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[palsch]

Anyway, you're reading too much into what I said when all it was meant to do is show how it is a problem of us against them. At least, that is definitely of Iran sees it - we can have nukes but they can't, but only because we say they can't.

Except I was trying to illustrate the 'geopolitics is hard' thing using an example from your post. It's not so much us vs them as taking each situation as it comes. Calls of western imperialism (or whatever it's being referred to as today) are pretty misplaced when it comes to nuclear proliferation.

There the criticism needs to be around the lack of disarmament efforts not the attempts to keep nukes out of the hands of more actors, especially less reliable/rational (in the international relations, trade links and diplomatic ties sense) ones.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Biological and chemical attacks are accessible to rogue individuals, and yet their use is fairly rare.
A quick google search gave me the knowledge to make no less than 3 different deadly gas attacks and all the info I needed to produce them.
So why not use them?
I believe it is because Terrorism as a whole relies on the court of public opinion. It's one thing to be condemned by the people you are attacking as "despicable", quite another when your actions are recognized as criminal by even the people from whom you are recruiting.
Terrorists are always walking a very fine line between being able to recruit and not. There will always be some people any group can get, but the people who are effective generally have some kind of standards. Use of poison gas and large-scale terror weapons generally cross the line. Even if they don't cross the line for the individual, the people involved recognize that it will reduce their recruitment efforts.
That's not any consolation for any victim of groups that do cross that line, but it does mean that you won't see the real nasty stuff very often, and even in the case of Nuclear Weapons, there are more devastating attacks people can use.

So, why are calls of western imperialism different for nuclear weapons? Israel didn't say they are attacking Iran for developing weapons capable of wiping out their cities. They specified nuclear weapons. Why is this different? I don't see it.

[ChairmanPoo]

Back in the day one Al Quaeda spokesman (don't recall which) boasted that he had gotten a russian suitcase nuke from the black market, but it's generally acknowledged that he was full of shit.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I guarantee Putin would be putting the utmost effort into tracking down and reclaiming any stray suitcase nukes if there were any. He can't exactly be Russian President For Life if everyone is dead.

[RedWarrior0]

Several things: If Iran were as crazy as they portray, Israel would be long gone by now.

If Iran and Israel go to war, regardless of nukes, we're (the US is) screwed. Because we're friends with, oh, just about every country between Israel and Iran, all of whom hate Israel. Not to mention the several thousand US troops and the gazillion barrels of oil between the two. I heard from my teacher that back in the 90s Saddam launched missiles at Israel to provoke them, because if Israel attacked Iraq, all the other Middle Eastern countries fighting Iraq would basically go "Screw this, let's kill Israel".

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Not to mention the several thousand US troops and the gazillion barrels of oil between the two. I heard from my teacher that back in the 90s Saddam launched missiles at Israel to provoke them, because if Israel attacked Iraq, all the other Middle Eastern countries fighting Iraq would basically go "Screw this, let's kill Israel".

A similar situation once happened. It worked out quite well for Israel.

[RedWarrior0]

Not to mention the several thousand US troops and the gazillion barrels of oil between the two. I heard from my teacher that back in the 90s Saddam launched missiles at Israel to provoke them, because if Israel attacked Iraq, all the other Middle Eastern countries fighting Iraq would basically go "Screw this, let's kill Israel".

A similar situation once happened. It worked out quite well for Israel.

Right. I know about that, but at the time we didn't have 20,000 or however many troops we have in Iraq, and Iran didn't have nukes.

[mainiac]

Err... after having had their anti air forces decimated in the first gulf war, being placed under an embargo and being sporadically attacked since then, you'd call it having the best military equipment a tin pot dictatorship could dream of? not even to mention that iran isn't a tin pot dictatorship anyway...

Those anti-air missiles were destroyed in the first gulf war... by aircraft.  And that embargo was at the time of Desert Fox more recent then the arms embargo to Iran.

I'm not saying that I support airstrikes against Iran or that the diplomacy wouldn't be extremely dicey.  But we have a very credible threat of airstrikes against Iran.  A nearly completed nuclear weapon would be seen as a pretty good justification for an airstrike.  In practical terms, this gives us a decent bargaining position to negotiate for the continuance of the status quo.

[Pnx]

You know, I would be much more worried about a nuclear device being put in a van and driven to a major population centre.

[sneakey pete]

Those anti-air missiles were destroyed in the first gulf war... by aircraft.  And that embargo was at the time of Desert Fox more recent then the arms embargo to Iran.

By all accounts, the AA in the gulf war was quite effective when they weren't hiding from the Anti radiation missles. They did manage to shoot down 3 f16's out of 16 during an attack on Baghdad in the first gulf war after the wild weasel aircraft ran out of fuel and had to go back to Saudi Arabia. As soon as they were on, AA started using its radar (as before, if they switched on they'd have a missile homing in on them rather quickly), missiles started become uncomfortably accurate.

My point is, the fact that the missiles aren't the latest tech doesn't mean that instantly all US aircraft are 100% invulnerable to them. The main reason of low amounts of aircraft shot down in Iraq etc seems to be due to the fact that the missiles were rarely switched on due to fear of being quickly blown up by Anti radiation missiles. I'm not sure the USA would be able to do that in the case of iraq, i'd have thought they would just have to many missile sites.