Well, let’s consider the argument a bit more.

For several decades, the US justified its stocks of nukes by “deterrance” – it needed those bombs in order to stop attacks by either Soviet nukes or by the massed hordes of the Red Army.

Now, in 2006, which country in all the world is the most threatened currently by nuclear and/or conventional attack? Starts with an “I”, ends with a “N”.

So why exactly shouldn’t Iran have nukes again?

Yup, nothing to those charges of treason. Those dastardly conservatives with their judgments and ability to read!

That’s ok though, swift condemnation from Liberals and Progressives alike for shargash’s statement is sure to follow. …any post now.

Iran could have nukes within 16 days of sufficient centrifuging.

Ignorant bitch.

Yeah. What she said might be technically true, but it’s specious to the argument at hand. In other words, it’s what Al Franken calls a weasel: technically true but irrelevant and intended to mislead.

The key to it is the phrase, “sufficient centrifuging.” Iraq hasn’t got nearly enough centrifuges to reach “sufficient centrifuging” in my children’s lifetime. Now, once they have enough centrifuges added to the cascade they’ll be able to. But even having enough centrifuges for an effective cascade is several years off, and then they have run the goddam cascade.

BC

As perverse as this sounds, the best chance for world peace may be to do everything possible to help Iran get their bomb ASAP.

When nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes (or something like that).

My question for the experts is this: can we credibly link a *covert* nuclear blast to its source? Are there isotope fingerprints or other unquestionable evidence? If a major city somewhere goes up in a mushroom cloud, will we know — within hours or a few days — who the terrorists got their bomb from? It seems to me that if we know this, we can credibly caution the world that the *country of origin* will pay the price for any nuclear attack on us.

This wouldn’t stop fanatics, of any stripe, from destroying a cityful of people… but it would provide a powerful incentive for the members of the nuclear club to keep track of their evil devices. It also injects a little sanity into the Chicken-Little “Iran’s Got A Bomb!” yammering that’s going on.

Eddy

The conundrum is this, as enunciated by physicist Robert W. Nelson: you have to go really deep to destroy underground reinforced bunkers, like the Natanz centrifuge facility. On the other hand, you have to go even deeper to avoid producing massive fallout in an underground explosion–the fallout from even a “low yield” tactical nuke exploded underground but not deep enough to avoid a crater will dwarf that of the air blast of a much larger bomb over Hiroshima.

So you would be left with this: we cross the nuclear line to go against a saber rattling country that is 5-10 years from being a real threat, a line not crossed since World War II, we kill tens of thousands or more of innocent civilians, and we don’t significantly damage the intended targets.

That’s the Bush administration–delivering global scale incompetence and inhumanity since 2001.