Iranian Ambitions

Iran is racing towards an atomic arsenal -- if they don't already have one.

I heard some authors/pundits on O'Reilly basically standing against pre-emption, claiming they were certain Iran was "5 years" away from an atomic capability.

So what's their plan, wait 4.5 years to do something, and hope they aren't wrong in their estimate by 6 months?

What kind of stupid policy is that?

Given the stakes?

Others say we will strike, but politically must wait until they declare a capability or test a weapon.

That assumes they'll follow that script, rather than secretly creating a dozen or two nukes and "testing" them by detonating them simultaneously over Israel and major American cities.

They've said they want to over and over.

Here's just one example, from Spain's former Prime Minister, reporting that Iran's Supreme Spiritual Leader, the absolute ruler of the country, told him this in 2001:

Aznar: Khamenei said in 2001 Iran aimed to 'set Israel alight'

Former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar said Tuesday that Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told him five years ago that "setting Israel on fire" was the first order of business on the Iranian agenda.
...
"He received me politely," Aznar wrote, "and at the beginning of the meeting he explained to me why Iran must declare war on Israel and the United States until they are completely destroyed. I made only one request of him: that he tell me the time of the planned attack."

Why for that alone we aren't killing every mullah in the country at this very moment is beyond me.

Many think our arsenal deters them from such a policy and don't let that scenario figure in their analysis.

We didn't "deter" 9/11 did we?

It's time we got it through our heads that islam wishes to simply murder as many Jews and Americans as it can, by any means necessary.

Its culture is dying, being crowded out by the inevitable approach of modernity. Our very existence is unbearable to their way of life. The only way their culture can survive is to snuff ours out.

I had a conversation with a guy recently who asked, incredulously, why the Iranian leaders didn't want their country to be "strong" by "modernizing" their infrastructure, educating their people, and becoming good modern liberal capitalists.

He completely could not grasp that their value system is completely different from ours, and their definition of "strength" belongs not to the secular realm but to the religious one.

The modern Western mind, shaped by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with a possibly fatal dose of post-modern secularism, simply cannot comprehend the thought-processes of the pre-rational, pre-scientific people in the rural areas stretching from Pakistan through Africa where the only form of "education" consists of memorizing the verses of the koran and the natural world is assumed to be run by magic and djinn-like spirits.

We have only to look at Qutb's In the Shade of the Koran, the deeply thought-out philosophy inspiring the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, to see how little this life in the physical world means to them.

God may have died in the West, but supernatural entities still rule the minds of a large part of the world, and we had better understand exactly what that means.

Especially when those people are about to obtain nuclear weapons for the glory of their warrior moongod.

The above is a preface to the following.

In a comment at a post at Winds of Change, poster "blert" summarizes a Russian analysis and offers his own cogent remarks on Iranian strategy and intentions:

Iran can create nuclear bomb.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20060310/44153405.html

Academician Viktor Mikhailov, director of the Strategic Stability Institute of Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, academic supervisor of Russia's Federal Nuclear Center (Research Institute of Experimental Physics), holder of the Lenin and State prizes, and minister of nuclear energy from 1992 to 1998, in an interview with RIA Novosti military commentator Viktor Litovkin.

Key points: Iran is better set to design weapons in many ways relative to the Soviet Union.

Iran has heavy water production; has had it for years. Its new civilian plant will be a pressurized heavy water design.

Heavy water is virtually the perfect moderator and makes uranium enrichment quite unnecessary. The Nazi scheme was so crude that it would have killed the lab crew. They intended to lower, on chains, cubes of un-enriched uranium into a swimming pool bath of heavy water. A few simple changes later: it would work. That’s all there is to it. The killer for Nazi Germany: no heavy water. The Germans never even seriously pursued enrichment of uranium: too expensive and difficult. ( During the war, it was assumed that they were doing so.)

Transmuting heavy uranium up to plutonium is easy. It can then be separated by chemical means to yield virtually 100% bomb grade plutonium.

America used the Hanford plants in the State of Washington to produce the plutonium for Trinity and Fat Man. To show you how much quicker it was, it started later than Oak Ridge and produced two bombs to one.

Hanford used ultra-pure graphite blocks as the moderator. Power was never extracted. It was totally optimized for plutonium production.

