to get its electricity from nuclear plants and funnel its oil to other industries.
HyperIon
first, the preview lies. well-known fact.
second, someone has not read the embedded links FAQ.
third, would somebody please explain why they don’t build their own refinery?
i understand they are costly but it seems ludicrous to have the raw material but lack the ability to turn it in the stuff you really need. and that goes for the USA as well. the payback is immediate and huge, the technology is well established and constructing a refinery is not nearly as complicated as building a commercial reactor. i’m sure that in the US there are a fair number of environmental barriers but I bet regulation is not a big problem in Iran (or Saudi Arabia or Iraq). so what gives?
Tony J
As others have said, no country in its right mind would want to give Russia a veto on it’s future energy supplies. Iran’s leaders have just looked at how Moscow is using the leverage of its oil and gas production to put pressure on its former satellites in eastern Europe and come to the very sensible conclusion that, if you want a nuclear energy programme you can rely on, you do it in house.
rawshark
As daddy Bush once said to a reporter:
” No, I’m not going to discuss covert operation because then they wouldn’t be covert.”
Sometimes it’s hard to believe the Shrub is really his son. Then I watch CaddyShack again, get a few minutes of Spaulding in my head then remember who the president is.
double-plus-ungood
Iran is probably not attempting to develop nuclear weapons, but are more likely developing a nuclear energy program that provides equipment, material, and training on order to have nuclear weapon threshold technology (in other words, the ability to develop nuclear weapons in a year or two).
While it makes sense for the saber-rattlers to go on about nuclear weapon programs because it’s easier to sway public opinion when there’s a tangible threat, they probably know that there’s no actual program, and no way to prove that Iran seeks threshold technology.
The problem they face is that at this point, the only political influence over Iran they really have is threat of military action (see the last five years). Once Iran is in a position to quickly develop nuclear weapons to attach to their delivery systems (see missile tests last week), that military threat against Iran dramatically lessens. So they need to either stop it now, or start developing other means of political influence (see announcements of diplomacy yesterday).
TenguPhule
And thanks, John. Far too many people are accepting ‘Iran going for nuclear weapons’ on blind faith.
James F. Elliott
After seeing what Russia did to the Ukraine’s power grid by shutting off their natural gas pipeline, any country would have to be insane to agree to let Russia control the spigot on their energy grid’s fuel. Iran wants to be the regional heavyweight, not Russia’s organ-grinding monkey in the Middle East.
liberal
Joshua wrote,
IIRC they are already doing the covert ops.
liberal
dbrown wrote,
Oh, I completely agree. I’m just saying, from a technical viewpoint, you can probably do a lot of damage with a 5 Kt weapon.
But you’re right about deterrence.
liberal
Gregory wrote,
Yep.
liberal
HyperIon wrote,
AFAICT the Iranian economy isn’t super strong or anything, especially considering the damage done by the Iran-Iraq war and years of not very enlightened governance. So you don’t have to do much to explain why they might not have completed what we might think of as an obvious investment project which however happens to be extremely capital intensive.
liberal
double-plus-ungood wrote,
I agree—this is an extremely likely scenario.
mike
Echoing what HyperIon said, it seems to me that Iran would get a far better return on investment developing a native petroleum capability than a native nuclear capability.
Brachiator
Damn good question. And of course, google is always your friend. If you search on “evidence of iran’s nuclear program,” you get a lot of good stuff, including a Wikipedia article on the topic (Nuclear program of Iran), with links to original reporting.
The short answer seems to be that there is no clear evidence of any nuclear weapons program. But there is also a pattern of inconsistent co-operation on the part of Iran with various international agencies.
A recent Washington Post story deftly illustrates the simple-mindedness of the Bush Administration in the face of a more complex reality (U.S. Seeks Support For Sanctioning Iran):
The US case seems to be that the existence of any Iranian nuclear program is problematic. The Iranian position seems to be that they have no obligation to make the US feel comfortable about that country’s nuclear programs, even at the risk of a US attack.
Teh stupid on both sides may lead to disaster.
This doesn’t say much about the capability of the army, or the quality of its equipment or its command structure. The tactics used in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s was more like the level of World War I trench warfare than anything remotely modern, and even descended to the level of the Iranians having boys run through mine fields.
A conventional war would likely be a disaster for Iran, but the aftermath would be a disaster for the entire world. the US could never mount an effective counter-insurgency campaign.
liberal
Brachiator wrote,
I thought the strongest thing Iran had going for it in terms of ground combat was its terrain.
liberal
mike wrote,
Only true you discount their security concerns.
liberal
Brachiator wrote,
While there’s a lot of stupidity and brutality in the Iranian regime, on the particular issue of relations with the US, they did make a pretty decent initial offer to improve relations with us (2003 IIRC), only to be completely rebuffed by the US.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Not much to add, since numerous other commentators have made the same basic point – from a strategic perspective nukes are more useful as defensive weapons than as offensive threats (which is one of the reasons why the Cold War never went hot). Hence Iran would be crazy not to be seeking to get them, to deter us, Israel and various other regional rivals (Sunnis and Shia don’t get along, remember?) from attacking them during some crisis in the future.
