According to the aptly-named AP writer Nedra Pickler, the White House is trying to “dampen the idea of a U.S. military strike on Iran”:
Dan Bartlett, counselor to Bush, cautioned against reading too much into administration planning.“The president’s priority is to find a diplomatic solution to a problem the entire world recognizes,” Bartlett told The Associated Press on Sunday. “And those who are drawing broad, definitive conclusions based on normal defense and intelligence planning, are ill-informed and are not knowledgeable of the administration’s thinking on Iran.”
I certainly have no idea of “the administration’s thinking” but let me ask a simple, almost a simple-minded, question. What would a “diplomatic solution” to the Iranian nuclear question actually look like? Just give me a few concrete sentences… Not easy, is it? Not for anything tangible anyway. Even if we got the Iranians to sign something, what would it mean? Hardly any countries acknowledge their nuclear weapons programs while engaged in initiating them. The US didn’t in 1944. The Soviets didn’t. The UK and the French didn’t. The Israelis didn’t. The Pakistanis and the Indians didn’t. What they said they were doing and what they were doing were rarely the same thing. And we expect the Iranian Mullahs, of all people, to behave differently? You’d have to throw in the Golden Gate with the Verrazano Narrows and the Brooklyn Bridge, if you wanted to sell me that one. Who knows what the Iranians are really doing? In order to know, we’d have to have a watcher, or maybe three, on every street corner of their vast country. And even then I’m not sure we’d know. Remember, back in the days of the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues split the atom in some made-over squash court under the University of Chicago football stadium. Its worth reviewing those times while recalling that was the early 1940s, over sixty years ago! So when we have the following from our British cousins in the same AP article, I can only roll my eyes:
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., said Britain would not launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran and he was as “certain as he could be” that neither would the U.S. He said he has a high suspicion that Iran is developing a civil nuclear capability which in turn could be used for nuclear weapons, but there is “no smoking gun” to prove it and justify military action.
What to do is not an easy question. But I wonder if, when you’re in 2006 and you’re talking about a 1944 technology, whether a “smoking gun” is anymore than a facon de parler.
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15 Comments
1. Frank Martin:…and remember the Mahattan project was started because everyone from ‘Uncle Albert’ on down was absolutely ceratin that Hitler was on his way to making the bomb.
Only, there was no Nazi bomb. They werent even close. So, was the Manhattan project a mistaken case of “preventative war” or was it the right thing to do?
History shows that Hitler didnt have the bomb, but it also shows that if he did have the bomb, he most certainly would have used it. It also shows us that a countries intelligence organizations are very often wrong, sometimes remarkably wrong, no matter who staffs them or how much money is spent.
It also shows that at the end of the day the man that sits in the white house has a hell of a job guessing what might be going on in the heads of genocidal maniacs, but he always knows the cost of being wrong.
We were right to make the bomb, even if hitler didnt have one. We were right to invade Iraq, even if Saddam didnt have one.
Apr 9, 2006 - 9:15 pm 2. ForNow:Hitler was indeed trying to get the bomb. But mistakes were made, maybe on purpose.
We’ve been down the path, already with Saddam. Saddam had already forfeited all presumption of innocence. His, and his evil sons’, patterns of conduct were clear and well established. But the left keeps arguing as if he had a presumption of innocence and as if evidence should have been stronger than any reasonable doubt, stronger even than many a hyperbolic doubt, which one would have in the case of a more normal leader. The left put forth many strange & stupid arguments. For instance, that despotisms should be taken out only in exact order of their degrees of evil; or only in exact order of how much danger each individually represented ultimately. The left ignored big-picture concerns over the least costly & least risky order in which to deal with these monsters on the loose, and denounced variations from the left’s decreed sequence(s) of allowable action as proof of nefarious purposes. To the contrary, in fact big-picture-based optimization is the most moral way to go about it. Ah well, don’t get me on this subject, it’s quite frustrating.
The same thing will happen with Iran, even though Western intel agencies, according to reports, are not in any doubt about Iran’s efforts & intentions.
