The EU is really stupid to go along with this, because they certainly don’t need higher fuel prices as they slip back into recession thanks to austerity. This faith-based governance is a real PITA for people trying to live in the world.
]]>Which is why it’s crazy that we’re talking about imposing sanctions on Iran *before* they have a nuclear weapon. In that case, what do they have to lose by deciding they *will* build a nuke?!
]]>All of which goes to the reason that Iran wants its own fuel cycle, to provide what it needs for itself, and extend the life of its oil fields, its major source of hard currency.
My bad, I assumed they had refineries in place, and I’m certain they have the necessary plans and programming for the computer controlled lathes to put the devices together, They are amazingly simple devices until you try to make small ones.
I’ve seen models of most of the early types at various military museums before the post-9/11 freak-out, and most of the weight was in the shielding, not the devices.
Humans do have an amazing capacity for finding things that will destroy us all.
]]>In short, they have the technology to do the complete process, but there’s pieces they’ve never bothered with (for example, the agreement with Canada for the CANDU’s says that Canada will provide the fuel, so they never bothered creating a refining facility to refine their own native deposits) where they’d have to build a lot of infrastructure from scratch. I think 18 months would be a fairly reasonable amount of time for this, given my experience in managing other large-scale manufacturing projects that involved doing things that everybody knows the basic principles but nobody involved has ever done it before.
That said, the treaty South Korea signed restricting their ability to refine, enrich, and reprocess fuel runs out in 2014, so there’s going to be… issues… there with getting fuel for their light water reactors (all of which currently comes from the United States). I suppose they could turn to Russia as a source of enriched fuel until their own enrichment facilities came online, but Russia isn’t exactly known as the most reliable partner you can have. Of course, given how erratic the USA has been lately, unless your name is Israel or Goldman Sachs I don’t know that you could count the USA as being a reliable partner either…
– Badtux the Scientific Penguin
]]>I think North Korea went ahead as a matter of self-protection as much as anything else. Telling the truth about WMDs didn’t help Saddam avoid the attack, so North Korea had no reason to believe they wouldn’t be attacked unless they had nuclear weapons.
Iran is the third member of the totally arbitrary ‘axis of evil’, so they would take threats seriously, which is why they have moved closer to Russia and China.
Likud needs an external threat that is perceived to be credible so it can stay in power, so they keep beating the war drums over Iran. Along the way they have further isolated Israel from the few nations that had been willing to talk.
They only group that benefits from this crap are the oil speculators like Goldman Sachs.
]]>So only nations that are *already* international pariahs — or aim to be a superpower, or are threatened by a superpower — will do nukes. Which is why our threats on Iran and our attempts to turn them into an international pariah are counterproductive if the goal was to encourage Iran to not build nukes. But of course, that’s not the goal, so … (shrug).
]]>If we can finger individuals for ‘elimination’, how could they hide the construction projects? They can’t, and they know it, so they aren’t building them.
This is the same garbage that we saw about the WMDs in Iraq, and we all know how that ended – badly for US interests.
OWL, people are being herded towards decisions that make no sense. Everything that is claimed to be ‘proof’ turns out to be a fabrication by some group of whackoes. How many times do they get to cry ‘wolf’. before we ignore them forever.
]]>Come on, Badtux, you are trying to bring facts into this, and everyone knows that facts have a liberal bias. 😈
If it is OK to attack nuclear facilities in the Middle East, I guess it would be fine with the US if someone attacked the Israeli reactors. 👿
Having the US complain about Russia and China vetoing action on Syria, after the long history of the US vetoing any action on Israel is the height of hypocrisy.
Even if the Iranians wanted to build a bomb, they are years away from the capability. If they really wanted a bomb, they could probably buy one from North Korea, or Pakistan if things continue to unravel there. The ‘Supreme Leader’ has issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are ‘un-Islamic’, and there is no way around that in Iran. To start, there would have to be another fatwa that lays out the basis of falsifying Khamenei’s reasoning, and that process alone would take years, and can’t start until he dies. It is amazing that most of the people arguing about contraception don’t seem to accept the power of a religious law.
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