It’s been an open secret for years that Israel possesses nuclear capability. It’s an interesting comment on the genuine – as opposed to rhetorical – threat that the Zionist Entity is deemed to pose that it’s only now, when Iran is on the verge of joining the nuclear club, that other Middle Eastern and Arab countries get concerned about developing their own programs.
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Samizdata quote of the dayMarch 24th, 2009 |
 24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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It is indeed an interesting commentary.
More generally, we know unequivocally that the nuclear weapons cat is out of the bag. As well as Israel, we know that South Africa, North Korea, & Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons — in addition to major economies such as France, China & India. Libya was well down the road, and (perhaps more arguably) Saddam’s Iraq was and Syria is heading that direction.
Being killed in a nuclear explosion is probably no worse (to the individual) than having a terrorist fly an airplane into your office building. Certainly, Hiroshima has recovered much better from nuclear bombing than Dresden did from good old-fashioned fire bombing. But to the extent that countries fear nuclear weapons, what is to be done about this proliferation, now that the technology is widely available? Empty diplomatic doublespeak is obviously worthless.
How about Obama leading a new era of co-operation between the US, China & Russia (with a little room for the French & Brits too)? In the event of nuclear weapons use anywhere in the world, the parties agree jointly to blow Pakistan, North Korea, & Iran to bits with a surfeit of nuclear explosions. List to be expanded as required. Any country that does not want to be on that list can get off it by verifiably dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
Change we can believe in!
Alice, you probably don’t need the full list you give, (co-incidently the permanent UN security council members. Well perhaps it’s not a co-incidence).
For instance, France has four nuclear armed submarines in it’s force de frappe, two of which are on patrol at any particular time. Each sub is armed with sixteen missiles that have a range of 6000 km and carry six 100kt thermo-nuclear warheads.
Let’s see 2*6*16 = 192 cities.
They’ve also stated several times that if a nuclear weapon were to go off on French soil they wouldn’t hesitate to strike back with everything they’ve got.
(Oh, and they’ve also got 60 air launched missiles with 150kt or 300kt warheads for tidying up any loose ends)
This comes across as suggesting that somehow the fire bombing was worse. I’m sure you don’t mean it that way. After all Hamburg had an equally severe fire storm but it had the comparative advantage of subsequently being in the Western zone. Surely a significant factor in recovery. As was Hiroshima.
Israel maintains zero regional influence beyond what it can project militarily.
The Arab states and Iran have been fighting a war of influence for quite a while now. It’s manifested itself in the Palestinian and Lebanese cause (Hamas, Hezbollah) mostly. With the uncertainty regarding the future of (majority Shiite) Iraq, Egypt and the Saudi’s are very much on edge. The Arab states aren’t worried about an Iranian nuke taking out Cairo or Riyahd (any more than they worry about an Israeli nuke) they’re worried about the considerable political heft Iran will gain with the acquisition of a deliverable nuclear weapon.
“This comes across as suggesting that somehow the fire bombing was worse. I’m sure you don’t mean it that way.”
No, of course not — and both bombings must have been absolutely horrible for the targeted populations. Just like to contrast Hiroshima & Dresden to annoy those “progressives” who think that radiation is the end of civilization — as if a rogue X-ray machine in a dentist’s office could sterilize an entire city block.
You are probably right about the reasons for the contrast between Hiroshima’s successful rebirth and Dresden’s pitiful recovery. Totalitarian socialism is very damaging to an economy. But we all knew that.
Isn’t it interesting that when you see all these neat little maps showing which bits of the world can be blown up via ballistic missiles, that no mention is ever made of the Saudi missiles. I wonder what sort of warheads they carry these days.
The problem for the French would be: who to strike back at? Iran wants the Bomb, but they won’t launch it themselves. They have fought the West using proxies for the past thirty years.
The moment Iran acquires the Bomb, the assumption will be that terrorist organisations will get it. Obama has got to understand that Iran is not governed by people with rational thought processes, but by religious extremists.
