Category: Nuclear weapons

What a contrast between the bellicose rhetoric and actions that the Bush administration deployed against Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago and the pathetic bleats it is issuing against Iran today. Back in 2002-2003, the Bushies were threatening (and preparing to use) a concerted military attack in order to meet the strong “concerns” it had voiced about Saddam’s WMD program. Today, the worst threat that hawkish ambassador to the UN John Bolton can muster is to suggest that,

if the Security Council doesn’t take tough action, the United States might look elsewhere to punish Iran — possibly by rallying its allies to impose targeted sanctions.

Many things have happened in the interim, of course. Firstly, the US military has become majorly bogged down in Iraq, where 130,000 US troops are deployed in positions extremely vulnerable to attack– especially by any forces sympathetic to Teheran, of which there are many inside Iraq. So Washington has zero possibility of mounting any credible threat of a major military intervention against Teheran. Bolton and Co. have ramped up the rhetoric against Iran a lot in recent months. But it is all hot air. Its major effect has been to stiffen Iranian defiance in response.
Second, of course nobody this time round, after what happened in Iraq, would take seriously any amount of questionable “information” the Bushies might claim they had that would point to an Iranian breakout from the NPT. And let’s remember that Iran still has not broken out of the NPT.
(AP reported Thursday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on state television that, “We don’t want to be the ones to remind [everyone] who was right and who was not in Iraq, although the answer is obvious,”)
Third, the Bushies themselves have taken major steps to shred the NPT, culminating in last week’s decision to give India a completely free pass on its defiance of the whole NPT approach to cooperative, multilateral nonproliferation efforts.
My base-line on nuclear nonproliferation is firstly that I am strongly committed to creating a world without any nuclear weapons (or other WMDs), and secondly I believe that using a cooperative multilateral path is by far the best path to get to that goal. From this point of view, the NPT regime has its flaws– primarily, because it privileges those five countries that were deemed to be “nuclear weapons states” back at the time the treaty was concluded in 1968. But the NPT has some strong advantages, too. It aspires toward becoming a single, universal franework from nuclear non- and de-proliferation. (So it’s a pity the US never expended any real energy trying to get proven proliferators like Israel, Pakistan, and India to join it– back in the past time when such pressure might have made a real difference.) And Article Six commits all states including the nuclear-weapons states to participating in good faith in negotiations for a complete and general disarmament.
Certainly, the NPT is a much stronger and more egalitarian framework for nonproliferation efforts than the Bushies’ preferred approach of building selective alliances on a purely political basis around the world– an approach that surely, as with Israel and India (and the countries that have acted in response to those two), has merely spurred the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
So far, the Iranians have been at pains to say that their aim is to develop a peaceful nuclear energy capability. Though who honestly knows what their longterm intentions are? But developing peaceful nuclear capacity is precisely what is allowed– or even, supposed to be facilitated– by the NPT. (It is probably quite unwise on longterm environmental grounds… but that’s another issue.) President Ahmedinejad has meanwhile done very well politically, at home, by portraying the US campaign against the plan as an attempt to deny Iran’s access to peaceful nuclear technology that is of real value to the country’s longterm development. He, and many other Iranian leaders, seems in general very happy to portray Iran as “standing up to Washington’s bullying.” (And some degree of support for this position can be felt far beyond Iran’s own borders.)
This, from AP yesterday:

“The people of Iran will not accept coercion and unjust decisions by international organizations,” Ahmadinejad said, according to state television. “Enemies cannot force the Iranian people to relinquish their rights.”
“The era of bullying and brutality is over,” he added.

My best judgment at this point is that if either the US or Israel take action against the Iranian nuclear program, the response– and not just from Iran, indeed, perhaps not even from Iran at all– would most likely be broad and highly detrimental to the stability of the present, already very fragile strategic “order” in the Middle East. What’s more, I am sure that the decisionmakers in Washington and Israel all understand this. Hence the bleatiness of Bolton’s rhetoric.
We should not forget, though, that Israel’s raid against Iraq’s Osirak reactor was undertaken in the context of a hard-fought election campaign in Israel, in 1981. Is there any ffear that a besieged Olmert, fighting for his political life at the polls, might seek to launch a repeat performance?
So far, I don’t think so. Hawkish former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon told a US audience yesterday that Israel could launch an attack on Iran that would set back its nuclear program “by several years”. He hinted that this attack might come from submarine-launched missiles, not just from the air. (But I wonder where the Israeli subs would be located for this? Interesting question.) But according to that same Ha’Aretz report,

Ya’alon also warned that Iran would clearly hit back hard in the event of such an attack, and cited Tehran’s long-range Shihab missiles, Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has in its possession, and Qassam rockets that Palestinian militants habitually fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. He added that a rise in oil prices could be further fallout from such an assault.

