War on Iran

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Imperfectionist, Apr 14, 2005.

  1. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    It seems that GWB has requested war plans for attacking Iran in June, and has begun to frame their nuclear energy program as a means to develop nuclear weapons, even though they have none, and every nuclear program that includes fuel production is technically dual-use. It probably would not include a ground invasion of troops, but a bombing of nuclear facilities. Does this seem likely?
     
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  3. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

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    Yes, have to make the world understand who is in charge. Neocons would like too conquer, occupy, and set up a puppet regime in Iran, but after Iraq has not gone according to plan they will have to settle for bombings that demonstrate the strength of America and the weakness of Iran and the world. Theory says that Iranians might revolt when they see that the current regime is weak. Unfortunately for the Neocons their theories are just pseudointellectual meaningless blather.
     
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  5. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    Is is possible that this plan would backfire, and cause the nationalistic Iranians to support their own government, instead of a neocon puppet regime?
     
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  7. Brian Foley REFUSE - RESIST Valued Senior Member

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    ISRAEL IS CRANKING UP THE PROPAGANDA AGAINST IRAN

    So when your loved one comes home at 2AM inside a cheap metal box with a cheap US flag draped over it, you will remember whose bright idea this latest war was.
     
  8. Sauron Dark Lord, on the Dark Throne Registered Senior Member

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    Well-put, Foley.

    Reminds me of the few days and weeks immediately after 9/11: Mossad tried to convince the new and inexperienced Bush administration that it was Saddam that was behind the attack.

    Not because Israel had any evidence, of course. Instead, because they knew if the USA could be convinced that Saddam was at fault, then Israel could get a shocked and angered USA to do the dirty work of taking out Saddam for Israel.

    Tricky bastards.

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  9. otheadp Banned Banned

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    every nation on earth should be concerned with Iran's potential nuclear ambitions.
    not just Israel, or other countries within Iran's missile range. they have many enemies - religion wise, politics wise, and insanity wise.

    you don't lose sleep over France's WMDs, even if the head of state is a retard. only fanatical governments such as in Iran creat concern. these should be watched like a hawk watches a little insect on the ground from a mile up. any infintecimally small possibility that Iran could acquire nukes should be challenged. that means that if a nuke program is "dual use", the potential for nukes exists and needs to be acted upon.

    diplomacy is a good way to start. hopefully no bombing of anything is needed. the good Iranian people should not pay with their lives for the insanity of their unelected and hated rulers. (i'm referring to Khamenei and the "Guardian Council", not to Khatami who has no power to even wipe his own ass with out permission)
     
  10. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    I don't think Bush is interested in diplomacy, after all, he's going to appoint John Bolton to the UN, probabaly because they don't anticipate using diplomacy at all. Bolton does not believe in the UN, he once said that 10 floors of the UN building could be destroyed, and they wouldn't be missed.

    Doesn't Iran have elections? Also, aren't all nuclear programs dual-use when they include fuel processing? Didn't the United States help Iran get it's nuclear program in the first place, so they wouldn't be after the oil? Is it alright for Iran to have peaceful nuclear ambitions? I would not support military action against Iran unless we have actual evidence of a nuclear weapons program, not some phony dual-use justification.
     
  11. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    Diplomacy has had a very bad track record in the last fifty years, no matter who the parties involved are. The best diplomacy does in any situation is buy time. Nobody ever changes policy and nobody ever yields because of it. Muscle, through physical or economical threat or something similar, seems to be the only thing that ever has a hope in hell of getting things to change.
     
  12. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    What if Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon unless they feel threatened, then diplomacy could reassure them that our intention is not to frame them with false evidence like Bush did with Iraq.
     
  13. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    Iran would develop a nucular weapon even if they didn't feel threatened. It would be so that they could threaten others. Oh, and that whole smiting infidels thing.
     
  14. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    How do you know? Are we to plan a war based on what we think they will do? Should we put people in jail for dressing like gangsters? The fundamentalists in control don't represent everyone, there is a good chance of a bloodless revolution, but with an invasion, they might turn against us due to nationalism.
     
  15. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    Ummm.... we have to plan almost everything on what we think people are going to do. There is little choice in the matter.