“Iran wants the Bomb, but they won’t launch it themselves. “
Exactly. Being serious for a moment, that is why the only defence against a nuclear weapons supplier who will pass the weapon on to some shadowy group for use is — have a standing, pre-agreed, open, credible policy to nuke ALL potentialy nuclear weapons supplier immediately following use of nukes anywhere in the world. Policy would have to be co-ordinated with other “sensible” nuclear powers to prevent rash responses when the missiles start flying.
Will it ever happen (the automatic nuclear response policy)? Of course not. Will it ever happen (nuclear attack via proxy)? Of course.
To judge from English language Iranian television (hardly an a source out to discredit the regime) and English language Arab television (funded by the “friendly” government of Quatar) both the 12er Shia Regime in Iran (from the Supreme Leader down) and the Sunni Islamic regimes are deeply hostile to the West in general and the United States in particular.
It must be confusing for them to have a President of the United States who shares their hostility. Although he does not share either the Shia 12er or Sunni beliefs.
However, both Islamic leaders and secular socialist leaders seem to have lived and cooperated together happily in the Hyde Park area of Chicago (giving each other jobs on charitable foundations created by kindly but hopelessly innocent dead Republicans). And Comrade Obama himself was put into Harvard Law School due to the influence of one of the main Islamic academic/political activist.
Perhaps they all square the circle by talking about “Islamic socialism” – or perhaps they do not care about logic and only care about their shared hatred of the West (with these evil folk it is hard to tell).
As for the nukeing of Israel – I suspect that Obama’s Chief of Staff would be unhappy with it (Chicago thug he is – but he is still a Jew and not a self hating one).
But I very much doubt that President Obama would lose any sleep over it.
Would he even care about the nukeing of an American city?
I doubt it – even the population of Chicago were only a means to an end.
To take a possible scenario: If a container bomb went off in Paris during the Bastille day celebrations, wiping out the entire top level of government, and devolving power to the Gaullist mayor of Marseille who happened to be an ex Para Colonel who’d served in Algeria…
Well let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in Algeria, or anywhere in North Africa, or in Mecca or Medina, or Teheran, or Islamabad… or Bradford come to that.
Or in any of the banlieu of any city in France, though they probably wiuldn’t use nukes there… and hopefully not in Bradford either.
To be realistic, a terrorist planted nuclear device in a major Western city would be a disaster, but it is often forgotten that the big five still have a massive thermo-nuclear response available. And in the wake of such a disaster, they may not respond ‘proportionately’.
To expand a little on my previous comment:
If terrorists exploded a nuclear device in Washington, and it wasn’t possible to finger the true culprit, then Ahmadinejad, guilty or not, could well wake up to find his anti-aircraft defenses destroyed, cruise missiles zooming up Main Street Tehran and the sky full of Buffs dropping 500 pounders on his military and nuclear installations. Possibly to be followed by 3ID knocking on his door while the US Marine corps took out all his oil capacity. The justification for doing this would be reasonably credible, (though not universally accepted), and the same justification applies to Pakistan or NoKo.
France, on the other hand, lacks that kind of conventional force projection. They struggle to get their aircraft carrier from one end of the Med to the other without it breaking down, and to move their army requires that they requisition all the cross channel car ferries.
The French response is limited to severe diplomatic pressures, a strongly worded UN resolution, or lashing out blindly.
If I was a state actor contemplating slipping a bomb to my tame terrorists then, mad or not, I would consider this in my choice of targets, though I would also bear in mind that the US still has the option of wanton destruction of the entire muslim world.
Kevin B, I’m not sure I get your point. I think what you’re saying is that a terrorist group which gained access to a thermonuclear weapon would hesitate to use it against the US because we would rain conventional (non-nuclear) destruction down on Iran, so instead they would attack France because its response would be limited to “severe diplomatic pressures, a strongly worded UN resolution, or lashing out blindly.” It’s that “blindly” part I would worry about if I were a terrorist. As you’ve noted, the French capacity to wage a conventional war is nearly nonexistent (so what else is new?), so wouldn’t its only option be nuclear? If you were at all concerned about Tehran wouldn’t some 500-pounders seem preferable to a nuclear strike?
