New Testingstan

20 yeas ago the Iranians used a brutal method to clear mines, leads to nuking.

Uh...i don't see the connection. Did he grease the slope?

because TEHY'RE CRAZZZZZZZEEEEEEEEE

the proliferation angle is more interesting, but it leads nearly inevitably back to the failure of containment and constant american pressure creating a need

israel havign nukes is a giant joke with huge comical winks between posturing americans
but arabs are genetically sociopaths and cannot be allowed to have this technology even though non-proliferation is merely a delaying action nuless you remove the desire

EDIT jesty i see you there don't you try and hide buddy

can you talk about the situation without being a mall photographer with delusions of grandeur? i am ready to be informed

doesn't north korea have nukes

GIANT WINK
GIANT WINK

ho ho

fyi iranians aren't arabs

they're persians

it's a completely different shade of brown, you see

so now i have a lot of dvds after my christmas purchase explosion

it is kinda overwhelming to pick which one ot play

i used to just not watch stuff but i have all this shit so don't want to waste it

i love my sitcoms

but wanted to watch something new for once today

so i put in FULL METAL JACKET


never actually seen this movie. seen bits and pieces but never the whole thing

the clips were funny

and stanley kubrick is pretty ok in general

so here goes

Phantasee wrote:fyi iranians aren't arabs

they're persians

it's a completely different shade of brown, you see

but you see if iran gets nukes everyone else will want them

THEY'RE arabs

and they aren't allowed to desire the weapons of the white man

oh shit

It's been ages since I studied this stuff so my thoughts are kind of jumbled

but basically I would have thought the basics of why nuclear proliferation has serious consequences are pretty self-explanatory, particularly given the last five years of hilarity in Pakistan and North Korea. In some ways the whole NPT regime has done a pretty good job...in theory the only serious obstacle to getting nuclear weapons is cost, and the advantages are numerous so it takes a pretty solid edifice to outweigh those advantages. Brazil and Argentina have both stopped nuclear programs thanks to the NPT/resulting international norms, the RSA gave its away (although that was trussed up in the decline of apartheid) and despite the wink-wink thing with Israel and various levels of tolerance to the other norm-shirkers, the thing has held fast

but I think Skimmer's right, Iran getting the bomb would let a massive cat out of the bag, particularly given other erosions of the NPT like India basically being welcomed into the fold of the big five nuclear powers. Sure Straha could school us all here but a huge part of the conflicts in the ME the last ~30 years has been the Shia/Sunni dynamic, and while Iran isn't some evil bogeyman the simple fact is it aspires to be a regional power (as is understandable given its demographics, position, relative isolation etc). That scares the shit out of the Gulf states and the Arab neighbours; and you'd think that once Iran has a nuclear capability they'd either want one desperately themselves or demand an increased US presence in the region, which is basically the same thing. I dunno, but look at the dynamics of the Iran-Iraq war and the kind of military brinkmanship that occurred with the Tanker War etc, and then add in nuclear weapons. It's just not a good scenario for anyone involved and it's why this is a really difficult problem. You can absolutely respect Iran wanting nuclear weapons for 'defensive' reasons but it's always more complicated than that in practice. And as I said, there's broader consequences for the failure of NPT - like how nations in Asia respond to a rising China and a potential waning of US military power.

but do you think that non-proliferation is a sustainable thing
or is it just supposed to be slowly proliferation or reducing desirability?

because as a solid end to proliferation it has never worked

honestly, I have no fucking clue

I don't think it's fair to say it never worked, because after ~50 years only four other countries have joined the big five and numerous other mid-tier powers like Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and the ROK have been dissuaded from pursuing them even though they would possess clear benefits

but as you were saying at sdn if nations continue to be confronted with existential threats then they'll almost certainly pursue weapons. it's why Israel and Pakistan have them at least and it's got to be a huge part of Iran's thinking. and you're not going to remove that motivation anytime soon, so....I guess you do your best to contain it, but equally the spread of nuclear weapons breaks that containment.

yeah but they were dissuaded; the non-proliferation structure didn't do it for them; they didn't think 'oh, we're not allowed/it is too difficult so we won't try', they tried and were stopped because they didn't want them bad enough

but i mean looking long-term it seems impossible to me that in a hundred years everyone who wants nukes won't just have them, especially as the technical barriers seem to be less these days

i guess we can hope that NP lasts long enough for eveyrone to have missile defence etc such the wide-scale use is far mroe difficult... but again there we're just playing the odds

in a sense it seems like people (decisionmakers) have been in a kind of denial, thinking that it is somehow possibel to contain the technology indefinitely and never have to face nukes in the hands of generic badguys

but its a really difficult issue because what you migh consider the best case solution is basically impossible and attempts to create that situation serve to make it less liekly

I'm not sure what's the saddest part about the hyperventilating over Iran getting nukes.