One other point: people tend to forget that foreign policy decisions are often made for domestic political reasons. That applies to other countries, too. The Iranian leadership (much less the general population) is not a monolith. We don’t know how their various internal factions stand on the question of getting nukes, but rattling the cage of the US has to be helpful to their hardliners in fighting off the moderates and reformers. They did exactly that during the Iranian Revolution, so why not now?
Bill Arnold
Re armscontrolwonk, a recent article posted a 15 slide PowerPoint review of the organization of the government of Iran. It is fascinating.
My take is that the domestic Iranian uranium enrichment program is suspicious because
( a ) the dominant parts of the leadership are willing to risk everything for it
( b ) the output given its current size is completely insufficient for enrichment of fuel for nuclear power reactor usage
( c ) the output (“separative work units”) of the public enrichment facilities if reworked for HEU production, or of hidden HEU production facilities of the same design, is sufficient for small-scale bomb production.
If one couples that logic with a worst case scenario coupling (1) a Iranian leadership lying about an active program (limited evidence for this) and (2) years of good luck (no “enhanced Murphy’s Law” derailing the program), one has an estimate similar to the administration or Israeli positions.
Thomas Jackson
If you want to see someone who has taken leave of his senses let me pose a question to all of you. Do you live your life based on what you have absolute evidence of or live according to possibilities and eventualities?
Do you own disability or home insurance because you wish to be disabled or have your home burn down? Do you wear a seat bet when you drive because you know that you are going to have an accident?
Nations conduct their affairs based not on absolutes (except for the French of course who demanded proof of the superiority of the German Army and got it by learning the words of Deutschland Deutschland) but rather by understanding what the capabilities of a potential opponent are. JFK brought the US to the brink of nuclear war without concrete knowledge there were nuclear weapons in Cuba but he knew what capabilities of the Soviets were and how the balance of power was being altered.
So those who believe that nations should live in a way that people would consider crazy you have defined yourselfs. Rationalizing evil is just banality packaged as bombast.
Brachiator
The problem is that Israel probably has hundreds of nukes, and I don’t see them allowing Iran to reach any kind of parity. Also, despite the recent test firing of missiles in Iran, they don’t appear to have much in they way of a reliable delivery system. And Israel would have to respond quickly and with devastating results to any nuclear attack from Iran.
I don’t see nuclear weapons giving Iran an edge with respect to Sunni/Shia divisions, and this would also worry the shit out of the Saudis. I don’t know. There would have to be some pretty deep strategerizing for this to be a strong play.
This is a great point. The Bush Administration loves to push the idea that the Iranian government is an anti-US monolith. Worse, the Bush Administration, more likely Cheney, seems to think that the only function of the State Department is to deliver threats to countries we don’t like.
Sorry. I would prefer to proceed on the basis of actual intelligence and coherent foreign policy, as opposed to theories, aphorisms, and paranoia. Currently, neither the Administration nor the Israeli positions are based on anything meaningful, and are strongly skewed by a neo-con preference for confrontation.
rawshark
Worked for Ronnie against the Soviets. Scared them straight.
Grumpy Code Monkey
And this is what makes me insane. Banging-head-on-desk-this-close-to-a-concussion insane. These chuckers have repeatedly compromised security in the name of politics, yet Obama’s the untrustworthy one? Good God, could you imagine the bloodbath in Congress and the media if the Clinton administration revealed the identity of a CIA field officer? But when Cheney gets Scooter to do it, it’s really no big deal.
grumpy realist
1. Pakistan already has nukes and has quite a lot of potential destabilization (Taliban already controlling large chunks of the border lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan.)–> I’m more worried about them.
2. If Israel decides on its own lonesome to go after Iran, what’s the probability that Iran will manage to close the Straits of Hormuz with resulting effects on price of oil–> oil shock –>US economy really collapses.
Think that the average American will be so lovey-dovey with Israel after that? Or will it just be shrugged off as “necessary sacrifice to support Israel.”
Of course, given the average intelligence of the average American, I bet they’ll simply turn around and blame Iran for having had the temerity to Do Something Back…
Why am I reminded of Europe just before WWI? Sigh….
HyperIon
i’m not sure the average america is so lovey-dovey with israel now. i don’t think most people know that they get the lion’s share of our foreign aid. i’d rephrase your quesiton with: “average jewish american”… the overlap of american and israeli interests vanishes if israel preemptively nukes iran IMO.
that’s politician talk, not citizen talk.
TenguPhule
So Iran would be perfectly in its rights to decapitate America’s political heads because of the fair possibilty that the American government is going to launch an illegal attack on them in the near future?
Phoenician in a time of Romans
attacking Iran would be relatively easy – we already control the air and the sea. we could decimate the country without ever setting foot inside.
Interesting. A missile duel between Iran and the US Navy over the Straits of Hormuz.
How many Tomahawks would it take to sink Asia again?