http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-s-eye-on-iran/ahmadinejad-iran-already-a-nuclear-state-but-has-no-intention-of-launching-attack-on-israel-1.501777

Nope

Delivery is still an issue

But it does explain the moving of the Iranian fleet to the Med. Sea.

The first US bombs could never be used by Ballistic Missiles. That's why for a very long time we relied upon bombers as the primary delivery vehicle.

Since Israel, Iran's new fighters notwithstanding, can wtfpwn in an air fight, bomber delivery is not an option.

The recent capture of an Iranian vessel with suicide belts, anti air rockets, rpg's and other equipment also shows normal sea based covert methods are risky.

With the Israel borders with Lebanon and Syria on high alert, with Israel even doing attacks into Syria and with a civil war going on... that land route is gone.

Which leaves only 1 direction... Egypt. The problem there is NATO and enough radiation sensors to make this a bad bad bad move.

So Iran has only 1 method left. A method that automatically means war.

They will have their ships attempt to dock in Gaza. That is the only way they can reliably get their nuke near Israel, the only chance they have to get their nuke into Israel, and the Israeli's are smart enough to know it.

Uniquely it is also one way to save their ally Syria as well. An Israeli war against Iran with a major naval defeat for Iran could get the Islamist revolutionaries in Syria to attack Israel. How many? Who knows.... it is a longshot after all.

It further helps Iran to distract from their own problems and in their view will allow them to claim moral ground in the UN for the ending (won't happen) of Israel. Failing that they shall try to leverage it to remove sanctions against them so they can increase research and developement of a good delivery system.

Also another issue is the Israeli Iron Dome system and the newer bigger systems coming online. This makes a Ballistic Missile even have problems.

There.... my military and security analysis of the situation... if Iran has a nuke...

In Baker on July 25, the weapon was suspended beneath landing craft LSM-60 anchored in the midst of the target fleet. Baker was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater, halfway to the bottom in water 180 feet (54 m) deep. How/Mike Hour was 0835.[19] No identifiable part of LSM-60 was ever found; it was presumably vaporized by the nuclear fireball. Ten ships were sunk, including the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which sank in December, five months after the test, because radioactivity prevented repairs to a leak in the hull.
Photographs of Baker are unique among nuclear detonation pictures. The blinding flash that usually obscures the target area took place underwater and was barely seen. The clear image of ships in the foreground and background gives a sense of scale. The large Wilson cloud and the vertical water column are distinctive Baker shot features, making the pictures easily identifiable. The most notable picture shows a mark where the 27,000 ton battleship Arkansas was.[54]
As with Able, any ships that remained afloat within 1,000 yards of the detonation were seriously damaged, but this time the damage came from below, from water pressure rather than air pressure. The greatest difference between the two shots, however, was the radioactive contamination of all the target ships by Baker. Regardless of the degree of damage, only nine surviving Baker target ships were eventually decontaminated and sold for scrap. The rest were sunk at sea after decontamination efforts failed.[55]

...On August 11, 1947, Life Magazine summarized the report in a 14-page article with 33 pictures. The article stated, "If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen. If such a bomb were dropped below New York's Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die."[119] Although it was accurately written, a casual reader of the article may have confused the grisly effects of Able's transitory fireball radiation on the close-in test animals with the equally deadly but more widespread and persistent contamination from Baker's base surge. Aside from the Life article, the report received little public attention.
The contamination problem was not widely appreciated by the general public until 1948, when No Place to Hide, a best-selling book by David Bradley, M.D., was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, condensed by the Reader's Digest, and selected by the Book of the Month Club.[120] In his preface, Bradley, a key member of the Radiological Safety Section at Bikini known as the "Geiger men," asserted that "the accounts of the actual explosions, however well intended, were liberally seasoned with fantasy and superstition, and the results of the tests have remained buried in the vaults of military security."[121] His description of the Baker test and its aftermath brought to world attention the problem of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.

