Following the release of the 15 British sailors from Iranian captivity, the Prime Minister Tony Blair has issued the following statement:
“I am sure that I speak for everyone when I say how delighted I am that the Iranian goverment has released our 15 naval service personnel. This has obviously been a traumatic ordeal for all of them and their families and an extremely trying and difficult time for everyone else in involved in this unfortunate episode. Thankfully, common sense and cooler heads have prevailed. I must, however, make it categorically clear that we did not, nor would we ever, make any concessions, strike any bargains or agree any deals in order to secure their release. It is the unwavering policy of Her Majesty’s government to stand firm in the face of threats and to strenuously resist any attempts at blackmail or intimidation of any kind. That said, all that remains for me to do is join in with the rest of the nation in offering up our prayers and thanks to merciful Allah and his last prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Thank you.”
Indeed. We have escaped the crocodile for now, not killed it.
Iran will use the short-term “goodwill” from this to make it harder for the likes of the UN, EU, etc to scrutinise or object to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran has played a clever game: its forces kidnapped British forces, demonstrated how weak Britain is, how little the EU “allies” are in supporting Britain, and hence was able to prove to its own people how much of a paper tiger Britain now is. The relative lack of outrage among the broad UK public was also striking and must have demonstrated how our national resolve has weakened since, say, the days of the Falklands War in 1982.
If you set aside morality, the actions of I’m A DinnerJacket’s regime are nothing short of brilliant.
I am afraid the risks of a shooting war with Iran have not substantially changed for the better. If Iran does get nukes over the next few years, Israel will act. And that means bombing the crap out of Iranian military targets.
Iran has bought time with this. Nothing else has changed.
Did Tony Blair really just praise Allah? That was the concession.
I’m wondering if Red Ken will take down the statute of Nelson and replace it with one of Ahmadinejad, to show gratitude for his gift of the sailors and Royal Marines. After all, who needs that relic of an atavistic imperial age.
ummmm….this is a joke, right?
I mean….the last sentence there.
A joke…like: funny! ha ha ha!
right?
Blair sucks like gay slave in a dungeon.
‘Navel service personnel’ Like they repaired air conditioners or something. Maybe they worked in a laundry. What elitist, limp, puke speech.
Then the mewing about the families.
And thanking Allah? Blair and company grovels like the best. What a puke. What idiots.
The whole event has shown how weak Europe is. Masturbatory has-beens. Bunch of paper pushing eunuchs.
Rule Iranians
The Crescent rules the waves
Once proud Britons reduced to pawns and knaves!
I’m worried that this country is going to be limp like this in foreign affairs until everyone has forgotten about Iraq. Even those of you that supported the war must concede that the deceit and the failures associated with it have seriously damaged our credibility. Our politicians and a lot of our population just don’t feel that they have enough of the moral high ground any more to make the strong demands that this situation needed.
I’m with Nate here,
this is a joke…
…right?
Read that BBC story and note the only instance in which the word ‘kidnapped’ appears: when it refers to the Iranian ‘diplomat’ held by US forces in Iraq.
The British sailors were merely ‘captured in the Gulf.’
Is the BBC under contract to the Iranian government or do they provide this service for free?
[quote]And thanking Allah? What idiots.[/quote]
I think there is only one idiot here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6522113.stm
No deal – yeah, right.
It is good the captives are coming out. Nothing positive would result from continuing to hold them. And an idiotic jump to full war is always possible.
Blair’s statement should have been delayed until the captives were out of Iran. Anything might upset such reasonable people. Why any UK people remain in Iran now is a mystery.
I notice the Argentinos have increased their posturing about the Falklands again. This may be manufactured news or actual news. If a reporter pointedly contacted the Argentine minister about the government position then it is a manufactured story. If, on the other hand, the AR government decided to reactivate the issue it is real news.
Anyone know if NATO is committed to defend British possessions? They didn’t seem to take a role in 1991.
The UK obviously cannot forever defend the Falklands without help (assuming they won’t use a nuclear bomb on the Republico De Juan Peron.)
Allah be praised. Despite caveats the release is good news.
Yeah right, and there was no quid pro quo during the Cuban missile crisis either.
As messed up as the pre-war intelligence was regarding Iraq, it does not change the fact that Saddam had not complied with the weapons inspection regime for years and was skimming big $$ off of the oil-for-food scheme for his own nefarious purposes, and frankly that’s all the justification that was needed, at least legally. Not that does not mean that the decision to invade was wise, but there cannot be any serious argument that it was not legal, under the terms of the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War and under the various UN resolutions that sought to enforce those terms, which Saddam flagrantly ignored. The execution of the war itself is of course another topic. How on earth do mistakes (or worse) in Iraq justify Iran’s blatant acts of war against the very forces attempting to put Iraq back on its feet? One has to have a pretty strong self-abasement reflex to endorese that notion.
