I wonder, seing the example of north korea and more recently russia, why don't everyone consider this a top worldwide priority. For some reason, only israel and the US ( and some arab countries) are worried. But once iran has the nuclear bomb, you can expect their nasty influence on the region to increase ten fold.
I don't understand how someone would take any chance to live in a world where a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics have the nuclear bomb.
Because Iran needs the bomb to protect themselves from... well, Israel and US.
Look at other coutries around around them, most of them were either attacked, bombed, are now being attacked or bombed, or are already occupied and have military bases built by other nuclear-having countries. Some of them have to even travel across half a planet to build bases there.
Ukraine is especially curious example. They used have nukes, but gave them up for a piece of paper, where one of the signatory attacked them and the other took months to start acting.
Iran would need to be insane to give up their nuclear program and we could actually see Eastern European countries coming together to build their own nukes if USA will continue to be unreliable ally. Sanctions be damned.
Change in political control is a possibility in any democracy. AfD could hypothetically take power in Germany at some point - at least enough to stall things out “until the situation is clear”/“until Ukraine handles their Nazi problem” etc, and then they’re suddenly “not a reliable ally” either.
Like I understand what you’re saying, but you’re also asking for basically a dictatorship in practice. Political winds can always change, and that’s something that cannot and should not be entirely forestalled.
(Although for example drug laws kinda do this - the us is beholden to international law on scheduling etc - we just don’t do that for military situations to the same extent as we use it for jailing minorities. But nato-style alliances with trigger conditions etc are a rarity, and ultimately still subject to the parties having to actually take action. If a nato trigger event has taken place, and everyone simply ignores it… what then? If trump says Slovenia are low-energy losers who incited the conflict themselves, therefore nato doesn’t apply (which is iirc more or less his stance on Ukraine during this conflict)… what do you propose doing about it? Code is not law, ethereum smart contracts can’t drop bombs.)
The rise of Russian-aligned parties and neofascist groups within western culture is the problem. And while there’s some root causes, like letting party-controlled media sources spread actual libel and falsehoods, once the neofascist party is getting 30%, or once trump takes the presidency, it’s too late, now they get the color of state power and state legitimacy, even as they dismantle the next election etc.
The real problem is that Russia and china are using western liberal values against us. Only westerners are concerned about protecting the speech of Nazis, or the right of Fox News to broadcast lies that the election was stolen, etc. China and Russia don’t have to care. And the fact that we have to work our politics within this framework that coddles vicious and violent movements and rhetoric is an angle that they can exploit to disrupt us.
Like yes, if you allow china to have their fair say in media, and allow them to purchase a major media outlet to spread that perspective, you’re going to get china-backed media causing disruption to domestic US politics. It’s just more controversial to say it with political parties than with tiktok, but, Fox News and newsmax really ought to go too, for all the same reasons. And as long as you can come up with a veneer of American control the problem will remain.
Yes, “appealing to the public” is a thing. Like surely even trump would have had at least an excuse on paper for choosing to favor Russia over Ukraine - and azov battalion is a good one, because hey, there really are Nazis. Absolutely “but what about azov” would have been a thing and you’d have to be uninformed to think otherwise.
The bizarre part here is you imagining Nazi logic has to make sense, when it notably does not, ever, have to make sense. Otherwise all the internal contradictions would fall apart - the only true tenent is strength and dominance.
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Like… never heard of “the night of the long knives” I guess. Fascists are only buddies up until they’re not.
In short: no, I don’t think a Russian-aligned fascist group would care in the least about stepping on a Ukrainian fascist group on the way to the top in their conquest of Ukraine.
hm.. i don't think iran destabilized syria, iraq, yemen, and most of all lebanon, to "protect themselves" from anybody. They're just looking for maximum regional influence, financing every local militia they can.
Blaming israel or the US for that is just extremely short sighted.
