Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means no more flamewar comments.
We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac, it would also be a bad idea to do it over Iran's posturing.
The US killed their national hero last year and we got a measured, proportionate response rather than lighting Iraq on fire.
Trying to pre-emptively "bomb Iran into the stone age" would not only be barbaric, it would result in a hail of scuds hitting Tel Aviv. You don't want that.
Of course - nobody has any intention of actually dropping nukes on anyone.
It's about power and leverage, and Iran's ability to project their dominance towards destabilizing and overthrowing House of Saud, and maybe disrupting/overthrowing Israel some day as well.
Since House of Saud actually has nukes (they paid for Pakistani program so that 'in a time of need' nukes will magically appear in their arsenal) all of this is bad for everyone.
In the 'balance of power' it actually makes a tiny bit of sense that 'small actor surrounded by 10 enemies', Israel, has 'secret nukes' because from a strategic perspective, it would be suicidal for them to use in anything other than an existential scenario of defence. If they were not building homes in Occupied Territories, I think more people would probably more readily acknowledge their defensive requirements. Also of course the fact that most people alive today don't have living memory of the many times Israel was invaded/fought wars with direct neighbours, many times bigger than it, and the outcomes were never going to be clear.
It would be better for everyone if Iran just gave up it's nuclear ambitions - there is zero chance anyone is going to invade them, they could join the rest of the world and start using their Oil dollars to buy plastic junk from China and software from the US, and physical gear from Germany - just like the rest of us - their people can be much wealthier, and we could all get along.
Definitely would improve their international stature if they stopped occupying, but they are still a state organized around an ethnic group.
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Serious question: at what point is it no longer rational to return land wrongfully taken? To displace millions of people and remove their right to self-govern? Practically every nation in existence came to be by taking land from someone at some point.
I agree that the "right of return" thing was BS. But it happened. I think the best course of action now is figure out how to move forward without wronging even more people.
This is not about long-ago occurences, this is about active steps Israel is taking now to maintain their status as an ethnostate.
Now we fear the theocratic muslims because their fanaticism is stronger than their sense of self preservation.
It turns out this is all propaganda, no state is keen on destroying the world, and it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.
No, it's really not. It's akin to citizens wanting to walk around with ARs in case they need to defend themselves. No, worse, because at least an AR wont annihilate everyone around you after you're already dead.
The value in having nuclear weapons is the threat that you could spitefully take your opponents out with you. The danger in having nuclear weapons is that some day it could actually happen.
Mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent. It's an eventuality - one which we should be vigilantly protecting against.
Unlike other nuclear states, Iran is governed by religious zealots.
In that case their highest religious authority has issued a fatwa against weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and since they're religious zealots they would honour that fatwa.
So they're either very religious, and should pose no danger because of that, or they're not very religious, in which case they would pose no danger.
Area of Hiroshima: 350.1 square miles
Area of Israel: 8,019 square miles
> From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.
This really isn't helping you, because if you're an Iranian and your government says "That country over there says their only logical choice is to bomb us into the stone age!" well what do you expect to happen?
Of course, predictably, both countries can (and will) play the same game, distracting people from actual issues like corruption. In the end, both governments win, while people loses everywhere.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Doesn't look like even that would wipe out Israel in one go
(permalink: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=32.062921...)
You're technically right -- the blast radius isn't covering all of Israel -- but third degree burns across ~50% of the entire landmass would be hell.
hydrogen bombs are where things really get scarier though.
What? How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver? Tsar Bomba could take out a major city, and had a blast radius roughly comparable with Tel Aviv. This is horrific to even contemplate; I've got friends who live there. But it's nowhere even close to the entirety of Israel; and you can bet your ass that their nukes are distributed well enough to prevent a single point of failure. If Iran got a single nuke off, Israel would still be capable of a disproportionate response.
Agreed. This is the key phrase here. "Deliver". Building a nuclear weapon is only part of the equation. Delivering it such that it gets somewhere that evades defenses and detonates in a place and manner in which it's effective is hard.