Since the Falklands are not in Europe or the North Atlantic, it is not a NATO matter.
If the statement attributed to Blair in the blog is correct then his words are a disgrace.
I can not though find these words reproduced elsewhere. The official website of the Prime Minister has a rather different statement which I reproduce below.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page11436.asp
I think Thaddeus should have tagged this with “humour”. Some people are very literal-minded.
Guys, get a grip, this is a satire (just).
Johnathan
If you set aside morality, the actions of I’m A DinnerJacket’s regime are nothing short of brilliant
Huh?
Having watched this excrutiating affair from outside the UK, i can safely say that to the outside world Britain has ended up coming out of this quite well.
Initially it looked as though we would cave in to any demand, no matter how crazed, just to secure their release. But this hasn’t happened.
However, if TB really has made no concessions (only time will tell and he doesnt exaclty have an inspiring record on the honesty stakes), then Britain has come out of this looking far stronger than Iran. A major miscalculation by Dinner Jacket, and even his own Generals were urging him to back down.
So childishly amusing to make a pun out of President Ahmadinejad’s name. Shows a total lack of cross-cultural awareness. Perhaps your name means something in some other language. Mine means, “don’t look” in Japanese, but I can live with that. Clearly people that have to distort a name to make a borderline insult or racial slur are facing a steep learning curve on their quest for maturity and enlightenment. If the cap fits, put it on.
“Guys, get a grip, this is a satire (just)”
Oh, well.
Maybe Prince Charles said it?
Chamberlain was at least honest in his naive appeasement. This is much worse.
It would have been better if the “edited” TB quote had been true. That would have been a touch of sarcasm.
As it stands, Britain truly is no more.
Don’t jump to conclusions about what’s really going on here. It wouldn’t surprise me if the release of these hostages was brought about by means of some pretty serious British and/or American threats conveyed by channels not in the public eye.
The way the Iranian regime thinks, the most logical use of the hostages would have been as human shields kept at various Iranian nuclear sites, so that the expected American airstrike against those sites would kill them. Thus the regime would hope to either prevent the airstrike or at least force the US to pay a price in terms of its standing in the eyes of the British public.
Just setting the hostages free with no visible concessions being received in exchange is out of character for the regime. There’s more going on here than meets the eye.
OK, let’s talk sense about Iran’s nuclear capability.
The most current”estimate” is that Iran is one year away from having it.
You heard the talk. They can have fissile material in one year. That’s derived from the premise that they will get 3,000 centrifuges to be up and running tomorrow and to run, nonstop, for a year—a year of nonstop operation, at the end of which you’re going to get 20 kilograms of 85 percent enriched, highly enriched uranium.
Theoretically, that’s possible. Right now the Iranians can only get 164 centrifuges up and running; they have another 164 cascade-ready, but they’re testing it. And they have bits and pieces of the total 3,000, but they can’t assemble them.
Here’s the other, unknown secret, ladies and gentlemen: They can’t do it. They can’t do it. Centrifuges are complex. They’re about yea big. Cylindrical tube. They have to spin around at 70,000 rpm.
Did you ever play with a gyroscope as a kid? Spin it up and hold it in your hand and moving it? That’s mass. It’s resisting you because the mass is shifting around. That’s only a couple of hundred rpm. Seventy-thousand rpm. If it’s not perfectly balanced, it blows up, falls apart. To be perfectly balanced, not only do you have to have precision machining throughout, you have to have ball bearings, magnets. The Iranians don’t have enough ball bearings and magnets that work, so when they spin these things up, they tend to pop, and when you pop open in a centrifuge, it shuts down. They can’t get them running for a day, let alone a year. Then, there’s the problem of feeding in the gas, the uranium hexafluoride. It’s contaminated with a substance called molybdenum.
Molybdenum—even if you’re just talking about a few, microscopic pieces of it—when it spins up at 70,000 rpm, develops a mass the equivalent of several kilograms. And what happens when you have something spinning with several thousand kilograms moving around inside? It pops. It blows up.
The Iranians can’t do it. Everybody knows this. Except we, the people of the United States of America, who continue to believe anything we’re told by a media that repeats without question the assertions put forward by an administration that doesn’t give a damn about disarming Iran and is only focused on regime change using the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran as an excuse.
Smarten up, guys. The US and the UK are lying to you about the Iranian Bomb and how close Iran is to building one.