...Following test Baker decontamination problems, the United States Navy equipped newly constructed ships with a CounterMeasure WashDown System (CMWDS) of piping and nozzles to cover exterior surfaces of the ship with a spray of salt water from the firefighting system when nuclear attack appeared imminent. The film of flowing water would theoretically prevent contaminants from settling into cracks and crevices.[128]

...The Strait of Hormuz /hɔrˈmuːz/ Persian: تَنگِه هُرمُز‎ Tangeh-ye Hormoz), (Arabic: مَضيق هُرمُز‎ Maḍīq Hurmuz is a strait between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. It is the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean and is one of the world's most strategically important choke points. On the north coast is Iran, and on the south coast is the United Arab Emirates and Musandam, an exclave of Oman. At its narrowest, the strait is 21 nautical miles (39 km) wide.[1]
About 20% of the world's petroleum, and about 35% of the petroleum traded by sea, passes through the strait making it a highly important strategic location for international trade.[1]

> BeoWolfe wrote:

> In other news, Saddam Hussien has weapons of mass destruction and North Korea too has nukes. 

Can I just flat out say, "Who gives a rip."  Honestly, whether they can make them or not they can certainly Fed-Ex one in from China or Russia.  How does them having home made nukes make them anymore dangerous they having bought nukes?  This is all just a pissing contest.  Everyone threatens military action if Iran pursues a nuclear program... they pursue a nuclear program.  So then everyone says... "erm ok, well if you are going to pursue nuke we really really mean we will do something if you show you can make nukes."  So Iran shows - hey we can make nukes.  So now everyone sits around and says "Well ok... although we haven't done anything, we really, really, really mean we will do something if you can come up with a delivery system."  This will go on forever until Iran actually nukes someone (which may never happen), but politicians will still try to make hay by doing nothing.

1: It's easy for an American or European not to notice... but if you were Iranian, you would never say that we haven't actually done anything to Iran.  Iran's oil exports have dropped in half.  It's currency is worth 1/5 of what it was before the oil sanctions took effect.  Long story short, Iran's buying power is significantly hampered, and the people (the same people that would be the sponsors of protests similar to those in Egypt, Libya, or Syria) are the exact same people who feeling the harm of the nuclear policy and the backlash resulting.

2: Yes, there are absolutely dangers from an Iranian nuclear weapon.  Let's assume for a moment that Iran is 100% truthful in stating it has no aggressive thoughts toward Israel (so, in short, remove the possibility that an Iranian nuke -> Iranian bombing of Israel).  There are larger consequences to consider.

First, there's the NPT.  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is an effort to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation and, in the long run, move toward the significant reduction of their importance in international militaries.  And for good reason.  Remember, in a nuclear war, there are very rarely winners (unless one nation has an incredible technological and strategic edge over the other, particularly by being able to destroy the other's nuclear weapons preemptively).  Thus, the only defenses against a nuclear assault are deterrence (the threat that an attack on you will be met with overwhelming nuclear force) or preemption (a military strike against a target's nuclear facilities).  Deterrence is obviously the preferred method, but that requires one party have long-standing dealings with the other party, and slowly develop the trust that the other party has motivations which would make deterrence work.

That's easy to do for 9 nuclear nations.  It's easy to do for 10 nuclear nations.  However, as each new nuclear nation joins the nuclear weapons club, it is nearly impossible to get that nation to fully disarm their nuclear weapons (so far, only South Africa has ever de-nuclearized, and that was not really as a result of outside pressure on the nuclear issue). 

So why does that matter?  There are two independent reasons why an Iranian nuclear weapon would encourage other nations to build nuclear weapons.

First, there's the pragmatic justification.  Iran is the only Persian Shiite nation in a primarily Arab Sunni world.  And quite frankly, if you think the Protestant-Catholic animosity during the Reformation was tense... that has nothing on the Shiite-Sunni conflict.  Remember, Iraq's sectarian violence has largely been defined along the Shiite-Sunni religious lines.  There should be very little reason why, as a result of an Iranian nuclear weapon, other nations, such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan wouldn't feel the need to acquire a nuclear weapon.

From there, it's a simple chain.  Nations without enemies generally don't build nuclear weapons.  However, by merit of them having enemies, their enemies feel that to prevent the threat of annihilation, they MUST obtain nuclear weapons to counter the threat.  The USSR built them to counter us.  England and France to counter the USSR.  As Israel built its own, it's attacked potential proliferation threats from Syria, Iraq, and now Iran.  There's absolutely no reason that, following an Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, the enemies of Iran would not begin to worry about the threat of nuclear weapons, and respond in kind with their own proliferation.  Each added proliferation makes the art of international politics that much more delicate, until we're in the situation where every little dispute between nations has the potential to essentially be another Cuban Missile Crisis.