I also note that retaliatory action could well be launched against the US troops in Iraq, since no-one in the world would imagine that israel would take such an action against Iran without getting at least an orange light, if not a green light, from Washington first.
(Former Israeli Air Force commander Eitan Ben-Eliyahu told HaAretz that speaking publicly about these things in the way Ya’alon had done, could be harmful.)
Also of note from today’s HaAretz on the Iran-nuclear question, this from Reuven Pedhatsur:

There could not have been a worse timing for the signing of the nuclear pact between the U.S. and India last week. While President Bush is leading the international campaign against the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, it legitimized India’s nuclear program, and thus granted India the status of a legitimate nuclear power in every respect.
This happened two years after he announced with great resolve that new nuclear powers should not be added to the list of the five nuclear powers, and eight years after the American administration imposed sanctions on India after it conducted a series of nuclear tests.
Tehran can rub its hands with glee, reading the details of the agreement that Bush signed with Indian Prime Minister Singh.
…When Bush was asked at the joint news conference with the Indian prime minister why the U.S. is rewarding a state that conducted nuclear bomb testing in 1998 and did not sign the NPT, and what message he was sending to other countries, the president responded with “what the agreement says is that things change and times have changed.”
That’s not a particularly successful response, nor does it strengthen the American position as the country that is supposed to lead the campaign to prevent nuclear weapons from reaching other countries.
…[T]he American president has greatly harmed the chances of denying nuclear weapons to Iran. From now on, the U.S. will find it difficult to present a morally authoritative position in its negotiations vis a vis the Iranians. And then there’s the Israeli angle. If India is accepted by the Americans as a legitimate member of the nuclear club, and even wins some nice benefits from it, it is possible that the time has come to start thinking about certain steps along the nuclear path it paved.

Bottom line: We should think of George W. Bush not just as someone who has launched a terrible and quite unnecessary war that has wrecked Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, and given Osama Bin Laden a virtually free pass to roam around the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at will– but also as someone who has significantly aided the spread of nuclear weapons around the world while undermining the global mechanism that is best-placed to contain and then reverse the spread of nuclear weapons.
What an extremely dangerous man.

I think it’s very important to get onto the record this short and sensible position paper on the threat of Iranian nuclear proliferation, written by Pierre Goldschmidt, the former Deputy Director General of the IAEA and head of its Department of Safeguards from 1999 to June 2005. He argues that the IAEA’s various safeguards regimes around the world have improved considerably in capability in recent– but just at a time when the political will to use them seems to be eroding.
He recommends this:

action by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to adopt a generic binding resolution that would establish three peaceful measures for containing crises when a state is found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations. These measures are strengthening the IAEA’s authority to conduct the inspections necessary to resolve uncertainties, deterring the noncompliant state from thinking it could withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and then enjoy the benefits of ill-gotten material and equipment, and suspending sensitive fuel-cycle-related activities in the state.

… And just when we thought maybe the government of Iran and North Korea might be the scariest actors in the nuclear-weapons field, along came France’s President Jacques Chirac to threaten the world, according to this piece in friday’s WaPo,

that France was prepared to launch a nuclear strike against any country that sponsors a terrorist attack against French interests. He said his country’s nuclear arsenal had been reconfigured to include the ability to make a tactical strike in retaliation for terrorism.
“The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envision using . . . weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part,” Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in Brittany. “This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”
The French president said his country had reduced the number of nuclear warheads on some missiles deployed on France’s four nuclear submarines in order to target specific points rather than risk wide-scale destruction.
“Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction and destruction,” Chirac said, according to the text of his speech posted on the presidential Web site. “The flexibility and reaction of our strategic forces allow us to respond directly against the centers of power. . . . All of our nuclear forces have been configured in this spirit.”