Apr 9, 2006 - 9:37 pm 3. GaryK:I agree that Iran, nutty and religion-driven as it is, cannot be trusted to abide by anything it signs and the only way to stop them is to destroy their capability to develop nuclear weapons. There is no diplomatic solution, it seems to me, once one side determines the other side is absolutely untrustworthy.
Earlier posts discussed Nazi attempts to develop nuclear weapons. The Japanese were also trying to develop nuclear weapons in WWII, as U.S. military investigators found out when we invaded the home islands. Not a very impressive set up but, they were trying. At least one researcher has published a book arguing that there may have been much more advanced and successful Japanese research in occupied parts of Korea–lots of hydroelectric power and easily secured research areas.
Apr 10, 2006 - 6:21 am 4. Dishman:We’re not looking for a smoking gun. There’s good chance the first evidence will be an Iranian nuclear test.
Apr 10, 2006 - 7:41 am 5. David:They do not need to test their bombs. Uranium devices are easy to build and do not need testing. The bomb we tested at Trinity Site in NM was a plutonium device and needed testing as we did not know how it would do. The first test of an Uranium device is called Hiroshima. The first time we will have positive evidence is when they nuke somebody.
I’m sorta hoping that all we are waiting for is sufficient bunker busting cruise missles and bombs to get the job done.
Apr 10, 2006 - 8:51 am 6. Kevin Peters:Roger:
There are two choices. Let Iran have the bomb. Some form of military strike. If Iran was interested in stopping their nuke program they would have taken the incredibly generous economic bribe the U.S. and the big three of the E.U. gave them. It would have ended their economic downturn and ended their economic isolation. Their economy would have blossomed. They said no way, we want the bomb instead.They have no intention of stopping. Mullah Bomb or attack. Which choice is worse? Those are the only options. Everything else is self delusion.
Apr 10, 2006 - 9:04 am 7. dclydew:If Hersch’s bizare report is correct in the view that most of Iran’s tech in under 75 ft orf rock… then it seems to me that we only have two choices.
A) Let Iran get nukes. I don’t think anyone in their right mind could accept this solution.
B) Use tactical Nukes to take out the bunker. I don’t think anyone in their right mind could accept this solution (since nuking, in any sense, a part of the Muslim world would likely turn into our most hellish nightmares).
In short, as far as I can tell, our best solution at this point, would be for us all to go stark raving mad, completely bonkers, nutty as Jimmy Carters farm and twice as full of sh*t.
As the man once said:
“Goodbye Blue Monday”
Apr 10, 2006 - 10:02 am 8. Curmudgeon:Actually, I doubt we would need nuclear bunker busters to take out Iran’s refining equipment, though they would certainly make the job easier. A point that everyone seems to miss (unless I’m missing something) is that we don’t need to destroy any bunkers. Refining uranium is still a very (electric) energy intensive process and we showed in the Balkans that we could destroy or temporarily disable Slobo’s power generating capacity at will. We could simply announce that Iran would have to do without electricity at all until we were satisfied with their compliance. Emergency generators could supply power to hospitals and such, but there is no way they could generate enough power to refine uranium if we didn’t want them to.
Apr 10, 2006 - 11:06 am 9. Kevin Peters:dclydew:
Iran is getting the bomb. All the talks about possible attacks are window dressing to ease the fears of those of us who agree with you that Iran getting the bomb is insane. It’s coming. Iran is banking on the fact that the west does not have the political will to make the hard choice and I think it is a safe bet.
Apr 10, 2006 - 11:09 am 10. dclydew:Kevin & Curmudgeon,
So besides either giving Iran the Bomb, or GIVING IRAN THE BOMB, our options are “Hit all major power stations in their country and destabilize their infrastructure (which, would probably upset a lot of people inside and outside Iran), or just accept that the government is deploying disinformation in hopes of making us all sheep a little safer (err, I mean sleep not sheep…)
Sounds like more supporting evidence for my solution
Apr 10, 2006 - 12:08 pm 11. dick:Seems to me that this is a case of the military planning being blown totally out of proportion. Our military have plans for almost any eventuality that can be imagined. That is one of the major tasks of the intel portion of the military. What Hersh has done is take a leak of this one plan that is not likely to happen and made it seem as if it were the most likely one to be used. The man is a total tool and should be taken out and put out of his misery.
