Iran's Nuclear Weapon Development

The recent disclosure of Iran's additional reactor site brings to the forefront an unbelievable state of affairs in the ineptitude of the Western world's management of this situation for over a decade.


As I sit writing this post, I find myself thinking that this must be what it felt like to read newspapers in the late 1930s, seeing war coming and watching the West's leaders fumble any chance to pre-emptively contain it.

Iran is a regional bully. It's a poorly-run theocracy that crushes its own citizens' dissent. Properly economically embargoed, the current regime might collapse in a year or so. Certainly, the lack of refined petroleum products and hard currency would make ordinary life and the continued progress of its nuclear weapons ambitions very difficult to sustain.

Instead, eight years of accommodation and lack of response by the Bush administration let Iran make substantial progress on both uranium enrichment and missile delivery systems. By turning a blind eye to Iran's single-minded pursuit of nuclear weapons, President Bush missed a golden opportunity to take the program out when it was still in its infancy.

Apparently, Bush's infatuation with Vladimir Putin prevented him from unilaterally halting Iran's nuclear weapons program. Further, inexplicably, when Iran was proven to be aiding those in Iraq attacking US forces, Bush, again, failed to take advantage of the opportunity to destroy substantial parts of Iran's nuclear capability.

With the 1930s as a reasonable example from which to learn, it should be obvious that rogue nations like Iran, now, and Germany, then, are secretly scared of being stopped via military force during their arming phase. But they treat every diplomatic threat as a signal to proceed.

Using major powers' values and diplomatic processes against them, these rogue nations merrily put on a show of diplomacy while racing ahead with rearmament. While everyone watches their clear displays of duplicity, leaders of the major powers continue to behave as if what everyone knows is, in fact, not true.

In the 1930s, it resulted in world war of epic proportions and loss of millions of lives.

Now, we are talking nuclear weapons with missile delivery systems. In the face of this, Wonderboy has just backed down on deploying the Bush-planned theater anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe.

How can this be happening? How can we actually be watching our own elected president, and the heads of the major European powers, and Russia, simply sit and watch a renegade state approach the point of capability of launching a nuclear weapon at Israel or southern Europe?

Are these elected leaders mad? Insane? Or merely so pompous and egotistical that because they, or, in our own case, he, believes in his rhetorical skills, he is willing to bet several million lives and the use of land in several Mediterranean or European countries for thousands of years on them?

I read this past weekend's two-page piece on Israel's options for destroying Iran's nuclear weapons program. Two things struck me as I read the article.

First, we have a cold-blooded, analytical piece concerning how Israel, a regional power, might take out Iran's nuclear threat, when the world's most effective and strongest military power, the US, stands nearer Iran, with greater assets. Yet I was reading a serious piece about how Israel would have to contemplate doing the job itself in order to avoid nuclear annihilation.

Second, with such a serious, world-changing possibility in the offing, i.e., Iran acquiring and launching nuclear weapons that will, for all practical purposes, change the face of the world for decades to come, the US isn't even considered in the running to stop it.

It's now a foregone conclusion that our own government will not use our considerable military advantage to simply attack and destroy anything necessary inside Iran, until it has no hope of recreating a nuclear weapons program for the next four or five decades.

Instead, we have the UN, NATO, and the US all behaving as if Iran already has active nuclear weapons in a deliverable state.

Whatever political and human costs a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities would entail, in hindsight, after the detonation of the first Iranian nuclear weapon on another country's soil, those costs will seem laughably small and affordable.

But, then, it will be far too late.