Is it the claims that Iranians are all crazy people who will use nukes coming from politicians in the only country to ever use nukes?

Or is it many of those same politicians advocating using nukes against Iran because they claim Iranians are crazy people who will use nukes?

What's sad is any attack to destroy their nuclear program only underlines he necessity of a nuclear program

It'd be less sad if America wast more concerned about radioactive oil wells than dead people

well the US thinks it's a great idea to shoot people with fucking nuclear waste so i'm not sure which judicial person is the most crazy here

What nuclear waste?

Depleted Uranium rounds.

But in the other hand, fuckers were going to be dead anyway, right ?


(not the soldiers who get cancer from using them, though )

yeah look if someone was shooting giant metal darts at me think I'd have bigger problems than 'cancer risk in x years'

Sure.

TBH, most of the complaints I heard were from the locals whose soils where contaminated for the centuries to come by toxic heavy metals, with all the associated health problem and photo of malformed babies. But they are brown people so who cares.

On the other hand, you hear a lot of disgruntled 1st Gulf War veterans talking about how DU gave them the "Gulf War Symptom". That's a shitstick PR-wise to sell back home.

good thing no one lives in the contaminated areas

man you can hardly even mention the idea of removing undesireables from the genepool without some dumbass raising eyebrows, and if you dare say this is a good idea in principle worth discussing, they compare you to freaking aydolf hitler. the internet is so doggarn poloticially corract it's a hindrance to raytional discoarse


when you say to people that eugenics is a bad idea, they laugh and say "yes, bad eugenics is bad, but my eugenics is good!"

In reality, what is and is not deemed acceptable variation will be done by people. People with political agendas, and reflexive group-based rivalries. People who we know from experience will ignore or spin data which is inconvenient to their agenda or partisan rivalry. People who are all too likely to begin viewing the sterilized as sub-human. People who will--like what happened with the now meaningless term "terrorist"--will define the term "sociopath" so broadly that the term will become meaningless as soon as it becomes politically convenient.

That is not a slippery slope. It is how the human mind works.

this is like what i was saying to him [alyrium] in the abortion thread

where he called it a slippery slope fallacy that's completely ridiculous

though after seeing wong in that morality thread none of this should be surprising

at least he is consistent

Him being an authoritarian cock is nothing new or surprising, there's plenty of shit from him over the years to support it.

Internet tough guy stuff is laughed at, unless you dress it up all fancy like.

Oxymoron wrote:Sure.

TBH, most of the complaints I heard were from the locals whose soils where contaminated for the centuries to come by toxic heavy metals, with all the associated health problem and photo of malformed babies. But they are brown people so who cares.

On the other hand, you hear a lot of disgruntled 1st Gulf War veterans talking about how DU gave them the "Gulf War Symptom". That's a shitstick PR-wise to sell back home.

It's not guaranteed that abandoning DU would mean that future battlefields would be "clean". The same tungsten alloy that would be used in a DU replacement was found to be extremely carcinogenic in rats. Inhalation wouldn't be as big a problem, but the long-lasting contamination might still be a significant issue. Hell, huge deposits of lead aren't a great thing to have lying in the soil, not to mention the problem of unexploded ordnance. War is going to leave environmental scars with or without DU, although I'm not going to say DU is vitally necessary for waging war.

It's morbidly interesting that so many modern efforts to kill tanks (advanced armor penetrators, cluster bombs, radiation bombs) have been proven dirty to some extent. For the purposes of reducing environmental contamination, it might ultimately be far more effective to try and draft a treaty to ban tanks and other heavily armored vehicles. You don't need DU/tungsten rounds or cluster bombs to kill infantry or light vehicles, and it would probably be difficult to conceal the production or maintenance of large armored divisions.