Tsar Bomba, since it was mentioned, was an impressive device, but utterly impractical as a weapon. It was of enormous weight and required unreasonable engineering just to drop it.
You're also quite right in that nuclear weapons, while powerful, are not necessarily the "end all" that they're often made out to be. Israel's geography does complicate this somewhat; there's little strategic depth and much of the population is concentrated along the coast which makes the impacts disproportionately larger against Israeli national assets.
A Palestinian might find that statement ironic but either way I'd disagree with it. Threaten as they might I don't believe Iran to be suicidal.
>One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
Do you think they're building a bigger tsar bomba or something?
>Pushed hard enough they may just so that.
Somehow I think starting an almost unwinnable war that'll probably lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths isn't going to improve Israels security situation.
lolwut? Absolute nonsense. A 60kt nuke, size of the largest India has ever tested, wouldn't even dose like half of Tel-Aviv's land area, let alone the whole country.
Sorry I didn’t do a full break down on on how to eliminate all life in a country. Others have certainly made efforts to exterminate Jews. Perhaps you would care to study how that went.
Only a few big cities. So maybe a dozen nukes would be sufficient.
So do North Korea and used to do Cuba. For at least some part, that’s for internal politics. Also, it’s typically the weaker party that makes such explicit threats (if the weaker party knows they’re the weaker one, the stronger party doesn’t need to be so explicit)
> One nuke will piss America off.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
One nuke on Israel likely will piss America off, too, and rapidly will lead to the end of the Iranian regime.
I think Iran won’t launch a nuke at Israel because they know that, even if Israel cannot retaliate, the USA will.
Some people say Iran, having seen what happened to Iraq, simply wants to have the deterrent of nuclear weapons, just as Israel does. I think there’s at least some truth in that.
They might have the better PR team, but for sure looking at actions rather than just words, it's clear who's the bad guy putting aside the whole typical "our ally" narrative.
It's not clear that they could actually deliver a nuclear weapon, of course. And certainly not all the way to America.
Nuclear weapons are not offensive weapons, certainly not when you're small enough so that any such attack on your part would only result in you being completely annihilated in retaliation. Nuclear weapons are an insurance policy against others deciding that you're ripe for "regime change" and/or invasion.
From what we know Israel also has the bomb and for the exact same reason.
What a nasty world we live in.
It reminds me of Hemingway, with the difference that he was able to write full paragraphs.
Gone are the days where threatening to wipe jews off the planet was considered rhetoric. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I'm not going to defend the current iranian gouverment, but aren't jews in Iran a recognized minority and have a seat in parliament?
So it seems they don't have anything against the religion per se.
https://static2.rokna.net/thumbnail/SkVEB41uf6ga/NS2RJzVApQ3...
https://cdn.yjc.ir/files/fa/news/1396/4/5/6417989_951.jpg
https://newsmedia.tasnimnews.com/Tasnim/Uploaded/Image/1396/...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%B4%D9%...
these counters are installed in every city in Iran.
This is what everyone knew was going to happen. The interesting question is if "this" (an unstable persian geopolitics) is what they wanted or just an accident.
The deal did not 'regulate' Iran - is the argument being made.
Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough, and that Iran would effectively pursue nukes along with economic liberalism.
This might be true! But it was replaced with a situation where there are no requirements at all. And here we are. If you have a better policy idea you need to implement the better policy and not just take your toys and go home.
An attack like this is military - which could be carried out by terrorists or a govt.
The difference is important.
> Would it be acceptable for Iran to assassinate Israeli nuclear scientists in Israel?
Acceptable? No. Terrorism? Also no.
A military attack is a thing you know. Not everything is terrorism.
Anti-terrorism conventions define terrorism as explicitly including unlawful killings with the intent to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.
I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
What are you talking about "facility"? The human, named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was a military target, since he was the head of the nuclear weapons program in Iran.
I'm unclear what the relevance of "many civilians around". Do you imagine military targets are always isolated with never any civilians near them?
> I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
A scientist in the US or Israel working on developing a nuclear weapon would be a military target. Why does this surprise you?
There's a reason you don't know the names of any scientists in the US or Israel working on nuclear weapons: They would instantly become targets.
Do you imagine war is some kind of game where everyone is like "it's my turn now", and there's a referee?
This is in contrast to the MO of most of Europe and even the United States.
Iran funds and supports groups who have declared, and continue to make war on Israel as a proxy for themselves doing it. They are happy to expend every single one of their proxy armies and munitions if they can avoid the direct consequences of action.
The groups that Iran supports carry out assassinations. Kidnappings. Mass murder. Direct attacks on non-combatant populations, aka war crimes. They cyber attack where they can. They physically attack where they can get their cannon fodder to do the wet work.
So, what's your point? That Israel is "evil" for demonstrating dangerous teeth behind its deterrence?
There's a game siblings sometimes play. One hits another. The injured party responds in kind. The first, the aggressor, calls their parents and complains that the second hit the first and was the aggressor. The second is then punished by the parent for aggression.
This has been the rhetorical, and effectively actual history of the conflicts since prior to the founding of Israel. Iran was a "friend" until they ... changed direction ... in 1979.
Israel is defending itself, actively, against existential threats. If the act of defending itself and its people causes you to label it as evil, that's your business.
Iran is not defending itself against existential threats. It is actively on the offense along multiple fronts. Its activities directly and indirectly cause death of non-combatants. That is, IMO, a very basic and simple definition of evil. This isn't defense. This is offense. For the express purpose of achieving the goals they have enthusiastically repeated for decades.
If you don't think that is evil, that is your business as well.
If you find yourself arguing against the entity that is the victim of the aggressor entity, I think you have some deep internal reflecting to do. Because such a position, is advocating against defending against actual attacks. Which the aggressor entity has done, in the open, through proxies, as well as in secret. Israel is not the aggressor entity.
If this is what you support, or cannot bring yourself to accept, and insist that this is "narrative" ...
Again, best thing to do is lots of internal reflection.
Edit: HN commenters are so thick. First of all GP says everyone hate Israel. So that must include you the reader of this comment. If you actually take that shit serious and then have a problem with my comment instead all I can say is that you should look in a mirror too. It's a fat lie. Not everyone hates Israel. Actually most on HN loves Israel and always heavily upvote pro-israel stories.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, you've posted so many of these that I've gone ahead and banned you. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
There's a reason why there's a separate word in most languages for "anti-semitism" but not for "anti-italianism" or "anti-brasilianism".
Surprised to see that here.
I don't deny that anti-semitism exists, but to suggest that a principled opposition to Israel is "extremely rare" is bogus.
And to other people reading this, this poster seriously thinks that antisemitism is because "all Jews are assholes". I'm truly shocked to see such things on this site, although maybe I should expect that.
Let's contrast it with fundamentalist Iranian islamic government, hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's, hanging their journalists and publicly executing dissidents.
I am not sure there is a shred of doubt who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here.
Israel is occupying Palestine, mobility controlled by checkpoints and passes a la South Africa, and actively takes actions to ensure that non-jewish people do not gain a majority in the country.
Israel extends a "right of return" only to displaced people who are of a certain ethnicity.
I have no ideea why you think this is relevant to your otherwise valid point. Iran and Israel are very similar here, one never signed the NPT and other signed it but is in non-compliance with the terms. Both states essentially don't care about what the other countries think of their nuclear activities - as is their right under international law.
In case you really need this much of a primer: (some) Muslims don't like Jews because they're following Muhammad's lead. Specifically, Muhammad had this to say about Jews in one of the Hadith:
> The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.
Of course the Jews (for their part) say that Muhammad was a false prophet. On balance though, they also say this about Jesus.
But in the centuries preceding Mandatory Palestine, there was not a sizable Jewish population in the area.
Probably not, since Islam is not thousands of years old.
Regardless though, I'm not sure "Jews weren't being attacked because there weren't many Jews to attack" is much of an argument.
If you can accept that, the same thing with “events related to Mandatory Palestine” in place of 9/11, Muslims in place of Christians, and Jews in place of Muslims should not be much of a stretch.