I’m with Infidel753 on this one. The Iranians have nothing to gain by doing this, and in fact, it gives away a lot of the propaganda kudos they gained amongst their external supporters.
I suspect some mines are now being put back in stocks.
You see, all the UK had to do was declare, under the circumstances, that Iranian waters were a War Zone where open hostilities might break out at any time, and suddenly the commercial shipping stays away in droves.
They don’t have to actually *do* anything (Good job, I have little faith in the current UK Govt). Or even say they will do something. Just say that an act of war has been committed, and more may be.
We still don’t know the half of it though.
ADC – so what process did the Pakistanis use? And the Norks?
Can’t do it? It is 1940’s technology, for God’s sake. Pakistan managed just fine and North Korea may have done. The only wonder is not that “can Iran make The Bomb” but why did it take so damn long sixty years after the Trinity test? I have no idea (and nor do you) how far along they are, but the idea they cannot make one is daft.
I must on balance agree with Infidel 753.
Re Tony’s love in: “…thanks to merciful, etc …” Rather an unnecessary addendum there, sounds phoney.
1) Saw Blair give the statement and it was as posted on the BBC site, i.e. no mention of Allah.
2) I thought it was correct in separating the Iranian people from the Iranian regime (as I had hoped).
3) With Infidel and pommygranite (long time no read) in that it could well be a result for the UK and the moderates within Iran. That said, it could help Iran improve its “rational” image, indirectly assisting their nuclear ambitions.
4) I noticed DinnerJacket asked Bliar (balance for you) to not punish the servicemen for what they said. To me that is a clear indication that DJ knew it was a lie and that they had lied to the servicemen.
5) Any suggestion that the lone woman was responsible for reading the map should be strenuously denied.
I want to agree, but I can’t stop myself thinking it is at least equally likely to have been brought about by means of a grubby deal offered by the British through channels not in the public eye.
That maybe the case when viewed from a UK or western perspective, Pommy. If you are an Iranian, on the other hand, and you get news via Iranian censors, then Iran has scored a nice little victory: Britain made to look shifty, Iran plays a diplomatic card, etc.
No, Iran has bought time, bamboozled opinion in part of the west. Like I said, pretty clever.
I’ve never understood the claim that it will take years and years for Iran to build an atomic bomb. It didn’t take the US that long during World War II, and at that time we were inventing an entirely new technology with no previous successes by others to guide us. As Perry says, today it’s old technology. Vast amounts of information about how it was done before are widely available. Why shouldn’t Iran today be able to do it at least as fast as we did 62 years ago?
Anyone know if NATO is committed to defend British possessions? They didn’t seem to take a role in 1991.
NATO is very explicitly not committed to defend any member’s possessions.
Back when the organization was created everyone involved- I don’t just mean the US, I mean everyone– had no intention whatsoever of being obliged to defend another nation’s colonial possessions. Coming to the defense of Belgium was one thing, sending our soldiers to die so the Belgians could continue to control the Congo was something else entirely.
Substitute other nationalities/possessions as you see fit.
OK. I’m wearing my physicist hat now. What ADC says is roughly accurate although s/he ought to be aware that rotating something at 70,000rpm doesn’t shift it’s mass appreacibly.
Why haven’t they done it yet Perry? Simple. It is a very big deal. The Manhatten Project cost 2 billion 1945 dollars. It produced a small number of very heavy, rather bulky devices (Little Boy had to be armed in mid-air because they couldn’t guarrantee Enola Gay would make it off the runway at Tinian).
And that’s route one nuclear science. You want something smalller, more sophisticated, possibly that you could put atop a IRBM then it’s going to cost, it’s going to take time and you’re going to have to do a lot of testing. Well, nowadays you don’t need to do the testing if you’ve got a suitably programmed super-computer. The only reason that option works is that we’ve got the test data to feed into the computer model. I assume the Iranian’s lack that privilege.
A nuclear weapons program is a massive industrial job. It is pretty much impossible to conceal and/or enormously expensive to conceal. This was not an issue with the Manhatten Project* but it is in a era of spy satellites. If you have to stop what you’re doing and pretend it Natanaz Ol’ Time Cookie Factory every time a KH-11 is scheduled to whiz past it’s gonna take you longer.
It also requires full-spectrum dominance across the physical sciences. You need top-level physicists (obviously) but also chemists, metallurgists, engineers of every shade, fluid dynamicists, explosives experts, mathematicians, statisticians the whole nine yards. The Manhatten project assembled a quite remarkable array of talent. Can Iran field that? If it can’t, it’s gonna take ’em longer.