Second, and even more destabilizing than the first reason... letting new nations join the nuclear club generally destabilizes the legitimacy of the NPT.  Unless there is some significant threat or retaliation from any single nation joining the nuclear club, other nations considering joining would have little preventing them from doing so.  Seriously, if you were President of, say, Burma (a small East Asian government that the IAEA says did some early research into nuclear weapons), and you saw that the international regime set to prevent proliferation did absolutely nothing when faced with a nation that spent 10+ years developing their program with the international community well aware of the development... what's to prevent them from developing their own weapons?

I say this is a more destabilizing threat because, unlike the first scenario, this scenario can occur literally anywhere.  Through drastic efforts we may be able to prevent some regional nuclear wars from breaking out in particular areas.  However, nuclear weapons creeping up in more and more scenarios of the world just force such a delicacy in every single matter of foreign policy that, like with the alliances before WW1, a single spark could set off the chain.

We obviously need to invade Iran. God forbid there are tyrants in the desert on the other half of the planet. They might form a navy that can compete with us in the next two hundred years! Or develop the technology to fire missiles at us which we can shoot down on their long flight to our shores!

Tyrants in the desert is obviously justification for Amerikans to station soldiers over there... in bases we have on the land of other tyrants we prop up with billions of dollars every year. Hypocrisy much?

You have in no way addressed my points that we hypocritically support other tyrants, and that they're not possibly going to be any threat to us for decades.

Why would gas be $8.00 a gallon? If that's our concern, we have plenty of means to keep it much lower than that--lower than it is today, even.

Gas prices aren't at issue. They aren't why we pretend that Iran is a threat to us.

Nothing remotely resembling our current level of occupation is necessary to ensure that Iran, a dirt poor nation with an infantile military by comparison, leaves our ships unmolested.

Awwww they're 18th to our first. "by comparison" means relatively speaking. Our GDP is more than 15 times theirs. By comparison, that's dirt poor. By comparison, that doesn't fund a military remotely comparable to ours.

The point is, if they ever became an actual threat to the United States, we would have the capacity to decimate them and they wouldn't have the capacity to stop us. If our leaders weren't corrupt, bloviating bureaucrats with the mentalities of small children, avoidance of this possibility would keep Iran from interfering with our affairs--such as shipping.

OH NO THEY'VE CAPTURED 2 DRONES! THEY'LL BE INVADING NEXT!

What do you think we're accomplishing by giving them a foreign enemy to unite and control their oppressed people? Speaking of using foreign enemies to unite people and distract them from oppression, isn't that what Iran is to you?

They can't even send a missile halfway to us--and, even if they could, they wouldn't be stupid enough to because we have the capacity to literally turn their entire nation into glass. Yet you want to do... what, exactly?

We prop up dictators. Why do we act surprised when people overthrow their dictators, whom we supported, and hate us for having oppressed them?

All of the tyrants we support are worse than the British ever were to us. And we fought and killed many of them. Why do we expect others to react more kindly to more brutal oppression?

This is beside the simple point that no, they are not a threat to our national sovereignty or our citizens. These are not the same issues nor arguments:

1) Iran is not a threat to us. Period. Einstein thinks Syria has the Boomerang system for locating shooters; all of his arguments are not only amateurish, misleading, and ignorant, but also riddled with embarrassing lies of expertise. He accepts the fear-mongering of those in power who want him worried about a foreign threat while their rights are steadily taken away at home. It's the same thing Iran's government does to its people.

2) We need to stop pretending our hands are always clean and everyone who hates us is a big bad meanie. Yes, many of them are. But we choose to be there. We choose to give dictators billions; we choose to oppress people. We shouldn't be doing that. We should know better. Our values should be better.

Neither of these points is a go-to or cop-out if the other fails. They're separate points. They both just happen to support the notion that maybe we should reevaluate our Middle-East policy of fear-mongering and oppression (both at home and abroad).