What a sad and dangerous old man. It makes you wonder whether France– or indeed any of the world’s five “recognized” nuclear-weapons states– should still be trusted by the rest of the world community to be able to “manage” their possession of these globe-threatening weapons responsibly.
By my count at least two of them– France and the US– are currently on the record as stating that they are not prepared to make any declaration of “No first use” of these ghastly weapons of doom.
Onward with the negotiations for “complete and general disarmament” that mandated 35 years agoby Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, I say!
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Addition, Monday morning:
I’ll just make a quick diversion into the topic of the world’s (currently four) non-“recognized” nuclear-weapons states, of which Israel is of course the doyen. Commenter Frank sent me a link to this Jerusalem Post article that describes a panel discussion on nuclear proliferation at Israel’s annual swanky and prestigious “Herzliya conference”. (All the “best and the brightest” of the Israeli security-political establishment tend to turn up there. Two years ago, it was the place where Ariel Sharon first announced his “Disengagement” strategy.)
During the discussion at this year’s conference, Sir Michael Quinlan, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Ministry of Defence,
suggested that if Israel wanted to seriously diminish future nuclear threats, it should be prepared to negotiate the status of its own nuclear program “once it existed in secure and settled borders, accepted by all neighbors in an agreement underwritten by the UN Security Council.”
And the reaction of that august and dignified, mainly Israeli, audience to this sensible and actually very mildly stated suggestion? According to the J. Post, they “hissed.”
What a bunch of childish, self-absorbed little bully boys. Really. And anyone wants to think we should trust them with nuclear weapons, as well?

Heartiest congratulations to Mohamed El-Baradei, the talented, judicious Egyptian national who, as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has just been named along with the IAEA as the winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
In that citation from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize every year, the Committee states that the award is being made to this year’s two winners,

for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.

It goes on to say:

At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation. This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its Director General…
In his will, Alfred Nobel wrote that the Peace Prize should, among other criteria, be awarded to whoever had done most for the “abolition or reduction of standing armies”. In its application of this criterion in recent decades, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition. That the world has achieved little in this respect makes active opposition to nuclear arms all the more important today.

As I learned when I wrote my 2000 book on some past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the all-Norwegian committee that makes the award generally seeks not just to recognize past achievements, but also to encourage and draw attention to ongoing efforts to make the world a more peaceful place.
From that point of view, we should read the citations for ElBaradei and the IAEA as strongly critical of the Bush administration’s moves toward abandoning the (by aspiration) “universal” approach of the Nucler Nonproliferation Tearty, and of the IAEA which embodies and operationalizes its provisions. The Bushies prefer instead to try to use small ad-hoc coalitions of likeminded (i.e. pro-US) states to pursue its more aggressive and escalatory counter-proliferation –as opposed to non-proliferation– policies.
Also, at the political level, while the Norwegian Nobel Committee has indeed over the years “concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition”, the Bush administration– like all preceding US administrations, and all other members of the hyper-privileged “P-5 club” in the United Nations– has had a very different view of the desirability of the nuclear-weapons states continuing to exercise quite undue influence in international affairs…
Yes indeed, it would be great if we could reduce the significance of nuclear arms in international affairs, and also abolish all the world’s nuclear arsenals! The NPT offers one, carefully ngotiated and nearly universally agreed, way to do this. Althought it institutes, for an interim phase of unspecified duration, a highly discriminatory regime in which just five states are “entitled” to continue to hold nuclear arsenals for some time, nevertheless it mitigates the effects of that discrimination in two ways:

1. It states clearly (Article 6) that the goal of all signatories is complete and general disarmament, and
2. It establishes a network of reciprocal obligations between the nuclear weapons ‘have’ states and the nuclear weapons ‘have not’ states. For example, parties in a position to do so should indeed “co-operate in contributing… to the further development of the application of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-niuclear weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.” (Art.4)

No U.S. administration has ever taken any serious steps toward operationalizing Article 6. And as we know, the Bush administration has been extremely busy since 2001 trying to find a way to impose harsh punishment on Iran for seeking to exercise its rights under Article 4.
Just Wednesday, ElBaradei made an important speech in Moscow in which he proposed a way to defuse current US-Iran tensions over the nuclear issue. (Hat-tip here to Scott H for signaling this one.)
According to the LA Times report linked to there, ElBaradei said that,

The most effective way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons is for the international community to guarantee the supply of nuclear fuel to countries that agree not to produce it themselves…
ElBaradei… said that approach would undercut the argument of countries such as Iran that acquiring the ability to produce their own nuclear fuel is the only way to shield a civilian energy industry from disruptions in supply.
“Objective, apolitical, nonproliferation criteria” should be used to guarantee the fuel supplies, ElBaradei said in a speech here. “If a country meets these criteria, it would be assured of the supply of fuel. That, I think, would take care, in my view, of at least 80% of the problem.”
…
ElBaradei spoke at a luncheon meeting and subsequent news conference organized by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation that works to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The group was founded by former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and media mogul Ted Turner.

