Posted on 04/18/2008 2:08:26 PM PDT by knighthawk
Edited on 04/18/2008 2:09:08 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.
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I’m a Very strong proponent of missile defense, but it makes no sense to spend all that money developing a system to knock down an incoming missile, but leave the border wide open where they can drive a nuke in with a pickup.
I dissagree. It’s time to pull our heads out of the sand and START ENFORCING NON-PROLIFERATION.
1) They accept monitoring, IAEA and safeguards and we trust them.
2) Air strikes.
3) Learn to live with a nuclear armed Iran.
We are at a point where they will have the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons.
I came up with a means for ultimate deterrence of non-major powers with nuclear weapons.
Remember Mutually Assured Destruction? MAD was the deterrent between the US and the Soviet Union, and it worked.
So why not extend MAD to the rest of the world?
Say you have two countries that hate each other. One of them acquires a nuclear weapon and wants to use it to smite their hated enemy.
By mutual understanding, if not agreement, between the major powers, if country ‘A’ uses a nuclear weapon against country ‘B’, then the United States will detonate enough airburst neutron bombs over country ‘A’ to kill every person in country ‘A’. Every one.
Having done so, all the buildings, treasures, artifacts, and everything else that was owned by country ‘A’, would be given as reparations to their hated enemy, and nuclear victim, country ‘B’.
This is the one thing that perhaps even a fool like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would understand. If not him, then every single other person in the government of Iran. So if he still wanted to use a nuke, they would quickly depose him.
It would not be a secret. We would tell the people of Iran that if their *leaders* used a nuclear weapon against Israel, or we even suspected they did, we would use enough neutron bombs so that every...single...Iranian in Iran would die. No survivors. No women and children. No old Imams. All dead.
And then all the lands of Iran would be given to Israel, to the Jews. They would not only still have Israel, but they would have an enormous and wealthy new land, and they could raise pigs in the empty mosques if they chose, as there would no longer be Muslims there to pray in them.
MAD. It worked for us. It can work for the rest of the world.
Ahmadinejad would toss a nuke at someone just to make sure the USA DID nuke Iran because doing so would force the appearance of the Hidden Imam.
That is why you let as many people as possible know. Though he might be willing to do it, how many other people in the power structure of Iran would gun him down with the slightest hint he was going to do it?
Making such an announcement to Iran would, after a brief pause, do much to stabilize a more moderate government. Anyone with the slightest suspicion of fanaticism wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near a nuke without causing itchy trigger fingers.
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