So, how did such mighty powers as Israel and Pakistan manage it? They was helped! The Israeli’s got stuff from Britain, France and the US. The Pakistani’s from… Well if you know anything about a certain A Q Khan (the Robert Oppenheimer of Pakistan) then I wouldn’t rule any malarkey out.
I hope, Perry that I have conveyed enough information for you to rule out a nuclear programme in the basement of Samizdata HQ. Although if you really want to you could try http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html!
*Some of the security measures for which were laughable. Plutonium (atomic number 94) was code-named 49 and Enrico Fermi travelled under the inspired alias of Henry Farmer. The Brits were a little more careful with their Tube Alloys program. I’m sure many Samizdatistas have endured dreadful flights but I doubt any was as bad as the clandestine escape of Niels Bohr from occupied Denmark. He was bundled into the bomb bay of a Mosquito and flown across the North Sea. The Mosquito absolutely stank of wood sap and the pilot was under strict orders to jettison Professor Bohr at the least hint of interception. You really had to earn your airmiles back then.
Perry, ADC may have a partial point.
It’s not the technical difficulty that will be responsible for Iran’s threats imploding but the lack of attention to dotting i’s and crossing t’s which seems to be a major problem for many of those stuck in the first millenium regimes. Iran’s record with disabled civilian aircraft is notorious and largely a result of failure to observe basic maintenance.
Two examples of similar attitudes in the Islamic world I know of are of engineering equipment in Algeria and Iran supplied by Canadian companies. In both cases the locals who were supposed to turn up for maintenance sessions failed to do so with the result that within a very short period the equipment had to be replaced and re-installed. Very lucrative for the businesses involved but it does make one wonder.
Something similar happened in Saudi Arabia where Bell Canada created a modern telephone system. Maintenance was supposedly to be undertaken by the Saudis but it turned out that importations of Asian engineers was eventually underaken to carry on operations. Incidentally these Asian workers were not from Islamic countries.
In a similar vein the technological infrastructure
of Malaysia by the admission of the former PM is maintained by the Chinese and Indian ethnic minorities.
Hence ADC has lots of reason to be sceptical.
Millie, last time I looked, nuclear armed Pakistan was an Islamic country too.
Indeed Pakistan is an Islamic country but they play cricket – big time cricket. Need one say more.
Designing a bomb is very, very hard. Building a bomb if you’ve been given someone else’s design is quite hard, but not impossibly so.
Fundamentally, it is a matter of putting enough sufficiently enriched U or Pu in one place and holding it there for long enough. Getting it is easy – even if you can’t buy it off the Russians or Africans, there are deposits in the Middle East. And of course they have a reactor now. Enriching it is slow, but just a matter of patience. The faster techniques are harder to do, but they know how now, and it’s just a matter of precision engineering. And you don’t have to mass produce the things, so you can afford to take your time and make a few mistakes. I’m not sure what ADC is talking about with this business of Molybdenum – any particles that get past the filters are not going to do any damage individually, and an accumulation could be prevented in a number of ways, or simply by shutting down and scraping it out every now and then. And if you are not too fussed about details of efficiency, putting it all in one place can be done with some fairly simple mechanical design and brute force.
And the Iranians didn’t bother pretending to be a cookie factory for the cameras. They pretended to be massive underground armoured bunkers surrounded by anti-aircraft defences, and with the surrounding area riddled with tunnels.
I’m sure they would like something they could put on top of a missile, but frankly, they don’t need it. Missiles are only of use for getting things there very fast through hostile territory. If you’re able to stick it in the back of a box truck and drive the thing there, the ultimate purpose is served almost as well. I’m sure I’m not giving anything away by telling you that. The Iraqi insurgents are now using Chlorine gas, but they’re not putting it in shells or missiles you’ll note. Or it would probably fit on a passenger plane.
The truth is probably somewhere in between. It is not as hard a task as all that for someone with national-scale resources, and the Iranians are probably not as competent as they would like you to think. But all the other programmes we found after breaking the AQ Khan network were a lot further advanced than intelligence thought they were. Why shouldn’t the Iranians be?
Well someone’s got to say it.
This is NOT Britian’s finest hour.
I am dismayed by the conduct of these sailors, and especially the marines, who neither defended themselves NOR attempted to escape capture. What maritime tradition were these 15 people serving? Certainly not what was once the world’s preeminent seafaring power!
I hope to God that none of these proud members of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy didn’t start crying when they realized that that wasn’t a British ship coming their way.
And someone apparently needs to inform British troops that, in the event of your capture you are only supposed to supply your captor with YOUR NAME, YOUR RANK, AND YOUR FREAKING SERIAL NUMBER, much less supply Iran’s government with your profuse apolgies. You are NOT supposed to cooperate. Period.