So there we have an international civil servant and diplomat who is coming forward with concrete, moderate proposals on an issue like the US-Iran nuclear-supplies standoff that have the potential for defusing all the US-hyped international tension over that issue… I doubt that Mohamed ElBaradei would have won George Bush’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Kind of scary to speculate who might have, don’t you think?)
But ElBaradei’s nomination certainly wins my support. Well done, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Also, the North Koreans seem to have gotten a workable deal from their negotiations– including, centrally, a security guarantee from the US. Why don’t the Bushies give a similar guarantee to Iran?

Interesting piece on BBC Wednesday night relating how, back in 1958, British officials sold Israel some of the “heavy water” that was a vital part of Israel’s clandestine nuclear-weapons production.
According to documents dug out of the British archives by BBC researchers, the people who decided to do that also decided not to tell the Americvans. They also, according to the surmise in this piece, decided against telling high-level British officials, as well:

the archives suggest that the decision to sell heavy water was taken simply by civil servants, mainly in the Foreign Office and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Well, doesn’t this just prove to you that you can’t trust those British to keep good control of vital nuclear precursor materials… I mean, either the officials concerned were acting on their own, clandestinely (in which case the country’s control systems in this vital area are unacceptably leaky), or these officials were actually acting with the knowledge and connivance of the highest-levelo national command authorities (in which case you can’t trust the national command authorities.)
Either way, Britain is unacceptably a proliferator of vital nuclear precursors, and should be punished for its crimes!!!
But who would punish it? The Security Council… Funny thing, that Britain like the rest of the world’s “recognized” nuclear weapons states, has a veto power on the Security Council…
Happy Hiroshima Remembrance Day, everyone.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer who has spilled some good beans on the plans and goings-on within the Bush administration. In the next-to-last (July 18) issue of The American Conservative he wrotean article in which he stated that Dick Cheney’s office,

has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. … As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

I paused awhile before posting this piece. (Hat-tip to Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton for signaling it, and a friend from American Conservative for confirming its veracity… The piece is not, unfortunately, on AmCon’s website.)
But I paused because I almost couldn’t believe my eyes, and I didn’t want to be part of a slanderous scare campaign.
However, after my AmCon friend confirmed the existence of the piece, and after I checked out Giraldi a little bit, I have to say that this looks like an entirely serious report.
In just eleven days we’ll be marking the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The idea of an established nuclear-weapons state planning, threatening, or even possibly (God forbid) launching a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear-weapons state that’s a signatory of the NPT flies in the face of Washington’s commitments under the treaty…
But above and beyond that… Has Dick Cheney completely lost his marbles?

This afternoon, I watched the DVD of the 3-hour Canadian-Japanese movie, Hiroshima. I was previewing it to see if our local peace group, the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, could use it as part of our observances of the upcoming 60th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I definitely think we can use it. It’s beautifully made, with what looks like a fairly meticulous eye to historical accuracy. Mainly, it tells the story of why Truman and Co. ended up making the decisions they did on dropping the bombs. It has good re-enactments of vital meetings and events on both the US and the Japanese sides, mixed in with contemporary newsreel footage. The actors who play Truman, Churchill, Stimson, etc all look reasonably like their subjects. I imagine the actors on the Japanese side do, too? The actors who play the Japanese leaders are Japanese, and speak in Japanese. In our edition, the DVD has English subtitles for the Japanese scenes. (I imagine there may be a Japanese-language edition with subtitles in the English-language scenes?)
Five years ago, Bill and Lorna and I went to Japan, and we spent a couple of days in Hiroshima. Nowadays it is once again a bustling city. It’s very modern, with many high-rises. When I was first there, it felt almost unreal. Had I expected it all to stay steeped in black-and-white and charred forever?
We were very warmly shepherded around by a woman in her early 60s who was a hibakusha (bomb survivor.) I should dig out my notes from that trip… I remember the green expanses of the Peace Park in the center of town; the very instructive and somber displays in the peace museum; the schoolkids all flocking to the memorials; the memorial to the Korean indentured/slave laborers who had been working in the city at the time and were incinerated along with nearly everyone else; the stonrg commitment the city authorities have today to campaigning in total opposition to nuclear weapons.
… So here in Charlottesville, Virginia, every year CCPJ does something on the Saturday nearest August 6th to raise awareness about nuclear weapons. This year, August 6 actually is on the Saturday. We had a little planning meeting today to firm up some of our plans for this year’s events.
Earlier this week I made an informational brochure to use in our organizing for this. I just thought: Hey, I could upload it onto the blog– then if any of you wants to use it (adapted) for anything you’re doing in your communities– why go ahead and do so. Attribution to CCPJ- Charlottesville, VA, please.
Here it is. It’s a Word-for-Windows file, formatted to make a two-sided trifold brochure on US letter-size paper. If you think you could use it in your own locality, let us know!

