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Remember Threads – 1983 film about nuclear war?

It's gonna happen that way.

Sleep nice.

god working in mysterious ways so …you tell me 😉

How many Muslim countries have the west invaded?
How many nucleur countries have the west invaded?
there is your answer defence from us.

Junkyard – phew, I thought it was going to be against Israel for a minute!

just because we have the deterant and the stick

Should no one else???

As junkyard says

I'd much rather nobody had the weapons – but (I might be wrong here) if Israel knocks out their capability because she feels under threat then the whole thing could escalate. Put it this way, Iran isn't helping to bring stability to the region just in the same way Israel's building policy isn't.

I'm praying for peace.

excellent sure prayer will work what with all the children of Abraham praying what could possibly go wrong …it has brought so much stability to the region so far….. 😯 🙄

Israel poses no real threat to Iran. Iran and Israel know this, and more importantly so does the States. Both Israel and Iran are playing to the home audience.

The Yanks are still the only ones to use nukes in combat though.

Yep and it saved something like 1 million lives that both sides were estimated to loose if the US had been forced to invade Japan in order to secure Japan's surrender.

Just an observation, not trying to make something of it.

Perhaps Iran knows more about global oil reserves than most, and reckons it needs uranium for nuclear power stations.
That's what it says the sites are for.

Yep and it saved something like 1 million lives that both sides were estimated to loose if the US had been forced to invade Japan in order to secure Japan's surrender.

That's pretty contentious. Planning to apologize for your comment in the Catholic Church thread btw?

Yes it's very contentious. The loss of any life in any conflict is contentious; we live in a complex world but then I know you know that.

The complexity of our world means that we have to make decisions that will inevitably lead to suffering or choose not to act, which will also lead to suffering. It's easy to judge the person that had to make the decision of whether or not to use the a-bomb on Japan. Personally, in the same situation (which means knowing only what they knew then about the future of the arms race) and given the projections for casualty rates of a land invasion (which the US would have been forced into as the Japanese were showing no signs of surrendering despite massive casualties in the Ryu Kyu islands), I would probably have made the same decision as Truman, but I would have lived with it weighing heavily on my conscience for the rest of my life.

As for my comments in the CC thread, not sure what I have to apologise for. You made a spurious suggestion that a greater proportion of Catholic priests were pedophiles than had been acknowledged and I made an equally spurious suggestion (which I won't repeat here). My point was to highlight hypocrisy and as someone who experienced abuse himself while at a Catholic primary school, I think I am in a better position than most people to highlight that issue.

What nickc said, although I think I'd be tempted to add that Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel.

Iranian governments have always been very vocal in their opposition to Israel, while their actual commitment to doing anything about it has been pretty limited. While it is typically very belligerent, Iran behaves largely rationally and is eminently deterable. Iran in possession of nuclear weapons is no more serious a concern than Pakistan. Pakistan has benefitted from having nukes only in that India's collossal conventional military superitority matters rather less than it previously did.

A few years ago I was involved in doing business is what was then the Soviet Union. Part of a project called Conversion 90 which under Gorbachov was trying to convert military production into domestic. Sort of swords into ploughshares thing.

Over a bottle of Vodka or two we had a lengthy discussion with some guys from a place called Chelyabinsk which is/was one of the centres of the Russian nuclear arms industry. We talked about the cold war and our mutual perceptions of one another and it was alarming how similar we all were. We all wanted bascially the same things. Roof over head, food in belly, hotty in bed etc etc.

Anyway, we eventually started talking about the nuclear deterrant, and their response was very simple and it went a bit like this:-

1) We lost 20 – 45 million people in the last war (depending whose numbers you believe)
2) We have been invaded and had wars fought over our territory on numerous occasions
3) We are a communist command economy, what we spend on weapons doesn't get spent on civilian goods
4) Americas 2nd world War losses were less than 1/2 million
5) They have never been invaded.
6) Weapons production in America is big business and highly profitable

So who is deterring who???

Personally I couldn't fault their logic, and history does suggest that they pretty much bankrupted themselves keeping up with the Jones.

We have been invaded and had wars fought over our territory on numerous occasions

So when are Belgium gonna get a nuclear deterrant? 😈

If I was the Iranian president (elected or not :p ) I'd try and get nukes to, I'd also remind Obama that the US still possesses chemical weapons.

So when are Belgium gonna get a nuclear deterrant?

What's that joke about Belgium? A country invented so that the Germans French and British could have somewhere to fight wars so they didn't destroy their own countries…