War! The fear mongering is here, again!

LOL It you can not power the nuclear enrichment centrifuges because all your power plants had been wipe the centrifuges are junk just to start with.

Yeah, right, and the Persians are really, really stupid (like you), they'd never think of that, would they?

Oh . . . i forgot to display my inteweb savvy . . . lol, lol, lol . . .

What the **** are you trying to say? This is gibberish, the only thing that makes sense is LOL. Stick to acronyms, words are just too tricky.

What disturbs me is that i'm starting to be able to translate his bullshit into English.

They can think of it all they wish to however you need power by the megwatts far far more then any back up power generators you could bury with them and even if you could somehow get that kind of a power source in a deep hole how are you going to move the fuel to them to keep them running?

Sorry thinking is not the same as being able to do anything about the problem.

We can stop their nuclear program dead by air power alone anytime we care to do so.

True, but the purpose in WWII was different. We needed to remove the soldiers. In Iran all we have to do is degrade their capability from 21st century to mid 20th century. Make the power unreliable, make the powers that be focus on day to day survival, make it hard for supplies to come and go, make people focus more on how to get food and shelter instead of fancy engineering projects and you can significantly degrade the Iranian program. You have to significanly degrade the entire country to do it but it can be done. If the scientists are huddled in their bunkers not working on nuclear fuel, that is a win by some standards. I'm not saying that this is desirable, only that it is certainly possible and you know that someone somewhere is mapping out a solution path that looks a lot more like making a parking lot than making a surgical strike.

Jeeze, what a dipshit. I quoted that for the irony, not that i expect that you'll understand that. It apparently does not occur to you that uranium can be "enriched" in a breeder reactor. Those need to be refueled only when all of the original fissile material has been processed. How long to you think western nations can keep bombing everything that moves in Iran, bright boy? Longer than the uranium or thorium core in a breeder reactor takes to convert?

Turning Iran into a parking lot is exactly the line my thinking was taking. If you do that, you lose. First because you'd have to nuke them, and then all bets are off, not simply in Iran, but with just about all the rest of the world population. Second because the fanatical members of the Revolutionary Guard who survived would be very likely to make every effort consistent with their considerable skills to get one or more "dirty bombs" into the United States. I doubt that any administration would be willing to risk that on the dubious proposition that we can permanently shut down their nuke program with air strikes alone.

Quite apart from that, i suspect Iran wants this program for its deterent value. Given that Israel very likely has their own nukes (the intelligence investigative unit of the Congress believes they have biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction--the B and C of ABC weapons technology--but haven't commented on the A portion of that acronym), i consider Iran's attitude to be ordinary realpolitik. In fact, i was thinking parking lot because if the Revolutionary Guard or their proxies ever did smuggle a suitcase nuke or a dirty bomb into the United States, Teheran would be a parking lot by the end of the week. They know that. The fact that many of them (some few mullahs and a good deal of the Revolutionary Guard) are fanatics is not evidence that they are either stupid or suicidal.

To put that succinctly in the context of the original idiotic premise of this thread--this is all tempest in a teapot stuff. We are very unlikely to shut down their nuke program, and they are very unlikely to use nukes for a first strike against anyone.

I note that the Iranian president was on a tour of Venezuela and Nicaragua this week. At the moment they're not daft enough to try smuggling in a suitcase nuke, but if Iran is getting bombed, all bets are off. How hard would it be to smuggle a suitcase nuke/dirty bomb into the States from South America? They seem to get cocaine in without much bother.

No you bring up technology they do not even have on line?

Ok they had a breeder reactor in a deep deep hole in the ground and you would think the problem is solve for them?

Sorry that breeder reactor is generating megwatts of power that is going into heat and is going to need one hell of a large supply of waters pump into that hole to cool it and guess what we bomb the pumps and other hardware that can not be in the hole with it.

Once more no matter what you dream up in hardware they do not have with total control of the air and with our weapons we could stop any nuclear program by air power alone.

You are delusional . . . but i've known that for a long time. Not only do you not understand the technical side of the issue, as always, you can't express yourself coherently in what is allegedly your native language. Come back when you have learned to speak English, and maybe we'll talk.

Footnote breeder reactors do not enrich uranium but created plutonium my nuclear engineer and is a far harder material to make a bomb out of as you can not used a simple gun design trigger.

I think we've shown in Iraq that you can level something without using nucs but yes, use of overwhelming force would (once again) put the US on the outs with a lot of the world. I also agree that such force would create more extremists than it would remove. The reality is that we don't have an Iranian extremist issue today. The US is kind of a caricature in Iran, a red devil with horns that isn't really real. Bombing the daylights out of them would change that pretty quickly. But I strongly disagree that no "administration would be willing to risk that on the dubious proposition that we can permanently shut down their nuke program with air strikes alone." I would have argued that no administration would have believed that we could quickly subdue Iraq or Afganistan but clearly one did and those people are still around and still have the same beliefs. There are still people, influential people, who believe that military pressure can be brought to bear to force a beaten Iran to discontinue their programs and allow the UN to inspect their facilities. You don't have to hit the facilities themselves if you make them surrender.