> hm.. i don't think iran destabilized syria, iraq, yemen, and most of all lebanon, to "protect themselves" from anybody
If you read even the basic Wikipedia historical last-few-decades overviews of those countries you mentioned, you will not read that Iran invaded and destroyed governments of those countries. You know who had a major part in destroying those countries? The "good guys".
Iran is absolutely helping the Shia elements in those countries for its own geopolitical gain, but to claim that Iran has destabilized those countries after the western powers and arab gulf states ravaged them so thouroughly that they are all now considered failed states, is some absolute next level propaganda that I could not ignore.
look at what hezbollah has done to lebanon...Also I didn't say iran invaded those countries. They just used proxy, like in the good old days (and keep doing it).
Calling what they're doing "help" is a pretty .. let's say special ? way of looking at it. Hope you won't regret your pov once iranians are free again, hopefully not too far in the future.
It played a major role in ending the occupation of the southern half of Lebanon by Israel [0], has since repelled another invasion [1], and now serves as a strong deterrent to any further invasions.
Sounds like an extremely successful project, given that Israel is currently occupying parts of lands of multiple surrounding countries and has no intentions of ever giving those lands back [2], in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
Hezbollah prevented the same fate in Lebanon.
Yes, I understand that in the eyes of Israel it is the devil, for it has blocked Israel's ambitions of regional expansion, but that is irrelevant to everyone else.
> Calling what they're doing "help" is a pretty .. let's say special ? way of looking at it
Your reading comprehension is special. I said helping the Shia elements, not the countries themselves necessarily. The exact quote: "Iran is absolutely helping the Shia elements in those countries for its own geopolitical gain [...]"
Anyway, given the above about ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, it seems that Iran has absolutely helped Lebanon at least.
That Iran also gained regional influence through that act, and thus did it primarily for its own benefit, does not take away from that fact.
Read Oz Katerji (for one) for some depth on the regional standing Hezbollah has. Most notably, Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into direct and painful involvement with the Syrian civil war, at enormous cost, at the behest of Iran. I don't think you'll find many serious analysts suggesting that the IRGC has helped Lebanon.
Stuff like "your reading comprehension is special" doesn't belong on HN.
Boolshit. It's just another nasty exempire that wants a bite with nothing biting back. The sort of practice the free world order was to put to an end and then that moral oder was destroyed by George w Bush. Putin loved him for going natural. Send them to the hague.
I don't understand how someone would take any chance to live in a world where a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics have the nuclear bomb.
This is an extremely apt description of Israel and the US though?
Nonproliferation is pretty much failed though. Iran complied with some of the most onerous and invasive inspections of its nuclear program for years, and the US still unilaterally withdrew from the agreements and demonized them. So what is the benefit of complying at all?
Yep, and a lot of countries around iran were attacked by them, are being attacked by them, or have army bases there build by those countries who don't want to leave :)
> There are already nuclear armed “terrorist nations”.
There aren’t any nuclear-armed nations that have not, while being nuclear powers, been either practitioners of internal state terrorism (the original sense of “terrorist”) and/or sponsors of such regimes and/or of non-state terrorists working against their geopolitical rivals.
The USA, as nuclear state, has armed Kurdish forces which Turkey, a nuclear sharing state, has described as terrorists.
Russia, as a nuclear state, has armed the Wagner Group, which France, a nuclear state, has described as terrorist.
Israel, a nuclear state, has armed settlers in the West Bank, which can be described as terrorists.
Israel, a nuclear state, has engaged and participated in terrorist activities in the past. Israel probably got their first bomb in 1963, Israel was using car bombs against PLO officials as late as 1981 via terrorist fronts.
You just described every superpower, global and regional. Or do you have a very narrow internal definition of what "ideology" means? Maybe that's the subjective part.
You're going to have to come up with an incredibly convoluted definition of terrorism in order to have it include only people, groups or countries you dislike, but not include people, groups and countries that you do like.
And if you do that, then it goes back to the comment by the person you replied to that said that "terrorist" is a subjective term.