I took part in our town’s peace vigil yesterday again, as I always try to do if I’m in town on a Thursday afternoon. The honking response from the drivers was great. Once again, there were times when there was a pretty awesome cacophony of honking from drivers waiting for the lights to change. Someone came by on a bike and, referring to the recent polls showing that Bush’s Iraq policy has been rapidly losing public support at home, said, “So you guys have been making a difference!”
(I wish I’d replied, “Yes, maybe. But why don’t you either come and stand with us, or at least give our peace center a nice fat donation.”)
Anyway, at around ten minutes of six, the heavens opened. As if the Almighty had opened a trapdoor in the sky and simply dumped around three inches of water on us within five minutes. That was what it felt like. I was stuck out on one corner on my my own with no shelter in sight. So I stuck it out, holding up my “Honk 4 peace” sign. There were some euphoric minutes of me standing there in the swirling waters of the sidewalk doing that, while cars still sloshed on forward through the driving gray rain and honked at us. Then I started to feel quite cold. I stuck it out till our usual ending time of 6 p.m., then a small group of us went to Christian’s Pizza on the downtown mall to start making plans for our annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day observation.
This year is the 60th anniversary of the terrible, terrifying decisiopn to drop those two bombs. (This year, also, H/N Day– August 6th– actually falls on a Saturday, which helps our planning some.)
We made some fairly good plans. I think. One of them is to do a sort of “Listening Project” with young people in our community, and just ask them what they know about the bombing of Hiroshima, and what they think of it.
President Truman’s decision to drop those two bombs– both of them on parts of Japan that he knew were heavily populated by civilians– marked the dawn of the “Atomic Era”. It was the only time in history that nuclear weapons have ever been used in combat.
The dropping of the two bombs was also the paradigmatic use, by the US national command structure, of the tactic of “shock and awe”. It was referred to as such by Harlan Ullmann, the author of the “S&A” document. The idea– not totally dissimilar to the thinking behind plans pursued by terrorists– was to launch an act so shocking (and shocking in part because it directly killed and wounded so many civilians) that the national command structure of the country targeted would instantly change its policies, and cave to US demands regarding the terms of the surrender.
The Bush administration’s continued commitment to the pursuit of “S&A” policies of various sorts, including in Iraq in 2003, is one way in which the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are still very relevant today. Another is the way in which possession of nuclear weapons has continued, from that day until now, to be a marker of great potency within the international political system. For example, why on earth should anyone think that the five favored “permanent members” of the UN Security Council should be the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons-states?
NW possession is a huge marker of many other aspects of international relations, too…

Continue reading “Hiroshima + 60, part 2”

Talking of wise elders, 97-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate Joe Rotblat has a good, serious op-ed in today’s NYT to mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of the signing of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
The headliners among the signatories to that prophetic document were the british mathematician and philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the father of e = mc².
In his piece, Rotblat recalls:

I was the only scientist to resign on moral grounds from the United States nuclear weapons program known as the Manhattan Project. On Aug. 6, 1945, I switched on my radio and heard that we had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I knew that a new era had dawned in which nuclear weapons would be used, and I grew worried about the future of mankind.
Several years later, I met Bertrand Russell… I had become an authority on the biological effects of radiation after examining the fallout from the American hydrogen bomb test in Bikini Atoll in 1954. Russell, who was increasingly agitated about the developments, started to come to me for information. Russell decided to persuade a number of eminent scientists from around the world to join him in issuing a statement outlining the dangers of thermonuclear war and calling on the scientific community to convene a conference on averting that danger.
The most eminent scientist alive at that time was Albert Einstein, who responded immediately and enthusiastically to Russell’s entreaty…

Today, the International Herald-Tribune is running Rotblat’s piece alongside another on non-proliferation “anomalies”, written by the considerably younger Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the Tokyo-based U.N. University.
Thakur identifies six such anomalies. To me, the fourth, fifth, and sixth of them are the most interesting:

Continue reading “Hiroshima + 60”

Hands up anyone who is not terrified that “Iran might be on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons”.
[She looks around her.]
Am I the only person sitting here with my hand up? Sometimes, it sure seems that way. The entire tone of the public discourse here in the United States is to stress two things:
(1) Iran really is about to acquire these things, and
(2) It would be a disaster for the whole world, and a real and present threat to the United States, if it managed to do so.
I disagree, on both counts. Let me tell you why:

Continue reading “Iranian nukes: are we scared yet?”