On this we are in complete agreement. My greatest concern is that "fear mongering" is once again being used to drive the US to a policy decision that in completely counterproductive for the US. Iran having the bomb is not the end of the world but you would never know that from the people calling for military action.

I suspect that members of the DEA are on the payroll of that pipeline. A few years back, a journalist got a package about the size of a window air conditioner smuggled into the United States by sea--i have no reason to suspect that hole has been plugged.

This is for Bill the LOL Idiot:

I wanted to check to make sure before posting this--fast breeder reactors are typically cooled with liquid metals, not water. As for plutonium devices, the second bomb we detonated over Japan was a plutonium implosion bomb. By today's standards, building such a bomb is not rocket science. As usual, you don't know what the **** you're talking about.

Yes breeder reactors do no need a river of water to cool them and all such reactors are not localed by large water sources because of that fact.

You can bury them into deep holes and not run a river of water into the hole and out of the hole.

Fool.................................

I beg to differ--you aren't going to take out deep underground bunkers with anything short of nukes. Taking out the military control centers in Iraq was relatively simple because they were relatively stupid designs. Don't doubt for a moment that the Revolutionary Guard has thoroughly studied that war.

Invading Afghanistan was not predicated upon quickly subduing them, it was an historically classic case of ultimatum, rejection of utlimatum and invasion. The invasion of Iraq was certainly predicated on doing it quick, cheap and dirty, and, of course, that was all delusion. But the invasion of Iraq was predicated on an ideological position outlined as early as 1997 by the PNAC. It was not done as an intelligent military operation, it was done because the neo-cons thought it should be done, and were faced with carrying on two wars at once. An Nasiriyah (sp?) is a perfect example. Our troops blew through the town and took the Euphrates river bridge in short order. Then, without having secured the city, nor having assured that there were no Iraqi forces present who could contest the position, they attempted to push logistical support columns through the town and over the river. As soon as the front-line forces who had taken the city were across the river and moving forward, the local Iraqi commander brought out his forces and began attacking the support columns, which were not equipped to fight for control of the city. Military operational effectiveness had been sacrificed to political expedience, and operations were carried out on the basis of an undemonstrated assumption that Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse.

Compare that to the operations of Centcom under Schwartzkopf in the first gulf war. He took the time to build up his forces, position them, amass reams of reliable military intelligence, after which he unleashed overwhelming force on an enemy unprepared to deal with it. American and French columns went through the Republican Guard like a hot knife through butter. They didn't just blow through them, they mopped them up and completely neutralized them before moving on. Schwartzkopf and company didn't miss a trick, it was a military grand slam. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Schwartzkopf's father was our man in Teheran during the Second World War, and he brought his family to Teheran after the war. Schwartzkopf the younger attended high school in Teheran.

Even before the invasion in 2003, retired military officers acting as "talking heads" for the new media were saying we would need occupation specialists (an expert group of officers whom we have had since the Second World War) to go into Iraq right behind the invasion. This was neglected. Proper manpower allocation was not possible while maintaining troop levels in Afghanistan, and so Rummy used Reserves and National Guard, and did not provide them adequate equipment, specifically failing to give them body armor and properly armored HUMVs. Just about any way you could think to **** up the operation they did. They were also apparently unaware of the dynamic of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, an organization of the Sunni minority who lost just about everything in the invasion, and thereafter had nothing left to lose. Isolating and eventually capturing Hussein did not "decapitate" Iraqi resistance to the occupation. The neocons were in such a rush to carry out their program that they neglected even the most rudimentary military provisions for a successful invasion and ocupation.

I will stipulate that if there were somebody as stupid as Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry in the White House, and they ignored the expert advice of professional military advisors, you could get something that stupid. I'm not all that impressed with Mr. Obama, either. I can think of few things more stupid than this plan to carry out joint military exercises with the Israelis. It looks like deliberate provocation (even if not intended that way), it serves no useful purpose in our relations with the nations of the middle east, and very likely will alienate the good will of the other nations of the middle east.

The only way to make the Persians surrender would be an air campaign of such magnitude that enormous civilian casualties would result. You have, of course, already stipulated the stupidity of such a program. I would also ask you where you think we could base the resources to carry out such an air campaign. Iraq, the Gulf states, Afghanistan--i don't think so. It would invite terrorist attacks on a grand scale. I feel fairly certain that Turkey would not cooperate, and i feel just as certain that the former Soviet states in the region would no cooperate. Do you think it could be done from carriers alone? Do you have any idea what it would cost to do the operation that way, without even considering our casualties?