“Kevin B, I’m not sure I get your point.”
Me either!
There is no doubt that the Big 3 (+ France & UK) could wreak nuclear havoc anywhere in the world. But at the moment, there is serious doubt that the current leaders of the US, UK, or France would react in any way whatsoever to a proxy attack, beyond apologizing for their own existence. Which makes them prime targets for any shadowy proxy group. (Does anyone doubt that Russia & China would respond like real nations?)
But set reality aside for a moment. Would the proxy group care that France might perhaps just possibly find the courage to nuke Iran in response to a proxy attack on French soil? Probably not.
The only participant who might (emphasis, might) possibly be disuaded is the country thinking about giving a nuke to the shadowy proxy group.
That’s why there is only one effective tool of disuasion — an internationally-agreed public policy of immediate Assured Destruction of ALL of a set of named potential nuke suppliers following any use of nukes anywhere in the world.
Laird, what I was trying to get across was the opposite of what you read. If I was a mad mullah I might prefer to nuke, through my terrorist proxies, Washington rather than Paris on the assumption that the worst I would get from the US would be a conventional battering which I would be able to use to unite my country, (and much of the rest of the world), behind me in jihad against the Great Satan.
Nuking France, however, might very well bring about the Armageddon the 12th Imam promises – so it has that going for it.
Of course the mad mullah would be wrong, since the US is more than capable of destroying Iran, (and much of the rest of the world), in an afternoon.
But my main point is that, whilst Alice’s pact of Nuclear countries is attractive, it is also unrealistic. However, to underestimate what the nuclear powers might do if a nuclear bomb went off in one of their cities, or even a city of one of their close allies, would be a fatal mistake for any state.
“But my main point is that, whilst Alice’s pact of Nuclear countries is attractive, it is also unrealistic.”
We agree.
“However, to underestimate what the nuclear powers might do if a nuclear bomb went off in one of their cities, or even a city of one of their close allies, would be a fatal mistake for any state.”
What about for any proxy group? We all agree that Iran is not going to announce that it has just set off a nuke in Bristol. But if a proxy nuked Bristol, and Iran announced that it was shocked — Shocked! — but this proved how much further Britain needs to go towards building a society in which Muslims feel comfortable, it is all too easy to imagine Premier Brown and the usual suspects rushing to the microphones to agree.
In any other year, a nuclear bomb exploding inside the US would result, in short order, in Farsi and Urdu being languages spoken only in Hell..er, NYC taxicabs. Same difference.
With the current crew…
If you’re familiar with David Grossman’s parable about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs, the current administration in the US is a curious mix of wolves and sheep. And sheep have only two speeds: graze and stampede. I predict true blind lashing-out of the sort that you see from panicky animals, rather than a carefully-targeted[1] response. (What I’d like to see: Asmadasahatter waking up, with a pig’s head in his bed the morning after Ambassador Tom Hagen tried to reason with him. Not holding my breath.)
Paul says:
And I agree, as long as Rahm Emmanuel remains relevant. He’s at least knee-deep in the attempted sale of Barry the Fixer’s Senate seat. The only easy way to protect him would be for Barry to fire the US Attorney for Northern Illinois, which would be a little more obvious than that slimy sack of crap would like to be.
If I had to guess, my guess would be ‘Emmanuel has until Election Season 2010. Then he leaves the White House for some high-profile campaign job where nobody will listen to his notions of foreign/defense policy. If he’s not indicted before then.’
[1] Note: I most carefully did NOT say ‘proportionate.’ A reasonable response to an attack, IMHO, is not a proportionate response, but rather a response that breaks the attackers balls and leaves him quivering in terror at the mere notion of attracting our attention again. But I also learned psychology at the hands of some old-school street monsters. Think, The Bad Czech or ‘Sean Connery’s speech to Kevin Costner in the cathedral.’