If you apply consistent rules and definitions, then most governments in the world will be found to be conducting terrorist activities, and mutual accusations of it lose any meaning.
I'm not really interested in selectively applying the definition, if you're using terrorism to further a goal or ideology, you're a terrorist, regardless of whose "side" you're promoting with your terrorism. I didn't realize this was something people split hairs over, but I do agree that most or all governments are either terrorists, or at least use terrorism as a tool.
terrorism has a very simple definition : to aim at civilians to accomplish a political goal.
(and no, israel and the US never aimed at civilians. They've used armies to fight armies.. which doesn't mean there hasn't been civilians casualties of course).
Terrorism does not have a simple definition and it for sure isn’t limited for civilian targets.
The hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 which targeted and hit the Pentagon—a military target—was a terrorist attack, albeit with heavy civilian casualties. The suicide bombing of USS Cole by al-Qaeda in October 2000 is considered a terrorist attack. It is hard to find less civilian target then a military attack missile destroyer.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 are not considered terrorist attacks despite the targets being civilians and the goal being political (unconditional surrender and a regime change of imperial Japan).
Wikipedia describes terrorism as “the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims.” Wikipedia also warns this is a very broad definition, hinting that it is not that simple. Later in the article Wikipedia admits: “The definition of terrorism lacks universal agreement” This is in contrast to e.g. Genocide, which Wikipedia offers a precise criteria outlined by the UN Genocide convention. The truth is there is nothing simple about what is and isn’t terrorism. It varies by who is using the term and in what context. It is one of these Wittgensteinian prototypical terms which only gets defined via its use.
pakistan regional influence is absolutely nothing compared to iran. They have border issues with india but that's pretty much it. Iran, without nukes, is already destabilizing at least 4 countries ( yemen, lebanon, syria, iraq, and that's without counting israel).
Imagining what it could do if its territory became a safe haven all of the sudden is simply terrifying.
Osama Bin Laden lived one mile from the Pakistani military academy, and appears to have been supported by the ISI, their intelligence service. It's a tremendous assumption of faith that Pakistani nuclear warheads are somehow safe.
Leaving that aside, Japan was not (even in the formal, substantively debatable, sense that the US was and is) a secular regime. State Shintō was an integral part of the system.
Observation: Pakistan is the only Muslim majority nation to own nuclear weapons. They currently own around 170 of them, (IMO they should absolutely dismantle them and join both the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and the prohibition treaty). Iran is a member of the NPT has zero nuclear weapons, and have shown them selves to be cooperative in non-proliferation efforts (until the Iran nuclear deal was cancelled by Trump).
Israel has around the same number of nuclear weapons as Pakistan, is not a majority Muslim nation but is very antagonistic towards majority Muslim nation. Israel is not a member of the NPT, and has been extremely uncooperative in non-proliferation efforts. Israel has engaged in terrorist activities in the past, their government includes many religious fanatics (like Itamar Ben-Gvir), and are currently being accused of engaging in an ongoing genocide.
My observation is that you aren’t afraid of a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics getting a nuclear bomb, but rather of Muslim majority nation having them.
That you know of. Israel has never confirmed its nuclear weapons. I think it's more likely than not that other Arab nations have tactical nuclear weapons.
For that matter, I bet Japan has them. If the conflict between Iran and Israel goes nuclear I could see Taiwan also developing their own. The proliferation is only restricted by time, money, and expertise.
The thing about nuclear deterrence is that it only works if you announce that you have nuclear weapons, so we know pretty well who has them and about how much, not only via the NPT but also by simple game theory. Israel is probably the only nation that has nuclear bombs without confirming because it is the only nation who’s officials regularly threaten their use without officially declaring their existence.
NPT countries such as Iran can also acquire nuclear weapons without braking the treaty via Nuclear Weapons sharing[1]. This is how Germany, Turkey, and Belarus have nuclear weapons. If Japan or Taiwan wanted nuclear deterrence that is a route available to them (maybe that is even one of the goals of the potential Pacific Partnership military alliance; This is how Taiwan had these horrible weapons in the 1970s). It is probably harder for Iran though as they lack nuclear capable allies, but for e.g. Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, they could probably keep some USA weapons in at one of the many USA military bases (though I doubt Iraq would actually want that).
