The whole affair has been so bizarre.
This does not resemble what I would imagine a fight for civilization survival to look like. I’m talking about the stakes being you win or you, your family, and every man, woman and infant you know is going to be killed or starved in concentration camps.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...>
And the later "retaliation" against local bases by Iran was in the same, choreographed public fashion. At this point it seems to be a very respectful gentleman's conflict. It's very unlike some of the wars we've got entangled in, for sure. It seems like both sides sort of acknowledge that if we don't play fair, if it's not choreographed, if we don't stick to the rules, we really possess the power for world-ending, horrific conflict.
Was in your reality also the complete iranian leadership killed without warning, while they were discissing negotiations with the other side?
Israel also has a lot more options for retaliations against Iran then nukes.
The idea that they're holding back from hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv because of nukes could well be fanciful, but it is hard to know what their calculations are. As an armchair general it seems like it'd be good for Iran to blow it up nukes or no but war is always a bit uncertain.
They seem to be correct because Israel has not nuked Iran in responses.
Iran doesn't actually want to hit Israel hard, or at least doesn't want to do it right now. If they did, they wouldn't rattle their sabers so hard before each giant volley toward Israel, giving the Israelis ample time to prepare for a strike.
Although hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv seems like it would be a great tit-for-tat strike to really annoy the US and Israelis without threatening them in a way that will provoke a nuclear response or doing real damage to civilians. So I don't see why they'd purposefully hold back on that.
Attacks trying to topple the Israeli state, in essence. Knocking out profitable capital is quite unlikely to do it.
Anything existential. (Tehran doesn’t currently have that capability.)
The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.
Nuking Iran was never in the cards. We could have done that in 1979 and any time since. Ukraine has nothing to do with it. The red lines that would provoke a nuclear response from the US are pretty well known -- the US foreign policy establishment hashed out this stuff 75 years ago. Iran could get nuked by the US if it used NBC weapons against the US or our allies. No amount of bad behavior with conventional weapons is going to do it.
People in charge of nuclear armed countries are worried about the end of the so-called "nuclear taboo" which has kept countries from using nukes for 80 years, and they're not going to break it over a third rate power like Iran unless that third rate power actually acquires nukes and makes a credible threat to use them. We didn't use them in Korea or Vietnam. We didn't use them in Afghanistan. We haven't nuked North Korea. All more serious situations than the one in which we find ourselves today.
When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.
Here's a good video on the topic concentrating on the possible Russian use of nukes in Ukraine:
Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years. And they have training: all those Iranian science majors at universities during/after the Shah was deposed are candidates. They've had 40 years to study, play and worship. As a friend says, Pakistan got the bomb and if they can do it, anyone can!
Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
laughing_man says "...use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded"
That's the situation they're in. Furthermore many of them are "holy warriors" for whom death is a reward. 72 virgins waitihg for each martyr - I can almost smell the testosterone from here.[Note to countermeasures people: possibly use smell to "sniff them out" of their caves and hidey-holes?? Farhad's flatulence brings him down, bwahahaahaaaaah!8-))]
laughing_man says [dirty bomb] "not a very practical weapon".
Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
Seems the Russians read the same comic strip and took it to heart:
https://www.wired.com/2007/09/soviet-doomsday/
and
https://www.unrevealedfiles.com/russias-dead-hand-the-doomsd...
who's to say Iranians are any different (albeit hornier - though granted it really is a lot colder in Russia than in Paradise!).
laughing_man says: "When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.?"
No shit, Sherlock! You're waking up. "Nuclear deterrence" is dead IMO (The July/August 2026 issue of "Foreign Affairs" magazine discusses this). [I hope there's no rush, I haven't yet bought a plane ticket. Goddammit! Probably end up rowing again!8-((].
"raw material" != "material".
While I assume they could've purified enough of the former into the latter by this point if they wanted to, it is a much much harder thing to do than to say.
> Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
No, what she discovered was *polonium*, not *plutonium*.
She named polonium that in support of the nationhood of Poland (which was at the time was partitioned between three countries), despite discovering it she never actually isolated it because polonium has a half life of 138 days which makes it a really really small fraction of the total material.
