On 2013-02-06, at 9:37 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
> At 3:21 PM -0800 6/2/13, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>> But all that effort needs is one dramatic event or episode to turn that dull interest in war, slaughter, and chaos around into a passionate conviction that Iran absolutely must be bombed to stop its non-existant nuclear weapons industry from producing a non-existant bomb out of non-existant enriched Uranium, even though most nuclear weapons use Plutonium and even though Iran has no nuclear weapons industry or Plutonium. Well they COULD IF they had a nuclear weapons industry and if they had enough enriched Uranium, they could make a bomb.
>>
>> In other words we are still in the same state of play and that has not changed in all these years.
>
> Iran has a nuclear energy industry and no-one goes to the trouble and expense of developing a nuclear energy industry unless they are interested in achieving the capability to develop nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy is far too dangerous and simply too expensive to be socially and economically viable in its own right.
>
> Except when you want to develop nuclear weapons, or you think you might want to do so in the future.
>
> The US government assumes, in the case of Iran, that the only reason for developing nuclear energy is to have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Frankly, I think they are right...The way to deal with it is to ban nuclear energy by world-wide treaty, with exceptions afforded to the nuclear weapons club. (For the entirely practical reason that those who already have nuclear weapons can't be bullied into giving them up. Because they have nuclear weapons.)
Although almost certainly unintended, your suggestion would allow Israel to retain its nuclear weapons monopoly in the Mideast. I agree it could not be bullied into nuclear disarmament even if the US were ever inclined to play that role, which of course it is not.
This is precisely why the Iranians are seeking a nuclear capability, much as the USSR did to counter to the US nuclear monopoly in the aftermath of World War II.
The threat of "mutually assured destruction" did set limits to US military aggression in China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. An Iranian bomb would place a similar restraint on Israel's unchallenged military supremacy in the region. The Israelis, for example, would be more much cautious about invading Lebanon or Gaza on the flimsiest of pretexts given the risk of an escalating uncontrollable confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran. There would no longer be arrogant loose talk about air strikes on targets inside Iran, as there is now, if the Iranians succeed in developing the capacity to threaten retaliation with nuclear-tipped missiles.
This strategic geopolitical calculation is of course what underlies Israel's efforts to halt Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons - not, as Israeli propaganda has it, the existential fear of an unprovoked nuclear attack on Tel Aviv by suicidal mad mullahs in Iran.