But you are wrong to omit politics as a barrier for proliferation. The NPT is strong, it has and most countries either comply with it, resign from it (North Korea) or don’t sign it. If Taiwan wanted to develop their own nuclear weapons they would need to resign from the NPT and potentially make any military aid from the USA infinitely harder in the process. I think their best strategy is to do enough nuclear research and have enough nuclear infrastructure so they are on the threshold of being nuclear capable without ever stepping over it (I think this is actually their strategy; as is Iran’s) that way they get the benefits of the NPT while still offering some nuclear deterrence, as in “we can develop them quickly if the need arises”.
Not sure about that. North Korea still remains an international pariah, nuke or not, and Russia isn't doing too well in Ukraine either. Of course Japan periodically complains of NK threat, but considering how much the Japanese right wing wants to arm the country again, NK is just being a very convenient excuse for them.
Ironically, one major consequence of North Korean nukes is that there's now zero chance America will unilaterally decide to "liberate" the country, Iraq style. Being South Korean, I'm okay with that.
I wonder if the US has the appetite for an all-out war with Iran. Could jeopardize 1/3rd of the world's oil production and drive the price of everything to levels never seen before. Furthermore, it would mean fighting on multiple fronts, Israel, Ukraine, and possibly Taiwan. Seeing as the US is struggling to provide enough ammunition for Ukraine, it's hard to see how there'd be enough for multiple full-scale wars.
Nothing has happened after North Korea got a nuke, nothing will happen when Iran will get a nuke. Both powers knows very well that with a nuke, invasion by a superpower is unlikely. Without a nuke invasion by a superpower can actually happen - see Ukraine.
It had the appetite but not the pretext under the foolish warmongers GWB and Cheney. The US was rehearsing for exactly this with a high tempo of operations including naval air sorties in the area during their administration. Unfortunately, their other "mission accomplished" wars didn't go so well.
Now, the US doesn't have them anymore and so this is extremely unlikely because Biden has zero interest in military adventurism.
I'm sorry to say such an adolescent thing here, but, "Duh?". For a delicate regime with many bordering enemies, and with an international nuclear policy in total shambles, it's the most sensible thing to do. By a country mile. If I was Grand Iranian Overlord, you can bet that every national effort would be, right now, to get a nuke as soon as humanly possible.
The Shia/Persian state is a sad little mound in the middle of a Sunni and - before Gaza, anyway - Sunni/Israeli block. I imagine the primary reason for the October attacks was to drive a wedge into that developing relationship, knowing Likud would react very Old-Testament-y.
People will make scary color coded maps with all the Iranian proxies, but proxies are just proxies, and some of those proxies - like in Syria - are as dangerous to Iranian policy as they might be to Iran's enemies. Ask America how relying on dangerous third parties went for it in South America - they might have established a firm anticommunist platform, but at the risk of destabilizing the whole continent.
It feels inevitable that one day Iran or Israel will conduct a nuclear strike upon one, the other, or both. There is no deescalation and it seems like everyone in the middle is cheering them on, hoping they both eliminate one another. Iran does not seem to be content until Israel is removed from the face of the earth.
Might be controversial, but if saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction, maybe the US and buddies would not attack them as they did, while lying about the weapons.
Atomic bomb would give Iran an extra layer of protection from those few countries that can do whatever they want, start wars based on lies, steal oil, commit genocide and worse, and the "international community" turns a blind eye most of the time.
Sure, but a lot less iraqis would die, if saddam had a few nukes pointed at washington, ready to launch in case of a us invasion, and US decided to not risk it (or well,... risk it once and never again, and some other countries people would be alive instead of the next war there).
