Political Cartoons

In the cartoon, or in real life? If the latter, so do I.

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n6vsft.livejournal.com

I guess both.

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The problem, if the US doesn't back Israel, is that Israel is so much smaller that it takes a lot fewer nukes to cause serious damage.

The US, of course, has enough to turn the entire surface of the earth to glass.

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And Iran isnt just as small?

detering Iran isnt a problem

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Iran has an area of 1,648,195 km². Israel has an area of 20,770 km².

No, Iran is not just as small. It is approximately 80 times the size. Deterring it is not a problem for the US; it might be for Israel, depending how large their nuclear arsenal is and how many people the leadership of Iran is willing to sacrifice.

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80 times as large and how many major cities does it have?

4.

It isnt the amount of rock you are sitting on, its where you are sitting on the rock.

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Ah, I see. You were talking population, I was talking area.

Hmmmmm. . . you have a point, actually, depending on how high a percentage of its population lives in cities.

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Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal sufficient to remove a significant portion of Iran from the map, and the means to deliver it. The Mullahs in Iran are playing a game they can't hope to win, and the chips on the table are the lives of 60 million of its citizens. For God's sake let's hope they know what's at stake and do something about their leadership.

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clownshoes.livejournal.com

Significant portion? It would only take like 3.

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It depends on what Israel's nuclear capability is. It seems clear they have kiloton range nuclear explosves, enough to obliterate significant portions of Tehran. Whether they have thermonuclear warheads is more unclear. These types of devices are more complex, and really require testing to determine if they work if you don't already have working designs. I wouldn't bet on the fact that Israel hasn't managed to aquire designs for thermonuclear weapons either from Russia or the US.

But even thermonuclear weapons aren't doomsday devices. A 10 megaton warhead detonated over a major city the size of Tehran probably won't kill everyone in it instantly. The real horror will come with the casualties from radiation sickness. We witnessed a lot of this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but thermonuclear explosions generate far more radiation, both from high energy radiation and neutron radiation, than anything we've ever seen. The pictures from this horror will make fission bombs look like a picnic.

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bluetooth16.livejournal.com

It's nice to see Iran get pwned for once.

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clownshoes.livejournal.com

Check the Olympics.

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I'm not sure I understand your response.

(deleted comment)

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That's okay. Sometimes it can clarify thinking. I was wondering, though, if Iran was going for an Olympics game.

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clownshoes.livejournal.com

I'm a schooch drunk, but in this mindstate, it almost makes sence.

Iranian athletes suck.

ButI'm not drunk enough to not show you this link. It's pretty interesting, although from your obvious knowledge of the matter, you might have already seen it.

http://www.iranbodycount.org/

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We don't really want to end up in a war with Iran, but if it's inevitable, I think it's better to do it now with conventional weapons rather than with nuclear weapons. The entire Middle East is a shit sandwich, which we will all have to take a bite from. The end of the Cold War and colonialism has unleashed centuries old problems which Americans I think have little understanding of. An ancient and tribal culture, armed with modern weaponry afforded by windfalls from oil money, has decided to take on modernity itself, so it can continue the old ways, only this time armed with the secrets of the stars.

It won't work, and we'll all be losers in the end if we don't do something.

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vlion.livejournal.com

I agree. It's like the crusades. Except with nukes.

This is where a blanket is helpful. And a cute girl to think about. /sigh.

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I don't really want the "crusades with nukes" analogy. If we were completely willing to use nuclear weapons, we could eliminate the whole problem in the 10 minutes it takes Trident missiles to be launched from a submarine and detonate 10 megaton warheads over its targets. As long as Arab and Persian cultures continue to be mired in political dysfunction, they won't be able to match this capability, and it could be reasonably argued they exist at our pleasure.

Islam has historically been expansionist over its history. What we're trying to avoid isn't so much our own destruction by the nuclear fire; that could happen to some of us, but we'd respond before it could happen to all of us. What we're trying to avoid is the question of whether our civilization could stand on the bodies of the millions of people we'd have to kill in order to defeat radical Islam armed with nuclear weapons. We harbor a lot of guilt just over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which brought a quick end to a war that had already killed 50 million people. Those bombs were firecrackers compared to what's carried just in one Trident missile on an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine.