Polonium was first isolated in 1902 by Willy Marckwald who managed a whole 3 milligrams and even then it took another three years for people to realise what he'd isolated was the same thing Marie Curie had found. It took 15 tons of pitchblende to get those 3mg.
*Plutonium* on the other hand was first discovered in 1934. Plutonium (and uranium) is the stuff that makes fission bombs. It takes tens of kilograms of uranium or plutonium per bomb.
Purification of chemical elements (both polonium and plutonium) is much, much easier than separating the isotopes of uranium; and you need to purify ("enrich") uranium to a specific isotope to manufacture more than trivial quantities of plutonium. (And, indeed, polonium).
> Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?
Also, cobalt bombs != dirty bombs:
A cobalt bomb is a bomb powered by a nuclear explosion, that has enhanced fallout.
A dirty bomb is a normal, non-nuclear, explosive, that has some radioisotopes attached to it.
The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building.
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=google....
ben_w: "You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?"
I was telling a story about my early life! Get a grip! It was a lead-in to a)the Soviet doomsday device which may have been real and may still be around and b)to my early fright at the nasty side-effects of nuclear weapons.
ben_wL "The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building."
Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone.
Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc. Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.
> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.
You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.
> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.
Spare you the most important point?
> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.
Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.
At the time of the accident in the reactor of the fourth power-generating unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the core contained 1659 fuel assemblies. Each assembly contained 114.7 kg of uranium, and therefore the reactor contained a total of 114.7 x 1659 = 190,287.3 kg of uranium. If the amount of fuel is calculated according to the uranium dioxide, i.e. in the form in which the fuel was loaded into the fuel elements, then its mass in each fuel element was 3.6 kg. A fuel assembly consists of 36 fuel elements, and therefore the reactor contained 3.6 x 36 x 1659 = 215,006.4 kg of uranium dioxide. The investigations performed in the destroyed buildings showed that the nuclear fuel after the accident is found in three main modifications: in the form of uranium dioxide tablets, in the form in which it was loaded into the reactor; in a dispersed form as dust and aerosol; and in a remelted state, in the form of a lavalike fuel-containing mass. This paper discusses the amount of nuclear fuel in the lavalike mass at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
In comparison, the one which levelled Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.
Q. Would it be possible to economically move the fission component into a standardized nuclear reactor that could then generate electrical power?
IOW is there a "swords to plowshares" solution to the disposal of fission weapons or, once you've made one, are you stuck with a device that can only be used to blow things up?
Reason I ask is, I see Russia et al sitting on all these weapons which cost a great deal, are no doubt costly to maintain and of little or no benefit to anyone (well, other than as a threat). [I mean, it's almost like owning a fleet of BMWs but even less useful! ] If we could build a "reactor framework" into which we could move a single warhead's fuel and that fuel could generate electrical power until sufficiently diminished to be of little/no use as a weapon, then that would IMO be a very good thing. Countries like Russia who had a closet of nukes but no money could sell the nuclear fuel off and benefit, buyers could get electrical power cheaper(?), and the world would be better off. Everybody wins.
Or is making a nuclear weapon effectively an economic one-way street (i.e., you're stuck paying for it forever?
Plutonium is its own special thing, and I don't know much about its use in reactors: while it's definitely possible to use as reactor fuel, I can't speak to the cost or effort required. Apparently plutonium is a PITA when it comes to metallurgy, but while this makes it hard to process into a weapon, I don't know if it also makes it hard to process back to fuel.
The Russkies have lots of nukes but no cash. They're apparently as money-illiterate as I am, which is pretty awful. But if converting warheads to "heaters" (for everything from heating to power generation) would be worth a fortune, then it might be enough to rebuild Russia's economy.
Furthermore, it might be a way to save OpenAI by creating cheaper power supplies for AI datacenters [just kidding about this last one - always like to get the AIers excited, see if their stocks rise!].
They already did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
A little too well, in fact, undercutting other suppliers; to quote from the page:
The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US.
Mostly the classified security measures kind of safeguard: Make sure nobody can come in and steal the hard-to-make enriched weapons grade stuff before it gets blended down.
For material handling, everything I've heard about uranium as a metal is fairly mundane. Just:
• don't ingest it, lick it, or sniff it, it's an alpha emitter and a heavy metal
• don't grind it while you work on it, not only do you not want to breathe in a dusty alpha emitter, the dust is pyrophoric, i.e. catches fire in air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophoricity#Pyrophoric_mater...
