nuclear-news

Why can’t Iran have nuclear weapons?

8 Apr 25,  https://theaimn.net/why-cant-iran-have-nuclear-weapons/

Yes. Shock horror! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw

We can’t have Muslims getting The Bomb, can we?

Although, if you look at their philosophy – they might be safer with it than some others are –

Ayatollah Khamenei said the Islamic Republic considers the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” from every logical, religious and theoretical standpoint.

Christian countries see nuclear weapons as tools for maintaining peace through deterrence, to be used as a last resort – (blah blah). Exception – The Catholic church regards nuclear weapons as inherently immoral.

 The Jewish state of Israel views nuclear weapons as necessary to prevent the recurrence of the Holocaust.

The history of the development of nuclear weapons begins with the Nazi period in Germany, but moves quickly to the UK and USA. Jewish scientists promoted The Bomb, including Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, (who both later fought against the bomb project,) believing that the USA would never actually use the bomb.

Despite the fact that Hitler’s onslaught on Europe was defeated by Russian troops, the international politics of the Allies after World War 2 was dominated by Russophobia. That was well understood by the Russians – so the inevitable next step was The Russian Bomb. An uneasy situation developed -peace through stalemate? -with the doctrine of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. And onward – as those two nations escalated their nuclear weapons – Fear of other nations led to this quasi-religious belief in Deterrence. International fears spread, and consequently other nations acquired The Bomb .

Deterrence clearly doesn’t work, to prevent war in one sense, as attacks and wars continue.

But you could ponder that Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan might have been safe from USA attack, had they possessed nuclear weapons. However odious the North Korean regime may be, it is certainly safer from USA attack because they have nuclear weapons.

Israel has at least 90 nuclear weapons:

“Above all else, our submarine fleet acts as a deterrent to our enemies who want to destroy us. – They need to know that Israel can attack, with great might, anyone who tries to harm it.” – Benjamin Netanyahu.

Zionist Jews consider the Samson option –  the D-Day strategy to annihilate the whole region by employing nuclear weapons in case Israel as a state is on the verge of collapse.  Unlike MAD, Israel’s Samson Option specifically threatens its non-nuclear opponents.

Is it any wonder, with Israel’s paranoid fear of Iran, that now, some Iranian ministers are arguing for Iran to get nuclear weapons? And of course, the Western world is in an anxious dither about this, and Donald Trump is threatening Iran with bombing, “if a deal is not reached”. All this is despite the fact that the Iranian Supreme Leader maintains the fatwa, and US intelligence agencies reaffirmed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.

Given the stupidity of the species, it is a miracle that nuclear weapons have not yet been used, since 1945. There really is a good argument for Iran to have nuclear weapons, seeing that Iran has for a long time been lined up by Christian American patriots for “regime change”, and by Israeli extremists for existing at all.

However, still the Iranian leadership is sticking to their religious belief against having nuclear weapons. And – oh dear – it mightn’t matter, because even if Iran did have “the deterrent”, it might not deter Israel, if the Samson option were to be put into action.

The military atom was never envisaged as a classic form of deterrence, but as an assurance that Israel would not hesitate to commit suicide to kill its enemies rather than be defeated. This is the Masada complex . This way of thinking is in line with the “Hannibal Directive”, according to which the IDF must kill its own soldiers rather than let them become prisoners of the enemy . – Is the possibility of a World War real?

So, we’d better hope there will soon be a new Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement between Iran, the United States, and five other global powers, even if Donald Trump is urging for this, in his customary bullying way.

June 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Israel’s Netanyahu banks on TACO Trump as he Launches War on Iran to disrupt Negotiations.

Juan Cole, 06/13/2025 https://www.juancole.com/2025/06/netanyahu-launches-negotiations.html

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday launched a war on Iran, bombing sites related to the latter’s civilian nuclear refinement program at Natanz and Fordow but also targeting Tehran apartment buildings where senior regime military figures were present.

If Israeli fighter jets struck unenriched uranium stockpiles, they will have thrown radioactive dust into the air, which may cause lung cancer in the affected population. If they struck enriched uranium, that would be like a dirty bomb. Israel itself has several hundred atomic bombs and is the reason for the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, but Tel Aviv and Washington ignore this stockpile of warheads when they denounce Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program (and now try to destroy it), even though Iran does not have a bomb and no major Western intelligence agency thinks they have militarized their program.

Among those killed were the Chief of Staff of Iran’s conventional armed forces, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri. This would be like a hostile foreign nation bombing an apartment building in Washington, D.C., to kill (God forbid) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. Then the Israeli bombers killed the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Maj. Gen. Hossain Salami. We don’t have an exact equivalent of the IRGC in the US, but maybe it would be like a foreign country bombing Steve Nordhaus, the head of the National Guard Bureau. Another high ranking IRGC officer, Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid, was also killed. The Israelis rubbed out Fereydoun Abbasi, the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the counterpart of Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy.

Iran launched 100 drones at Israel in retaliation.

Netanyahu announced that it was only the beginning of a days-long campaign.