The Chernobyl reactor type is but a variation on Hanford: steam power is extracted and they run hotter. Bomb grade plutonium is routinely kicked out of these plants, so much so that at the end of the Cold War tons of surplus plutonium was stockpiled. This in a nation that had weapons by the thousand. Much of this stockpile was weakly guarded.

Highly Enriched Uranium is the nuclear explosive of primitives. It is too expensive. It does make for a very simply bomb design. It was never tested before first use. Confidence was high.

Even Trinity was regarded as unnecessary by many. Every sub-component had already been tested and re-tested. The Oppenheimer crew never wanted to bomb Japan. Trinity got rid of one weapon and stalled the attacks. The war could’ve been ended months earlier. Tibbets forced the issue by sending the 509th to Tinian. That put the onus on Oppenheimer & Co.

It ought to be apparent to all that Iran doesn’t dare test her nukes until she is really ready. Doing so would give Bush & Co a green light to attack before enough atomic retaliation is available.

Folks, stop trying to come up with your own Iranian strategy. Just listen to what they have said, on the record, when they thought only loyalists were listening.

Paraphrasing:

First, they want to create an arsenal of a nuclear superpower, no nickel and dime operation. Anything less is suicide. At that level of power, they can sit at the big table and have complete freedom of action. Smart.

Second, co-opt or absorb OPEC. Smart. Extract semi-monopoly rents from your enemies.

Third, infiltrate all of the infidel lands with martyrs. Smart. Russian and Europe may fall into their lap. Run a protection racket to extract more rent.

Fourth, upon the magic hour pop everything at one go: and that means everything. Smart… all or nothing is the only viable path in nuclear war. Trading blows… now that’s suicide. The mullahs have no intention to receive any counter blow. With any luck a muslim can launch some missiles on America from Russia. It’s a ‘Terminator 4’ plot fantasy.

Whenever the button goes down, Iran intends to be the ‘innocent’.

The romantic idea that hard hearted mullahs with fat wallets and decades of effort with world class technicians and working blueprints can’t have yet succeeded: how precious.

The world’s intelligence services and the IAEA have a flawless track record in failing to predict the tempo or status of budding nuclear powers. Failure 100% of the time. How sweet. I read here on WOC that most are awaiting their pronouncements. Oh, well.

Well, maybe there’s one exception: Oppenheimer and his buddies did inform the Communists of their progress. But that was given to them on a silver platter. The Soviet Union didn’t penetrate Los Alamos… it came to them. The first Soviet bomb was an absolute clone of Fat Man right on down to non-metric dimensions. Likewise, the TU-4 was an absolute knockoff of the single B-29 that came into Soviet possession.

When the Cold War was over, the Russians started bragging about Oppenheimer. It cut -both ways: it embellished the KGB and GRU… and cut low the reputation of their own atomic bomb developers.

I know it’s hard to believe that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Communist; just because his wife, brother, parents were Communists and Russian archives point to him as the man that gave it all up for them. But I’m willing to believe it.

The mullahs are anything but stupid or insane. They are radicals. Ahmadi-Nejad really is like Hitler: his presidency is more in the nature of the German chancellorship. It’s by appointment only. He has installed his personal buddies all over the active leadership of the country. His superior, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, apparently is in ill health: cancer. He has a replacement in mind, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who is as radical as they come.

Like Nazi Germany, Iran figures to mop up the weak states around them and leverage themselves up into true superpower. Getting America out of the Gulf is essential. The way forward is to wear down the American voter. It’s working, perfectly.

GWB probably IS paralyzed. The mullahs are not going to provide timely pretext. The MSM demands levels proof that are unattainable. Russia and China are determined to block further American hegemony in the Gulf.

The Rubicon has already been crossed, but the savvy non-scientists out there say it not. With no direct knowledge of the process, even an element of it, they don’t know what to think or when to think.

As to the notion that our intel is going to get this one right: then what of 9-11-2001.

The EMP story is just a scare. The mullahs don’t want to put our lights out. They simply want to blow us up.

A good example of that thinking was the attempt on Baghdad’s Green Zone. Obviously schemed by the Iranians and run through a front, the notion was to bag’em all. Such a stroke would clear the deck for an American humiliation and departure. Natch.

The mental axioms of islam are incompatible with the fundamental beliefs of Western liberalism, and one or the other must give way.