• and make sure the weapons-grade chunks are not ever under any circumstances near each other while working on them, for which the main big surprise is "do not work them into cylinders, because cylinders can roll towards each other and end up touching".
Bullshit. Without historical data, you can't recreate experiments!
Why bother posting such nonsense?
In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).
It might move the needle 15%.
That is not the only reason the United States doesn’t flatten Iran with nukes. It’s not even a consideration. How are you even arriving at such a conclusion?
Doesn’t matter. This question turns entirely on what Israel’s leadership thinks. If they’re faced with an existential threat, nukes are likely on the table.
Safe reminder both Israel and Iran, and arguably Iran more so, commit “war crimes”.
The semblance of an international order post world war 2 at least suggested that we as a species were attempting to move toward a better place. Many notable breaches occurred but there was a much stronger universal condemnation of each, with real political repercussions even for western powers.
> The semblance of an international order post world war 2 at least suggested that we as a species were attempting to move toward a better place.
Unfortunately neither Russia, China, Iran (Hamas/Palestine, Hezbollah, Houthis, &c), North Korea, Cuba nor other anti-western actors valued that order and instead have sought to destroy it. The world we live in today and the issues we are seeing are primarily due to their actions. In each circumstance the above list (and there are others) demonstrably took actions under their authoritarian anti-democratic governments or societies to break down the order you value.
You have the right to believe what you like, in my opinion the consequences for blaming our own crimes on others is dire.
> You have the right to believe what you like, in my opinion the consequences for blaming our own crimes on others is dire.
Nobody forced Iran to kill 30,000+ of its own people, try to build nuclear bombs, fund terrorists who have and continue to kill innocent people throughout the Middle East, and more. Those are their crimes that they are blamed for and those are the ones that we should be talking about mostly because that’s what matters.
It’s rather strange for you to try and take away the agency of others people, countries, or civilizations or infantilize them.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
I suspect that Iran knows that going after Dubai would upset a lot of American (and Sunni) billionaires.
...which I now return to...
You may be confused with southern Lebanon, which is.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
At the peak Iran fired 650 missiles at Israel and only killed 28 people, mostly from hitting a single residential building. These days Iran is only firing small salvos into gulf states and only 20-30 drones at a time. I'd be surprised if they could pull off 2025 numbers when they fired a hundred at Israel.
One way of interpreting that statistic is that they are running out of munitions. Another way is to consider that stockpiles are not running low, but the initial response was a collection of high-burn, uncoordinated, decentralized tactical actions after an attempted decapitation-strike disrupted top-down C&C. Now that the fog of war has cleared, and communication has been restored, a more strategic regime is now in effect.
At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.
Although what has changed is that Israël is no longer getting guns for free they need to pay for it same as everyone else. Progress!
Also, Israel will not abandon (or be abandoned) by the US, but the others might want to cut their losses if supporting the US becomes costlier than being neutral.
The game being played is extremely interesting, with high stakes and no margin for error. Too bad people die.
Won’t be pretty, as no empire has ever fallen peacefully.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
The Saudi main army is pretty incompetent, but the Royal Guard is extremely effective. They are separately trained by the West and maintain comms separate from the main army. And now they've teamed up with Pakistan, which has one of the best air forces in the region.
Qatar recently opened up a route for citizenship to foreign veterans who serve in their armed forces. That guarantees them a steady supply of soldiers from the region should the need arise.
The most vulnerable are Bahrain and Kuwait, but both of them have had help with security actions from their more competent neighbors.
One> An executive has to care about a cost center, then proceeds to invest in prevention instead of looking like a hero after, instead of putting off a fire an getting a promotion or bonus. Which is nigh impossible.
Two> Our tech overlords try to push for our cyberpunk present to at least look kinda cool. Which they also refuse todo.
(I realize it’s a stretch from what you’re suggesting but if you think about it, not really)
government contractors may be embedded in high stakes situations.
<https://diamond-age.bib.bz/security-measures-adopted-by-atla...>
UAE has been down for months, Bahrain is now offline, Saudi Arabia is still under construction.