What layer do nukes honestly give you that your chemical and bioweapons don’t? All are taboo to use. If shit hits the fan its far easier to gas and plague the country than to develop and successfully deploy nuclear weapons.
In terms of weapon effect, nukes really are in a whole other category, particularly against invasions, which require concentration of force by their nature. Even a dozen nukes with 1950s delivery systems can make the price of invasion untenable - particularly for democratic governments. And once a country is making them, they're very easy to stash, so you can never be sure you got them all. We faced a similar problem with Cuba, when we learned that they'd stashed possibly quite a lot of FROG launchers in addition to the big missiles.
Chemical weapons are a bit like Age of Sail line of battle, with an awful lot depending on the weather. Biologicals are even worse, since neighboring populations - surprise! - turn out to be pretty closely related, making it difficult to target foreign ethnicities. Humans in general are pretty tightly clustered, although I would imagine one of the great weapon uses for AI systems in this century (or decade) will be biologicals very tightly targeted at micropopulations, very small cell factors (so, with your new AI-designed bioagent, instead of 80% enemy 40% friendly [which was the estimate for an Anti-Black People agent in South Africa] it goes to something like 70% enemy 10% friendly). Both biologicals and chemical can have unpredictable weapon effect, which is the primary reason we don't see them more often. A really great rifle that shoots backwards even .1% of the time would still be the world's worst rifle.
Nuclear states have a form of "super-sovereignty" that effectively makes them a different kind of state. No one's chucking rockets or missiles at you anymore, no one's going to risk an airstrike or putting you on the Regime Change list. The long term effect of holding a nuclear arsenal has some nasty follow-on effects internally, for a nation, beyond just the sanctions and such, but it's such a cost-effective method of deterrence that such factors fade into the background.
> Nuclear states have a form of “super-sovereignty” that effectively makes them a different kind of state. No one’s chucking rockets or missiles at you anymore
Except, you know, that’s not actually true. Recently, a greater share of nuclear states have had direct strikes on their territory by foreign enemy states than is the case for non-nuclear states.
Yeah, my bad, chucking rockets isn't what I had in my head, but I always try to use "chuck" as a verb as often as possible. What's actually the critical word is "invasion": no one[1] tries to take your land when you can hawk[0] a nuke at theirs. If you can give me a counterexample, I would be super excited to hear it.
[0] In your FACE, "chuck"! There's plenty of verbs in the sea.
[1] This is a fun one. "No One" would be "another state", someone that has land to lose. Stateless entities - religions, ethnicities, corporations - have sort of a secret superpower when dealing with nuclear states. We kind of see that in the post-ww2 era, and the "Cold" War, for the nuclear powers, was a war of stateless factions (a little bit like the European Wars of Religion). A follow on from this is that an unstable land border of a nuclear power is more or less the exact definition of trouble: Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza/West Bank[a], and going back, the Soviet breakup of course. The real horror story would be a nuclear state run by a stateless minority - like a religious government that hates the bulk of its own people - because they're at least partially incentivized to take nuclear casualties.
[1.a] Yeah yeah I know "Israel Doesn't Have Nukes", but c'mon.
Claiming that Iran is or will pursue Nuclear weapons is a perfect reason to get Joe Public to support Israel and USA to "take them out".
As fanatical as the religious rulers are in Iran those leaders do have a theological problem with weapons of mass destruction ie nukes. Therefore they have chosen to perfect ballistic missiles.
Unlike Israel, Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Meaning that if Iran wants to pursue nuclear weapons (which, to be honesty, they probably do) they have a long way to go, both politically and engineering wise. It also means there are many ways to prevent Iran ever getting one (the Iran nuclear deal was a good example until Trump cancelled it).
Israel, however, is not a member of the Non-proliferation deal, and very likely are own a few nuclear weapons. If anyone is are afraid of Nuclear Weapons, they should not support Israel under any circumstances.
I don't understand how someone would take any chance to live in a world where a terrorist nation run by religious fanatics have the nuclear bomb.