You may be right about Brown, Alice, but he’d be a fool if he did. He wouldn’t last 5 minutes.
We would be talking about a hundred thousand immediate casualties and a big, highly radioactive, cloud heading up the M4 towards London, and/or up the M5 to Birmingham. The public pressure to retaliate would be huge and those in Parliament and the media who bleat on about anti-muslim ‘hate-crimes’, would be egging the mob on the loudest.
Almost everyone in this country would have a friend or relative dead or dying in Bristol, and everyone would be looking fearfully out of their sealed up windows terrified for their lives and the lives of their children.
And the cloud would be blowing straight across the Channel to France and the rest of Europe, and the populations there would be demanding action as well. If ‘they’ can do this to Bristol, they can do it to Lyon or Brussels or Bonn.
Ahmadinejad’s best chance would be to hope that we could persuade the US to lead a coalition of the extremely pissed off to take him down conventionally, but I seriously doubt that we, or the French, would wait that long.
What the eventual outcome would be is anyone’s guess. It wouldn’t be pretty, and there would be a lot of recriminations going on after, but I doubt that Islam would survive as a major world religion.
“What the eventual outcome would be is anyone’s guess.”
Indeed. Sad thing is — there is a very high probability that someday we will find out.
A few years ago, if someone had speculated about Iranian forces seizing a British naval crew on the open seas, would you have predicted that the British government would:
(a) seize Iranian ships and blockade Iranian ports until the crew was released with a groveling apology and a large financial payment? Or
(b) themselves issue a groveling apology and beg for the safe return of the British crew?
There is no doubt about what Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria would have done. But when it comes to western governments these days, low expectations are the key to happiness.
Religious extremists, yes, but that does not mean they don’t think rationally. The Iran-Iraq war ended in a truce that Iran’s radical leaders accepted when they realized that they weren’t going to get anything out of it without sacrificing even more, even though they had the upper hand by then.
Analyzing the thought process behind the first use of nuclear weapons in terms of rationality is not helpful.
No rational actor would ever make first use of a nuclear weapon against a nuclear armed nation. Period. It’s just that simple. Any first use of nuclear weapons will be very decidedly irrational, born out of fantasy ideology, fear, desperation, hopelessness, runaway bravado, or straight up insanity. It is much more difficult to predict such things. As nuclear weapons proliferate into an even greater number of hands we approach ever closer to the day when the possession of nuclear weapons will intersect with the possession of the extreme irrationality it would take to use them.
It seems unlikely that Iran would use an atomic bomb, but would keep it to persuade itself that it had come of age, and was equal to anyone else- just like the North Koreans thought. An A-bomb makes you a triple-A nation, even if your leaders are megalomaniacs!
After all, they would know that Mecca could be wiped out by one bomb, and the ground unusable for Hajj for centuries, if people started swapping bombs, so I think it’s for show.
My own country, AustrAliA (notice the triple-A?), has one nuclear reactor so we can keep up with the big boys.
“the ground unusable for Hajj for centuries”
Not quite. That is the unrealistic fear-mongering ignorant left-wingers would like you to believe.
There are well over a million human beings living & thriving in once-bombed Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Japanese were reportedly growing water-melons there within a year of the bombings.
Even in the hyper-sensitive US, the site of the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico is now a seasonal tourist attraction, where parents take their little children to dance around the blooming desert.
The long term dangers of residual radiation have been somewhat exaggerated by the usual suspects.
Hmmm. Although glass-parking-lotification might be very satisfying to contemplate as a response to a terrorist nuke attack, I doubt the West has the balls to respond in kind if proxies are used.
Besides, as has been discussed, going nuclear isnt required; we are perfectly capable of committing equivalent damage with conventional weapons, minus the condemnation of future generations.
On the other hand, if we watched a missile launch from Tehran, arc in a beautiful parabola and nuke, say, Paris, I believe the REAL reset button would be pressed for Iran, as it would be fairly clear who did what to whom.
Wow Paul, the Big O is not my favorite guy at all, but, I wouldn’t feel comfortable making that claim.