Target Iran?

[borat]

The problem with religion, whatever form it manifests itself in, is that by definition is sets out principles that it preaches are 'good' which should be followed, and ones which are 'bad' which should be at token level looked down upon and at fanatical level punished to the extreme. Not all religions agree on what is 'good' and what is 'bad', so when there is more than one of them their followers are inherently in conflict with each other because of the differences they have been taught as right and wrong in their upbringing. Whatever religious stance you take, you have to admit that its pretty stupid to wage conflict on each other just because 'that chapter in my book is different to his' , particularly when many of these lessons are drilled into us when we don't have the independance to think about them for ourselves. Incidentaly i was brought up as a christian at school, went to cathedral every morning, i still hold dear a lot of values it taught me, but also hold distant a lot of values which it taught that have gone competely against my life experience.

[KRSESQ]

The upshot of all this discussion of Iran is, We don't dare take any chances. The government of Iran is a proven hard-line anti-west Islamofascist regime which has a long track record of actively supporting international terrorism against ANY nation they percieve as an enemy of Islam. It is this perception of what they consider an enemy that we have to worry about.

IS their nuclear program TRULY peaceful? I don't know. Do YOU, Brian? Does anyone outside of Iran's ruling circle know? If they would allow international inspections, it might ease a lot of minds. But they don't WANT people's minds at ease about their intentions. They WANT their "enemies" to be worried and scared. If they truly DO hold an apocalyptic worldview, then we should MOST DEFINITELY be worried and scared. If they do get the Bomb, what will they do with it? Into whose hands might it fall? We don't dare take any chances.

The hell of it is, the majority of Iranians, by all accounts, would be perfectly happy to see the ruling Mullahs just go away so they can put their satellite dishes back on the roof and go back to watching their Dynasty reruns, and see the latest Star Wars movie at the theater, and buy their Britney Spears CDs on the open market without fear of being pistol-whipped by some Sharia "enforcer." Ultimately the innocent people of Iran are going to be the worst victims of the Mullahs' reckless nuclear policies, God rest their souls.

Kevin

[KRSESQ]

I don’t have a problem with people believing in god, people need something to believe in, but believing in fairy tales I can’t understand that.

I can believe that there is a God, but i can't believe that there is some bloke with a long beard that created everything in 6 days.

Thankfully, very few mainstream religions still hold to the literal interpretation of Genesis. Most accept science as the best tool for understanding the universe, while accepting a "Prime Mover" (read: God).

Those who still insist upon Literalism appear to have an understanding of God and the Bible in general that is stunted at the level of a five-year-old. Literalism just doesn't hold up when you realise that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, but especially Genesis) is sort of a "Reader's Digest Condensed Version" of a much larger body of oral and written tradition that predates the oldest biblical texts by many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

Enough threadjack! Back to topic!

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

IS their nuclear program TRULY peaceful? I don't know. Do YOU, Brian?

Of course I don't know. But they could have been given the benefit of the doubt, with supervision. The intransigence of the West may make that very much more difficult, now, but it could have been done, long before this new hothead even appeared on the scene. IMHO, we made a horrid mistake.

Looking at the situation impartially, Iran has stated they wish to enrich yellowcake themselves and possibly to recycle used nuclear fuel in a second phase. If their statements are correct, that their purpose is purely for civil purposes, the enrichment will be only to a maximum of 5%, which is easy to do and easy to control. It is true that lightly (5%) enriched uranium could be made into a fissionable bomb, but it would require massive amounts and it would produce a weapon that would be too difficult to be practical to handle. To make a useful bomb with yellowcake as your starting block, you would require weapons-grade or highly enriched uranium (>90%). This is possible but is much more difficult to do and certainly could not be done without inspectors finding out. This is why we made a mistake. If we had said, OK, make your LEU for electricity generation, under IAEA supervision, when we had the chance, we would automatically have had the controls that would have detected any attempt at HEU manufacture.