    And while the fundamentalists don't represent everyone over there, they are the only individuals whose voices currently matter. They are a theocracy run by religious zealot clerics. I fully believe that they would be willing to commit mass genocide of their own people before letting Iran fall out of their hands and into the hands of secular infidels.
     
  16. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    OK, it does make sense to plan contingencies, but I meant planning to go ahead with a war, even without any evidence that a civilian nuclear program is being used to make weapons.
     
  17. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

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    The USA has the worlds best conventional Army in Iraq and probably has nuclear weapons in the on ships, planes or submarines in the Persion gulf. The current US leadership feels no restraints about using force in any way for any purpose. For the last 110 years US governments have tried to dominate and exploit third world lands. Iran under Mossadegh was the purist democracy that the middleast has ever known. Israel can't claim to have reached that level while controlling occupied people who can't vote. Turkey and Lebanon never reached the level of Democracy that was under Mossadegh. The USA toppled Mossadegh and established a dictatorship. In Iraq the USA talked about democracy but had to be dragged into allowing democracy by Sistani's threat to throw the Shiites into revolt against the USA if the USA tried to stall untill they could create the infrastructure to controll a bogus make believe democracy. The Neocons say that they are for democracy now despite their antidemocratic past but they toppled a democracy in Haiti and were caught lying about Iraq so Iranians would have to be stupid to believe that the US government would have good intentions towards the Iranian people if they would just overthrow the mullahs.

    Neighboring Pakistan has nuclear weapons, a unstable goverment, a tendency to meddle in the affairs of neighboring states and an alliance with the USA.

    Russia is still a great power and has nuclear weapons near Iran.

    Turkey fought Iran for three hundred years, has a coventional military that is probably stronger han Iran's military and is an ally of the USA.

    Saudi Arabia has so much money, funds anti-shiite groups, is hostile to Iran because the region of Saudi Arabia that has the oil is the home of an oppressed Shiite people. If the USA was not arround Iran might liberate those people and their oil. Saudi Arabia is an ally of the USA.

    Iraq fought Iran and is now a wild card. Nobody knows what Iraq will become and that scares everybody.

    Israel has nuclear weapons and blames Iran for Hezbollah (they should probably blame themselves). If terrorist do something horrible in Israel would an Israeli leader placate right wing Israelis demands for action by lobbing a nuclear weapon at Iran? They would not do that if Iran had nuclear weapons.

    Off all the nations that have a population of twenty million or more and that do not yet have nuclear weapons, can you name a nation that has a legitimite national security need for nuclear weapons greater than Iran's need for nuclear weapons?
     
  18. Neildo Gone Registered Senior Member

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    We're going to war with Iran regardless; even if they flat out dropped all nuclear research with 100% proof of it by the mouth of God.

    - N
     
  19. Imperfectionist Pope Humanzee the First Registered Senior Member

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    Correct, Bush wants to control the middle east and that means controlling Iran, proof can be made up as needed, just bring up gay marriage, and the god botherers will go along with it. After all, war in the middle east is part of end times prophecy, right>? im gonna puke.
     
  20. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    They are the type to offer 'Because god says so' as proof...
     
  21. TheAcridApe Mt. Monkey Resident Registered Senior Member

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    Going to war with Iran is such a bad idea. I am totally oppossed to it. So many people would die, on both sides. The Islamic world would totally be up in arms, perhaps starting a Jihad against us. Like when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Oh man maybe it's time to start looking for a place to live in New Zealand.
     
  22. Stokes Pennwalt Nuke them from orbit. Registered Senior Member

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    Iran does not want this reactor for power generation. Rather, they want to use it to construct a complete nuclear fuel cycle, whose only purpose would be to supply a weapons program. As proof of this I offer the simple fact that the reactor currently being built at the Bushehr facility is a Russian VVER-1000. This is a descendant of the RBMK model, which is the type of reactor that caused the Chernobyl fire in 1986.