We haven't seen atomic weapons used in anger since 1945, and I'd like to keep it that way.

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vlion.livejournal.com

Well, I was meaning Iran as the crusaders with nukes. I'm well aware that Islamic countries basically exist at the West's moral unwillingness to wipe them off the map. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see zillions of muslim innocents firebombed to death for the crimes of their leaders.

Radical Islam is a scary thing. I don't see them as being rational. I don't know what will happen. All I know really is that they should never get WMDs.

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I agree, and the sad thing is that the left is so mired in their hatred for George W. Bush, I don't think they've really considered the consequences of a nuclear armed radical Islamic movement. Whether it eminates from Persia or Arabia is of little consequence. The question is whether it can be headed off while it's still possible to punish the guilty with minimal harm to the innocent.

For all the energy expended on the left regarding the cost of this war on both sides, I remain unpersuaded. We are not plunged into total war yet, and total war can still be avoided if we act intelligently. There's room to argue that we have not, in fact, acted intelligently, but I'm not hearing persuasive alternatives to limited war that don't seriously risk total war.

Studying the last total war we fought should convince anyone that it, especially given what we're now capable of, is to be avoided at all costs. Man's nature, however, left unchecked, will inevitably slide us into that if we don't give him something to lose by doing so. The hope with Iraq is that we'll be able to give them something to lose, where previously they had nothing. Despite the many flaws that will become apparent in Iraq politics over the next decades, I trust the collective will of their people a hell of a lot more than I would Saddam Hussein and his organized crime family that just happened to end up running a country. The same goes for the mullah's in Iran.

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The unfortunate part is that being pwned could risk the lives of 60 million people. Even World War II barely delivered that kind of body count. One reason I get so infuriated with the left is that they seem to not understand what the stakes are. They decry our intervention in Iraq as warmongering, without thinking about what real warmongering looks like. In this world, 60 million people being gone in a matter of 30 minutes is the reality. The question is whether the Middle East can be transformed to accept The Enlightenment, or whether they wish to destroy themselves in a confrontation with it, possibly taking us all with it.

I'll close with this thought from my favorite blogger, a postscript (http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/postscript-to-three-conjectures.html) to his essay The Three Conjectures (http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html):

The appearance of an Islamic WMD capability would hang like a comet of doom over the whole Muslim world.

It would not be the first time that the inner contradictions of a civilization, taken to their limit, have killed it. Something in the expansionist and militant hubris of 19th century Europe led the continent to the mindless mud and trenches of the Great War. The Lost Generation died by Europe's own hand. Now it is Islam coming face to face with a challenge of how to handle the true divine fire. And the real dilemma is that the power behind the light of the stars is incompatible with the framework bequeathed by Mohammed. It may be the turn of the Faithful to die by Islam's own hand unless it can listen to the word that speaks from the very heart of the flame.

And that message, surprisingly, is that we must love one another or die. J. Robert Oppenheimer thought, as he beheld the fireball of the first atomic test at Alamogordo, that he heard the Hindu god Shiva whisper "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". He understood at that moment that mankind's moral capacity would have to expand to match its technical prowess or it would perish. If Islam desires the secret of the stars it must embrace the kuffar as its brother -- or die.

Maybe we're destined to perish. But it seems to be far more likely if we care to engage in MAD tactics with people who yearn for death.

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That guy is woefully ignorant of nuclear theory.

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You mean that MAD is always guaranteed to work? I don't have that kind of faith in humanity. Do MAD enough times with enough opponents, someone is going to end up pushing the button.

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Put it this way. If Iran gets nukes, the chances of any nukes being used goes down. It doesnt matter if MAD works all the time or not, what matters is that MAD works better than when one nation has nukes and another doesnt. A lot better, a whole fucking lot better.

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