OK, that's one aspect, but what about spent fuel rods that contain a small percentage of plutonium? That would be a lot easier to use for weapons, as a bomb could be made with only 20-odd kg of the right isotope (which is not present in used fuel but could be converted by neutron irradiation). I would have nothing against them recycling the used fuel as MOX, which would take care of all the plutonium, leaving only 4% of the used fuel mass left over as low-energy depleted uranium, which is relatively harmless as a radionuclide, although it has been used for various purposes such as flywheels, armour-piercing projectiles, boat keels etc. Again, the balance sheet would be easy to control: so many LEU fuel rods in, so many spent ones out, so much plutonium, so many MOX rods in. All discrepancies accountable.

Unfortunately, I fear we are too late and have lost the window of opportunity to do the job properly, probably because of an irrational fear expressed by some countries 2 or 3 years ago. IOW, we have bungled.

[Gurm]

Of course I don't know.

No, you don't.

But they could have been given the benefit of the doubt,

They were.

with supervision.

Which they have repeatedly flatly refused.

Ok, let's be honest. This COULD be another Iraq - discontinued nuclear program but a leadership that's posturing for the sake of saving face, right? WRONG. In this case they DO have a nuclear program, they ARE refusing to be regulated, and while they haven't out and out said "we're going to nuke our enemies", they have said in recent days that they intend to wipe Israel off the map. Oops!

[TransformX]

Reminds me of an old thread here. There's this book about paedophiles and other sickos and the people who are still too dumb(?) to understand/accept it, like those parents who let a known offender live with them and he molested their daughter.

[Brian Ellis]

They were.

Sorry, they were not. Various countries have refused to allow them to enrich yellowcake to LEU for no rational reason other than that they were afraid that they would use the enrichment process to produce HEU, blithely ignoring the fact that the latter is not the same as the former. In reality, the right to enrich to LEU for civil purposes is actually entrenched in the NPT and is therefore an acquis under international law. This acquis has been denied to Iraq, possibly as a result of paranoia.

I'm not saying that the Iraqis have played their hand very cleverly, either. There is undoubtedly wrong on both sides but I was always told that two wrongs never make a right.

Reminds me of an old thread here. There's this book about paedophiles and other sickos and the people who are still too dumb(?) to understand/accept it, like those parents who let a known offender live with them and he molested their daughter.

Sure, and there have been many cases of innocent people having been victimised and even murdered because somebody has wrongfully said they were paedophiles. Look at the recent case in France when several persons were proved innocent - one of them even committed suicide because of the persecution he suffered. The people who forced him to this extremity were certainly not "still too dumb(?) to understand/accept it", according to your lights, I presume?

[Gurm]

Sure, and there have been many cases of innocent people having been victimised and even murdered because somebody has wrongfully said they were paedophiles. Look at the recent case in France when several persons were proved innocent - one of them even committed suicide because of the persecution he suffered. The people who forced him to this extremity were certainly not "still too dumb(?) to understand/accept it", according to your lights, I presume?

Ok Brian, let's stop being ultra-liberal for ONE MINUTE and think about this rationally, shall we?

There is a huge difference between ruining someone's life by falsely accusing them of being a paedophile... and being overcautious (or paranoid, however you like to put it) about allowing a terrorist state to obtain nuclear power.

Nuclear power isn't a right. People ought to have the right to life, liberty, and property (which was later changed in our constitution to "the pursuit of happiness") nowhere in there do I see the right to enrich Uranium for any purpose, peaceful or not. While the wrongfully accused paedophile has been deprived of his civil rights, Iran has not.

And let's talk about the possible consequences. When you take someone crazy enough... and make no mistake the current leader of Iran IS CRAZY ENOUGH... and give them some Plutonium... that's just NEVER A GOOD IDEA. Who cares if they promise up and down not to use it to turn parts of the Middle East into glowing piles of glass? They aren't particularly trustworthy - OR SANE.

So you can talk all day and night about how this isn't political or that isn't justified, but what it boils down to is WE SHOULDN'T BE OBLIGED TO HAND NUCLEAR CAPABILITY TO A NUTJOB TERRORIST REGIME.

[Brian Ellis]

Nuclear power isn't a right. People ought to have the right to life, liberty, and property (which was later changed in our constitution to "the pursuit of happiness") nowhere in there do I see the right to enrich Uranium for any purpose, peaceful or not.

If nuclear power isn't a right, who can be so arrogant as to grant the privilege? Perhaps a consortium of USA, UK, France, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, China, Pakistan and India, all of which have HEU enrichment facilities? Let these countries decommission their facilities before they dictate to other countries what they can or cannot do, just to show an example. Maybe Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and all other countries with a civil nuclear programme should also stop generating nuclear electricity lest they start building bombs. Sauce for the goose...

[TransformX]

Sure, and there have been many cases of innocent people having been victimised and even murdered because somebody has wrongfully said they were paedophiles. Look at the recent case in France when several persons were proved innocent - one of them even committed suicide because of the persecution he suffered. The people who forced him to this extremity were certainly not "still too dumb(?) to understand/accept it", according to your lights, I presume?

Brian, I'm speaking of people who were accused of it, who admitted it etc. etc. etc.
Yet so many dumb "liberals" still want to believe such people can be "reformed" etc.
I suppose that even after hearing the words spoken by Iran's president, after hearing the ayatollah Khomeini , after hearing the stories about plastic keys to the gates of heaven, not to mention the funding to wordlwide terrorism and their last work in Iraq, you STILL believe they're a peace loving country that wants nothing other than to mind their own business?
This isn't kindergarden anymore, let's not play make-believe alright?

[KvHagedorn]

Alright.. supposing a current nuclear country were to be taken over by a psychotic warmongering megalomaniac.. let's say France has another Napoleon. What then? Should we conspire to remove their nuclear program somehow? How?

[Dr Mordrid]

Selective use of EMP's and stealth cruise missile strikes. That'll take them back to the 19th century due to the loss of their high tech equipment, communications and power systems. These won't get everything, but it'll get enough.

Contrary to popular belief EMP weapons do not need to be nuclear. They can be chemically triggered and quite powerful.

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

If nuclear power isn't a right, who can be so arrogant as to grant the privilege? Perhaps a consortium of USA, UK, France, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, China, Pakistan and India, all of which have HEU enrichment facilities? Let these countries decommission their facilities before they dictate to other countries what they can or cannot do, just to show an example. Maybe Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and all other countries with a civil nuclear programme should also stop generating nuclear electricity lest they start building bombs. Sauce for the goose...

ROFLMAO.

I see your line of thinking.

Let's recap. USA, UK, France... we're not terrorist states with a stated agenda to destroy the enemies of Islam. Or Christianity. Much as Gee Dubya wants to think so, we are NOT on a holy crusade to bring his evangelical christian message to the a-rabs.

Your logical flaw lies in equating us with Iran. And yes - as the countries WITH nukes, it is pretty much our JOB to keep crazy nutjobs who insist that Israel needs to be obliterated, that all Jews must die, and that the USA is "a great satan"... from EVER GETTING THEM.

[Gurm]

you STILL believe they're a peace loving country that wants nothing other than to mind their own business?
This isn't kindergarden anymore, let's not play make-believe alright?

Liberals believe that ALL countries are peace-loving countries who simply want what is good and right. It's what makes them liberal. It's why they support Palestine, and believe that Islam is a religion of peace.

[Gurm]

Alright.. supposing a current nuclear country were to be taken over by a psychotic warmongering megalomaniac.. let's say France has another Napoleon. What then? Should we conspire to remove their nuclear program somehow? How?

Yes, absolutely. If France were suddenly in the grip of a dictator who was poised to use their nukes against us or our allies... EMP time, baby.