    These reactors are very different from western designs. You hear the words "light water reactor" a lot, often described as being "proliferation-safe", such as the one we were supposed to help North Korea build under the 1994 Agreed Framework for this reason. This is because the types of reactors in use in the United States and Western Europe all use distilled water as coolant. This water is impregnated with boron to help it moderate the neutron activity in the core during operation, but the base ingredient is regular distilled water like you can buy in the supermarket. LWR's are proliferation-safe because their spent fuel rods contain only trace amounts of Plutonium, which as I'm sure you know is the element best suited for crude fission weapons of the sort that nascent nuclear states strive for. Without getting into the science of it, just take it as fact that there is no way to produce useful amounts of Plutonium with a light water reactor. The other advantage of light water reactors is that they are fail-safe. Water is both the reflector and the moderator - which means that water must be present to allow neutrons to bang about the core and continue splitting atoms. With a loss of core coolant, the water begins to boil, and the reaction stops. Steam bubbles are known as "voids" and LWR's have what is called a "negative void coefficient", which means that a void will cause a negative trend in core power. It is physically impossible for a LWR to function without core coolant.

    The VVER-1000, as I said, is a descendant of the RBMK design, and is therefore very poorly suited to utility power production. These reactors use a fixed moderator comprised of blocks of solid graphite, in which channels are drilled for the fuel rods and for cooling water to pass. Water is used for cooling and reflecting, but not for moderating. If voids form in the core of a VVER, the reaction will rapidly accelerate uncontrollably as there is no longer any water to act as a reflector for free neutrons, but the fixed graphite moderator is still there to slow them down enough so they can be captured by the fuel and continue the chain reaction. The coolant will boil off, but the moderator will not. The core will rapidly spike to dangerous power levels in the presence of steam voids - thus the VVER has a "positive void coefficient". These reactor designs are just stupid, and there really isn't a nicer way to put it without being dishonest. From the instant the RBMK design became known, western engineers counted each day as a blessing when there wasn't some kind of catastrophe related to one (until Chernobyl of course). Even worse, the Soviets knew how poor a design it was, yet they continued to use it (and there are in fact 13 RBMK's still in operation in Russia and FSU tributaries). The reason the Soviets preferred this design was simple: the RBMK is a fast-breeder design that breeds a significant amount of Plutonium in its fuel rods. When the fuel in the core is depleted, it can be removed and easily reprocessed into Plutonium for weapons as North Korea has recently demonstrated. Essentially, any utility plant using an RBMK (or VVER, like Iran is building) is a weapon fuels factory that produces electricity on the side. These designs are only tacitly stable, have a rather poor fuel efficiency, and are maintenance-intensive as opposed to light water reactors. There is no plausible reason to build one unless you intend to build yourself a complete fuel cycle to supply a weapons program. LWR's are stable, produce more power in a smaller size and with less fuel, and don't automatically put you on the shit list with groups like the IAEA and countries like the United States.

    Let it be known that I am a huge fan of nuclear energy, and I am all in favor of spreading the love wherever it is welcome - including Iran - especially in the less-developed world where clean, abundant energy could really help people. But it has been intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that Iran has been pursuing a complete fuel cycle for a weapons program since the late 1970s. Not only do they insist upon the VVER reactor, but they also refuse to engage the EU in a fuel/waste trade deal that would ensure the spent fuel would go to France for reprocessing, rather than staying in Iran where they could fashion it into weapon cores. Your hands don't get much redder than that.

    The US Navy has not deployed with nuclear weapons since 1991, with the exception of fleet ballistic missile submarines whose sole mission is strategic deterrent patrol, rather than anything with a theater or tactical slant. You might be surprised how few warheads we actually still have on active alert.
     
  23. Watcher Just another old creaker Registered Senior Member

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    The implication is that the US believes that it can contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This assumption is at the core of the Pentagon's long-range plan, and in my opinion it is flawed. Proliferation is only a matter of time. Take out Iran today, Pakistan becomes a rogue state tomorrow. Russia finally devolves to anarchy and their weapons are scattered to the winds. So many scenarios, so little time.

    Like it or not, these weapons are flattening the playing field for terrorists and smaller countries alike. One nuke (or other WMD) in a big Western city can easily offset the defenses of a mighty army or air force. So, the industrialized world is in panic mode, now that they realize the imminent danger.

    The scheme from the beginning was to use Iraq as an excuse to enter the Middle East, with the end goal to contain the "rogue" nuclear states. Of course this will end up being a disaster in almost every way you can imagine. Why? The US will need to become more and more militaristic and empirical to accomplish this goal, and move further and further away from the role of benevolent ally that ensured their place in the world in WWI and WWII. And in the end, that will be self-destructive.
     

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