[Fegasderty]

I remember reading that - where's it from?

[LottiFurmann]

can we nuke iran already?

[doctorzlo]

I agree.It is suprising that US seem unable to eliminate "supreme leader" ali khamenei

It's not so much the US is unable to, in so much it's what is the point? I really don't think this would better our relationship with the ME nor would it help our national or international security.

[softy54534]

Hmm that's a toughie. You can't really uninvent something although you can disassemble a country to delay the development of dangerous things. It really speaks to the point though, of the very thing the people who would exterminate all the Jews like to point to. "International Law". If in fact treaties and agreements are fundamentally useless and can be ignored then we can safely ignore them. We enter into things like the CTBT, NPT and other accords because it makes sense to do so - - or it doesn't in which case they're just window dressing for whichever Crazy State wants to ignore them. It seems really that the entire notion of treaties themselves has shifted from a real thing with real consequences and founded on some common interest into merely another tool or Realpolitk. Now countries threaten to ignore treaties if a whole host of other unrelated demands aren't met.

For example the DPRK uses nuclear technology to attempt to extract a basket of other strategic gains from the other 5 members of their multilateral talks. Food, technology transfer, less political isolation, etc. The fact that they get hard currency from illegally selling this technology is part of the leverage applied to having it at all. That's why they bothered to develop it, in part. The other part clearly is that they are flat out paranoid and nonrational.

So in Iran's case, what strategic goals do they see themselves gaining by threatening to build up their nuclear arsenal? It doesn't seem to be as simple as they say, just another defensive arms race. The Iranians aren't that simplistic. Because the real benefit to a regional power in acquiring nuclear weapons is much more complex than that, isn't it? It has to do with being able to threaten regional neighbors with other overt actions they may be afraid to respond to because they have nuclear weapons. It may have to do with building economic ties to the Russians on the cheap while at the same time looking for a fat payday from the west to not develop nuclear arms. It may have to do with trying to impoverish Israel by committing to an arms race. Or it could have to do with destabilizing Syria and Iraq by emboldening terrorists there by promising them access to nuclear weapons. Certainly the case of Pakistan and India being nuclear powers has something to do with it. Or it could be a dozen other things.

Morever we want to try this like an anomaly, a blip which it is not. The world really is changing and developing countries are attempting to develop nuclear and other weapons. In the next decade you may see Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Nigeria, Egypt develop or attempt to develop nuclear weapons. For some of those countries all they lack is the political will to proceed. How we deal with this will define how we deal with them down the road.