Iran is not assessed by US intelligence to have a military nuclear weapons program, only a civilian uranium enrichment program. The country is allowed in international law to make fuel for its Bushehr reactor, built by Russia, with more planned. Thus, the Israeli attack violates international humanitarian law.

Israel is now waging war on people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, in what appears to be an attempt to establish itself as a regional hegemon and to quash any regional opposition to its plans to ethnically cleanse the over 5 million Palestinians it militarily occupies.

Netanyahu launched the strikes to thwart the peace negotiations being conducted with Iran by President Donald J. Trump’s administration via Oman, striking a day before the next talks were scheduled to take place. Trump had signaled repeatedly that he did not want the Israelis to attack, but Netanyahu appears to hold to the TACO (Trump always chickens out) theory of the president’s behavior. He pointedly thanked Trump in his address to the nation, clearly hoping that Iran might take some action against America in response and so draw Trump into a war he clearly does not want.

Ironically, Trump himself paved the way to this war by trashing the 2015 nuclear deal concluded by the UN Security Council with Iran, which effectively blocked Iran from ever militarizing its program. Iran faithfully adhered to its prescriptions until 2019, a year after Trump tore up the treaty and placed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. Had the 2015 deal remained in place, it is difficult to imagine the Security Council putting up with Netanyahu’s military adventurism, which might have attracted serious sanctions.

Netanyahu was likely to some extent wagging the dog with this attack, since his governmental coalition is in danger of falling apart over the issue of the conscription of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, most of whom support Netanyahu. The latter, however, has been led to argue for conscription. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews are some 14% of the population now, but were only 2% when Israel was founded and the government of David Ben-Gurion pledged to allow them to study the Torah rather than serving in the military or getting a real job. Now this community is the ultimate welfare queens, and non-Orthodox Israelis deeply resent their refusal to serve in the military. Many Ultra-Orthodox are not Zionists and do not believe than an Israel can be established before the Messiah appears.

A war with Iran is therefore Netanyahu’s double attempt to thwart the outbreak of peace between Iran and the U.S. and to thwart attempts to bring his government down domestically through a vote of no confidence.

Netanyahu clearly assesses that Iran is a paper tiger, and cannot actually inflict much harm on Israel, since Tel Aviv and Washington can intercept most Iranian drones and missiles, and Iran does not have much of an air force. Israel has already reduced the power of Iran’s regional allies such as the Hezbollah of Lebanon. Although some Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia branded the attack illegal, nobody in Riyadh will shed any tears about Iran being taken down a notch.

It is, however, unlikely that Israeli attacks can do more than set back Iran’s uranium enrichment program, since the country has a big establishment by now of nuclear scientists and it has its own uranium, and the know-how it has built up cannot likely be extinguished. Netanyahu does not have a long-term vision for his relations with the Middle East, instead following the fascist prescriptions of the de facto founder of his Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who urged that the Jewish settler-colonists in Palestine (he used such terminology) lash out hard at any opposition and crush it. This philosophy set in train the decades of whack-a-mole that the Israeli military plays with regional countries and peoples. It hasn’t made Israel secure, though it has made Netanyahu rich and powerful.

June 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Israel’s Own Actions Invalidate All Pro-Israel Arguments

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 14, 2025

I didn’t make Israel be this way. It’s not my fault that this is what the Zionist project looks like. You can call me an antisemitic monster all day for criticizing Israel’s genocidal atrocities and insane warmongering, but I didn’t force this on Israel. This is what Israel chose to be. This is what a state full of Zionists looks like when you let the Zionists do everything they want to do.

You can talk all you want about the historic persecution of the Jewish people. You can try to argue that Jews for some reason need a state that’s all their own in the geographic location where Jewish people used to live back in ancient history. But what we see before us today is what it looks like when that occurs. This is it. This is the result. This is the only result on offer. And it isn’t my fault that that’s the case.

All arguments made in defense of Israel ultimately rest on the unquestioned assumption that the Jewish people must definitely have a homeland where Jewish people are in control, and that this homeland must definitely be in the location that Israel is in right now. Once you accept this premise, then all the other arguments for the necessity of Israel’s actions make sense and can be defended.

But we’ve seen the results of what that premise entails. It necessarily means nonstop violence, tyranny, war and abuse. It necessarily means genocide. It necessarily means ethnic cleansing. How do we know it necessarily means that? Because here we are.

So the premise upon which all pro-Israel arguments rest is invalid.

Which means all the arguments are baseless.

Which means there’s really no good reason to keep maintaining the status quo of modern Israel.

Which means there’s no good reason western government’s should keep supporting that status quo.

Which means there’s no good reason not to end the apartheid state, give equal rights to all, grant Palestinians the right of return, right the wrongs of the past, and have Israel and its western backers pay so many reparations to their victims that future generations will not feel the effects of their abuses.

That is the only logical position here. Israel’s own actions have made that clear. Israel’s critics didn’t force Israel to choose those actions. Those actions are just the product of everything Israel is.

June 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment