War! The fear mongering is here, again!

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.

Iran killed hundreds of Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon in the 1980s, and also were behind a number of kidnappings where innocent civilians were held for years. In the 1990s they killed dozens of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. More recently they've supplied dangerous weapons to insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to Robert Fisk, a major motivation for the bombing was the ill will generated by the Multinational Force (MNF) among Lebanese Muslims, especially Shiʿa living in the slums of West Beirut and around the airport where the Marines were headquartered, as they saw the MNF siding with the Maronite Catholics in their domination of Lebanon.[10] Muslim feelings against the American presence were "exacerbated when missiles lobbed by the U.S. Sixth Fleet hit innocent by-standers in the Druze-dominated Shuf mountains."[11] There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druze community in Lebanon with US direct backing of Israel in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israeli factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druze Lebanese population.

Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut during the incident, has said that "the Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented;"[12] and that,

It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.[13]

Some authors, including Thomas Friedman point to the use of this naval gunfire as the beginning point of the U.S. forces being seen as participants in the civil war rather than peace keepers and opening them up to retaliation.[14][15]

Some analysts believe the Islamic Republic of Iran was heavily involved and that a major factor leading it to participate in the attacks on the barracks was America's support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War and its extending of $2.5 billion in trade credit to Iraq while halting the shipments of arms to Iran.[16] A few weeks before the bombing, Iran warned that providing armaments to Iran's enemies would provoke retaliatory punishment.[Notes 1]

Iran having the bomb is not the end of the world but you would never know that from the people calling for military action.

Oralloy wrote:

Iran killed hundreds of Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon in the 1980s, and also were behind a number of kidnappings where innocent civilians were held for years. In the 1990s they killed dozens of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. More recently they've supplied dangerous weapons to insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US Marines were not exactly "peacekeepers". They'd taken an active role in the fighting, against Iranian friends and allies, and of course not surprisingly Israel again had gone to war against the other countries around it, and we horned it and got the brunt.

Quote:

According to Robert Fisk, a major motivation for the bombing was the ill will generated by the Multinational Force (MNF) among Lebanese Muslims, especially Shiʿa living in the slums of West Beirut and around the airport where the Marines were headquartered, as they saw the MNF siding with the Maronite Catholics in their domination of Lebanon.[10] Muslim feelings against the American presence were "exacerbated when missiles lobbed by the U.S. Sixth Fleet hit innocent by-standers in the Druze-dominated Shuf mountains."[11] There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druze community in Lebanon with US direct backing of Israel in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israeli factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druze Lebanese population.

Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut during the incident, has said that "the Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented;"[12] and that,

It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.[13]

Some authors, including Thomas Friedman point to the use of this naval gunfire as the beginning point of the U.S. forces being seen as participants in the civil war rather than peace keepers and opening them up to retaliation.[14][15]

Some analysts believe the Islamic Republic of Iran was heavily involved and that a major factor leading it to participate in the attacks on the barracks was America's support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War and its extending of $2.5 billion in trade credit to Iraq while halting the shipments of arms to Iran.[16] A few weeks before the bombing, Iran warned that providing armaments to Iran's enemies would provoke retaliatory punishment.[Notes 1]

Shia moslems are minorities or discriminated against in most of the other mideast countries except Iran and are often screwed over. We consistently support Sunni regimes or minorities. If we do that, Iran is going to go to bat for their co-religionists. Stupid, definitely non even-handed policy on our part.

In addition, what you call "insurgents" in Iraq, Iran considers friends, neighbors, co-religionists, the majority of Iraqis, consistently screwed over by the Sunni minority, who also were despised over the years by Saddam the Sunni.

We supported Iraq in their war against Iran, a war we had no strategic interest in.

We came in in an elective war, under the pretext of fighting terror, against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and pretty much ended up backing the Sunnis.

If we come in and take sides, we're damned well going to suffer the consequences. We have NEVER been even-handed in the Mideast and we get the consequences.

I don't see much I disagree with there, but the fact remains Iran was conducting attacks beyond their borders, which was the claim I was objecting to.

We accepted China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea getting the bomb without doing anything.

If Israel keeps saber rattling and threatening to bomb anyone they don't like,

and refuses to settle or even seriously negotiate the issues that have threatened middle east peace for the last sixty years,

although again, according to 16 US intelligence agencies, they are not.

It's called Mutual Assured Destruction. It kept the US and Russia from killing each other for sixty years because neither of us was quite stupid enough to test it.

If Israel is stupid enough to test it, and from years of evidence Netanyahu just might be, I think this time around they are in fact likely to bring a firestorm down on their own heads.

So were we, much farther away, against Iran's friends and neighbors, against people they share a common very important bond with, and have had long-standing ties with in spite of largely arbitrary European-imposed national borders.

fast breeder reactors are typically cooled with liquid metals, not water.

BillRM wrote:

such reactors are not localed by large water sources because of that fact.

BillRM wrote:

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.

engineer wrote:

Yes, I think continous bombardment of Iran would eventually result in them surrendering and I think our casualties would be very low. That very scenario is why they want the bomb. One A-bomb takes out a carrier group. Without it, they have absolutely no defense against a carrier group working a hundred miles away. As long as the US can sit a carrier or three offshore and run bombing missions at will with minimal risk, there will be some in the US who see that as a valid option. As for a country willing to let us use their facilities I'm sure Israel would offer up some airfields and I'm not so sure that the US couldn't buy off some former Soviet states. They did for Iraq.

I'm sorry, but are you saying this would be a good idea? What do you think would be going on across the Middle East? What do you think China will be doing while all this is going on?

They can study any war they care to however that is not going to slow us down one little bit and yes we can take deep bunkers by hitting one spot over and over with earth penetrating bombs without nukes being needed.

Here is the projection of the blast radius of the Hiroshima bomb. Note that within one mile - complete destruction. Even within two miles would neutralize the threat.

As to size typical a-bombs are easily small enough to fit on warhead - they are small enough to fit in backbacks. I've seen a nuclear tipped torpedo. We're not talking ICBM sized warheads here.

BillRM wrote:

All this with them knowing that they would crease to be a nation shortly after they did any harm to naval ships using nukes?

Only if they did it agressively. If they were being attacked from the sea and took the only defensive measure available to them, much of the world would not regard a nuclear counter-strike from the US as warranted. Everyone agrees you don't strike first but I think many people would think using nucs in self defense is not out of bounds.

this may have been brought up already, but...

how is attaching a bomb to a scientist's car and detonating it in public that much different from flying an airplane into a building?

A dozen small nukes used against Israeli would result in hundreds of nukes on their heads as the best guess is that the Israeli is in the same class as such counties as England and France with over 300 advance nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

But yes, if Iran nuked Israel, Iran would be destroyed.

oralloy wrote:

But yes, if Iran nuked Israel, Iran would be destroyed.

hopefully it doesn't happen until Iran has a good supply to assure mutually assured destruction, win/win situation