I would bet that if you were able to look at the plans for attack on or by Iran, you would find probably 50 scenarios and this would be one of them. If you were then to hand these plans to the military leaders and ask them to rank them in the order of most likely to least likely, this one would be the least likely. Hersh has used this to try to make more money from his writing. As I said, the man is a total tool.
Apr 10, 2006 - 12:20 pm 12. Kevin Peters:dclydew:
Apr 10, 2006 - 1:40 pm 13. dclydew:No one is “giving” Iran the bomb. They are making it. They will either be prevented from doing it or they won’t. They have indicated what they are doing. We have to decide what to do. The ball is in our court and I fear that the west is going to let it happen. Maybe that is the best thing to do, maybe invasion or air attack is worse. I just do not see any other options at the moment.
Kevin,
The term was a bit of hyperbole, positioned besides the further hyperbole of giving them the bomb (in all caps).
I agree with you though. I don’t think that Bush has the support of the nation any longer. He’s allowed the nation to become more divided and allowed mistakes to become horrific blunders. With the problems in Iraq, the lack of Osama’s turbaned head and the internal political problems of the Republican party, it appears likely that come this fall, Republicans will (at least) lose their powerful majority status, and may even lose the House, Senate or both.
In this climate, Bush would be commiting political suicide if he attacked another Muslim nation… and if he did it pre-elections, then the Republicans losses would likely be assured. Post-election, I think Bush will have 2 years of bullshit impeachment attempts and gridlock… again not a situation where stopping Iran with force will be workable. By the time the next President comes to power, s/he’ll likely be too late to do anything about it.
Not a good situation at all… in fact, I think that some fundamentalist religious zealot getting nuclear weapons, has probably been the scariest Armegeddon scenario for 50 years.
Apr 10, 2006 - 2:04 pm 14. submandave:I almost hate to say it, because it sounds like dyed-in-the-wool partisan pissing, but if we allow Iran to deploy a nuclear weapon through hesitancy or inaction I will give Bush only half the blame. The rest lies firmly with the Bush-hating partisans who have harped on the B.S. mantra of “Bush lied” solely for domestic political points.
Apr 10, 2006 - 3:02 pm 15. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):Its really simple: Israel cannot afford even a chance of the existential threat posed by a bomb in the hands of those who have pledged to use it on Israel regardless of retaliation.
If somebody doesn’t stop Iran, Israel will have to, and the only option *they* have is nuclear – they don’t have the conventional ability to do the job.
And that means that we are going to do it. And we can likely to it without the tactical nukes. The big problem with tactical nukes is the fallout the would result from the required ground bursts – fallout that would kill lots and lots of people. The explosions themselves would be highly contained, but I know of no ground burst system that doesn’t produce a lot of fallout and loft it a ways into the atmostphere.
Also, the most well known sites are not deep in the rocks – they are buried under sand. They are vulnerable to conventional precision weapons, and we might also use SOF folks on the ground to finish the job. Furthermore, you can’t do much with something buried in a tunnel if someone (us) keeps blowing up the tunnel entrance.
As for Bush’s political position, it doesn’t matter. He (fortunately) understands the situation well enough to do it no matter what happens to him. He is a lame duck already, and he is a determined man who isn’t easily deterred.
………..
Finally, a technical correction:
It is asserted above that uranium (U-235) bombs do not need testing. That is sort of true but not in a relevant sense. The Hiroshima bomb was a very big thing. It used the “gun” design which is so simple it doesn’t need to be tested. But it uses a very large amount of U-235 – the most expensive and hard-to-get material in making a uranium bomb. Furthermore it’s size makes it unsuitable for missile launch.
Iran needs bombs that fit on missiles. And that means implosion bombs, whether uranium or plutonium. And that means testing.
Apr 10, 2006 - 10:03 pm