What coercion did any of these “heroes” have to endure from the Iranians? All pizzas would have anchovies until they met the Sharia grovelling requirement? Disgusting!
I fear for you, Great Britian. You and the whole of Europe.
Allah Akbar! ;^)
DM Depew, It’s already been said, and argued over.
The rules of engagement, the orders and training given to the sailors, say you don’t start a shooting war without getting the OK from the civil power. You can argue, if you like, with a government that sets such ROEs, but as for the sailors themselves there is a higher priority set in the military on obeying orders.
You’re not alone here in your view, and you are of course entitled to it, but it isn’t helping our side any to express it. There are reasons it has to be that way, some obvious and some of which aren’t openly discussed, although I don’t expect any agreement about that and that’s fine. But I think it would help if you directed your ire at the right targets. Thankyou.
One only wonders how the arch Victorian cad Flashman would have handled this crisis, in his best Flashman on the March style, in which a miserable Abyssinian potentate kidnaps some Brits, to then get half the British Army, the largest in the world, marching on his tinpot kingdom, for his trouble.
Ah but, By Gad, those were the days.
And these days, British troops are ordered to surrender immediately at the first hint of trouble; how things have changed. Though with spread-betters normalizing Blair’s resignation speech date at the 10th of May, I suppose Our Dear Leader had to clear these troublesome deckchairs from the Titanic of his premiership, so one can only wonder at what he gave the Iranians in return for his troops.
Expect Iran to be joining the EU within the next ten years.
“What ADC says is roughly accurate although s/he ought to be aware that rotating something at 70,000rpm doesn’t shift it’s mass appreacibly.”
Poor choice of words.
Think of a small coin, glued to the edge of a 33/3rd record, spinning at 33/3rd RPM.
Doesn’t effect the disc at all.
Now spin it up to 333 RPM and watch the turntable jog across the floor and into the wall.
Same thing with the centrifuges. Anything that gets in and condenses to a solid in something that’ll get spun up to 7000 RPM or so is not going to help keep it in balance.
And, gentlemen, even a “Little Boy” type device is damned complicated to engineer and damned hard to make work. As seen by the absurdly insipid North Korean shot.
Add several orders of magnitude of difficulty for an implosion device.
Despite the dire warnings coming from D.C., GW Bush will not be handed a note reading “PINNACLE/NUCFLASH” anytime during his remaining time in office.
And it’s damned likely that his successor won’t be handed one either.
While the Islamic powers have, on average, not displayed much technical savvy in recent years, it is a poor strategy that depends for success on your enemies remaining incompetent.
Do not discount the Iranians. They have a long tradition of being the smart ones in the Islamic world, and they’re damned if they’ll let some hillbillies in Pakistan show them up.
ADC,
Yup. You can get about a million gravities, at the outer edge of a gas centrifuge.
But as I understand it a high efficiency gas filter will take out nearly all particulates down to less than a micrometre, which gives them a volume on the order of 10^-18 m^3, and at a density of 10^4 kg.m^-3 that would give them a mass of around 10^-16 kg, which will provide the same ‘weight’ as one of 10^-10 kg in the centrifuge.
So the only way you’re going to get any damage is to have a lot of them build up over time. Although in that case you would probably expect them to settle fairly evenly around the circumference, so it will take even more to get a significant imbalance, if they’re not sucked out with the depleted Uranium. And when you do, force sensors on the bearings should pick it up so you can shut down and rebalance the thing.
I can’t see how they would work without some sort of active centering mechanism, that shifted weight near the middle to keep the centre of gravity on the axis of rotation. I’d guess that such mechanisms constitute a large part of the secret. Certainly it isn’t going to cope with sudden jolts or large imbalances, but a gradual buildup ought to be something you can cope with.
The only other option I can think of is for particles to form after filtration – if you have impurities dissolved in the gas and cool it then they could condense out. The answer to this one though is to filter it as cold as you can get it, and then run it through the centrifuge hot. They rely on having a temperature gradient in them anyway.
I’m not claiming to be an expert in this, and maybe there’s some reason why Molybdenum is a major problem that isn’t immediately obvious. If the Iranians were fool enough to not properly filter the gas, then I wouldn’t be surprised at it. I heard someone shattered one by leaving fingerprints on it. But it doesn’t sound to me like a showstopper of a problem, it’s just another technical obstacle you have to engineer your way around.
It’s the thought of reverse-engineering that worries me. How certain are we that all the Russian nukes are accounted for? Or that Pakistan won’t let them look at their facilities?