Every time someone brings up "wants to wipe out xyz", I wonder how that would play out. North Korea wants to nuke the US and SK, Iran wants to nuke Israel, Pakistan wants to nuke India, etc.
But playing the scenario in your head leaves to a simple conclusion: If either NK or Iran would deploy nukes, it would be their end. It is likely that the US will remain the only nation on this planet who dropped nukes on civilians.
Actually, none of the countries you mentioned want to nuke any other. It's all propaganda, some from the potential nukers, most of it by those on the receiving end.
While technically true, in Hiroshima were multiple military headquarters and Nagasaki were industrial city and shipyard. Just saying there there was a bit more reasoning behind the selection then "where we could kill the most civilians".
Yes, there definitely were more factors that went into that decision. But destroying factories and shipyards in populated cities wasn't the primary factor that went into the choice of weapon.
If you were the PM of Israel, would you stake the lives of 6m people on that? It would be Iran's end, but it would be too late for Israel if it came to that.
Every nation has to trust the country with nukes that they won't invade or destroy them. If you were Iran, would you trust the US not to try to invade or topple your country?
Iran isn't alone with the rhetoric of 'destroy your enemies'. North Korea and the US sell the same story, just the enemy changes. Whether the enemy is Israel, the US, or the arbitrary definition of a terrorist, the sell is ultimately a strategy to sustain support for military spending. It's hard to defend vast military spending when you have a poverty problem in your country - unless you can say you have enemies to defend against.
well to be fair, a nuclear armed country has threatened to bomb Iran back to the stone age (and has a reputation for trumped invasions in the area) as well as a vast history of interfering in the country including coup and assassinations.
Perhaps they feel threatened.
And the "wipe Israel off the face of the map" quote is contested.
> Then, specialists such as Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project pointed out that the original statement in Persian did not say that Israel should be wiped from the map, but instead that it would collapse.
> Cole said this week that in the 1980s Khomeini gave a speech in which he said in Persian “Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” This means, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” But then anonymous wire service translators rendered Khomeini as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the face of the map,” which Cole and Nourouzi say is inaccurate.
Sure there are some in Iran who will probably say that. Just like there are some in the western countries that if inteviewed will say the same of whoever the current bogey man is. Hell, John Bolton is back
Without wanting to get in to Middle East political discussions, I don't think anyone there wants to sincerely "wipe out" another nation. The consequences would just be brutal and wouldn't be worth it.
I think Israel is much more in the business of targeted strikes on personnel and infrastructure to keep their enemies in check, something they're very capable of.
Israelis don't want to wipe out Iran (as much as Iran doesn't want to wipe out Israel- I think they have a more generic aspiration to the end of what they call Israeli regime)- but they surely want a weak, divided, impoverished Iran, and they have been lobbying the US for a long time to wage war against it. The US unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement has been in Israel's wishlist for years. Not because it improves the chances of peace or because it makes Iran less of a threat- quite the opposite. But because it weakens it and improves the chances of a war.
To be fair, Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, as it has been proven again and again by the thorough inspections and controls allowed by the JCPOA agreement, which the US have just undermined and probably killed for good.
You're confusing uranium enrichment with attempts to build nuclear weapons. Irans's research into nuclear weapons has ended in 2003, 15 years ago. Iran has nuclear power plants though, and uranium enrichment is needed to fuel them.
I think the reason Trump and Netanyahu are so enraged by the JCPOA agreement is that it makes concessions to Iran in exchange of.. nothing, since Iran already didn't have any active nuclear weapons research. The purpose of the continued insistence on Iran's nuclear threat is to weaken it, and the JCPOA effectively kills this strategy.
I'd love for you to be correct. I think pulling out of the JCPOA was stupid, and I'd love to be able to point out there is no risk anyway. But...
> Iran has nuclear power plants though, and uranium enrichment is needed to fuel them.
They have a single commercial reactor[0], and it doesn't need the enrichment levels they are producing.
Most reactors are light water reactors (of two types – PWR and BWR) and require uranium to be enriched from 0.7% to 3-5% U-235 in their fuel. This is normal low-enriched uranium (LEU). There is some interest in taking enrichment levels to about 7%, and even close to 20% for certain special power reactor fuels, as high-assay LEU (HALEU).[1]
Iran has over 200kg(!) of 20% enriched uranium[2]. I guess it could be for an unbuilt, experimental reactor like they claim. It seems unlikely, since they haven't pursued any contracts for a reactor like that.
Well, it also gave Iran a few billion dollars, a lot of which seems to have flowed into the coffers for Hamas, Hezbollah etc, both of which are terrorist organisations.
