Iran Probably Already Has the Bomb. Here’s What to Do about It

[Bouncer]

Again NUKEs are for fooling your masses, the fat kim, Pakistani elites who told their people eat grass but let us join the club of international bullies etc. They are not our standards when trying to develop deterrence.

You are joking right? Nukes are the big stick you and your enemy both hope you never have to use. Countries do not spend billions just for "fooling your masses". Entire doctrines are built around nukes. You are either trolling or woefully uneducated on the subject, no offence.

 

[mike2000 is back]

Had the US negotiated with the North Koreans in the 90s and taken even a bad deal, the North Koreans probably wouldn’t have had nukes, perhaps even some way to get the Koreans to reunify when they were so desperate after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Lol You have to consider the interests of the bigger powers in the region. Geo politics is not a zero sum game. Many interests and back door deals/machinations have to take place to even think of such a unification. Have you thought of how China and even Russia would have reacted to such a unification? So Koreans unification doesn't rely primarily on themselves to be honest. Lol. It depends on foreign powers . The US,China and Russia. If this 3 sides can strike a deal and agree then Korea can be more easily United. However a unified Korea might not served their interests since it will depend under whose leadership a united Korea will be. China and Russia wont want a US friendly government at the top, US won't want a Beijing friendly one . So the standstill and status quo will carry on until there's a dramatic event that will change the current status quo. It's was same case in Vietnam, only difference was the US gave up on South Vietnam (mostly due to the strong anti Vietnam war sentiment in the US and constant internal opposition in the US to their Vietnam presence) else Vietnam Will still be divided like North and South Korea. With a Beijing supported north and US aligned South with a huge US military presence.

 

[mike2000 is back]

Iran Probably Already Has the Bomb. Here’s What to Do about It

By R. JAMES WOOLSEY, WILLIAM R. GRAHAM, HENRY F. COOPER, FRITZ ERMARTH & PETER VINCENT PRY

March 19, 2021 3:24 PM

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech in Tehran, Iran March 11, 2021. (Official Khamenei Website/Handout via Reuters)

We can start by figuring out how to defend ourselves.

Washington’s policy-makers are being misled by the intelligence and defense communities that are grossly underestimating the nuclear threat from Iran, just as they did with North Korea.

Washington’s mainstream “worst-case” thinking assumes Iran does not yet have atomic weapons, but could “break out” to crash-develop one or a few A-bombs in a year, which the intelligence community would supposedly detect in time for warning and preventive measures. Rowan Scarborough recently reported in the Washington Times that “during a private talk in July 2017 before a Japanese-U.S. audience,” the Pentagon’s director of Net Assessment James H. Baker briefed that “Iran, if it chooses, may ‘safely’ possess a nuclear weapon in 10-15 years time.”

Another mainstream “worst-case” view is that Iran could abide by the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and legitimately glide toward nuclear weapons capability in ten to 15 years. The Trump administration canceled the JCPOA for legitimate reasons, but the Biden administration has pledged to revive it.

In contrast to these views, we warned in these pages in February 2016 that Iran probably already had atomic weapons deliverable by missile and satellite:


When our World War II Manhattan Project reached this stage, the U.S. was only months away from making the first atomic bombs. This was Iran’s status 18 years ago. And the Manhattan Project employed 1940s-era technology to invent and use the first atomic weapons in only three years, beginning from a purely theoretical understanding.

So by 2003, Iran was already a threshold nuclear-missile state. But for at least the last decade, the intelligence community has annually assessed that Iran could build atomic weapons in one year or less. On the other hand, less than a month ago, independent analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security assessed that Iran had a break-out time of as short as three months for its first nuclear weapon and five months for a second.

And there is no reason to believe U.S. and IAEA intelligence capabilities are so perfect that they can assuredly detect Iran’s clandestine efforts to build atomic weapons. Indeed, the U.S. and IAEA did not even know about Iran’s clandestine nuclear-weapons program until Iranian dissidents exposed it in 2002.

The IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community have long been poor nuclear watchdogs. IAEA inspections failed to discover clandestine nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 1998, the intelligence community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” failed to warn that, just a few months later, Pakistan and India would overtly “go nuclear” with a series of nuclear-weapons tests. U.S. intelligence often underestimated nuclear threats from Russia, China, and North Korea. It is likely now doing the same with Iran.

Contrary to mainstream thinking:

• Iran can build sophisticated nuclear weapons by relying on component testing, without nuclear testing. The U.S., Israel, Pakistan, and India have all used the component-testing approach. The U.S. Hiroshima bomb was not tested, nor have been more sophisticated U.S. thermonuclear warheads during the past 30 years. Pakistan and India’s 1998 nuclear tests were done for political reasons, not out of technological necessity.
• IAEA inspections are limited to civilian sites, and restricted from military bases, including several highly suspicious underground facilities where Iran’s nuclear-weapons program almost certainly continues clandestinely. Imagery of one vast underground site, heavily protected by SAMs, shows high-voltage powerlines terminating underground, potentially delivering enormous amounts of electricity, consistent with powering uranium enrichment centrifuges on an industrial scale. So IAEA reports on Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile almost certainly are not the whole story.
• The U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran suspended its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is contradicted both by Iran’s nuclear archives, stolen by Israel in 2018, indicating Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program (reported at several sites in 2006, 2017, and 2019) and by Iran’s rapid resumption of enriching uranium to prohibited levels. This demonstrates an existing capability to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium. Reports from the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission elaborate these and important related issues.
• Most estimates assume Iran needs five to ten kilograms of highly enriched (over 90 percent) uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to make an atomic weapon, as with the first crudely designed A-bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But a good design requires only one to two kilograms. Crude A-bombs can be designed with uranium-235 or plutonium-239 enriched to only 50 percent.
• Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are not just indigenous, but are helped significantly by Russia, China, North Korea, and probably Pakistan.
• While the intelligence community uses an in-country nuclear test as confirmation that a country, including Iran, has developed a nuclear weapon, this leaves it wide open to deceiving itself, our leadership, and our allies. Iran and North Korea have close working relations, North Korea will do anything for Iranian oil, and Iranians have reportedly been present at some of North Korea’s nuclear tests. North Korea could easily have exchanged information with Iran and even tested Iranian nuclear weapons as well as their own — if there is any difference — without the U.S. and its allies knowing whose weapons were being tested. North Korean scientists are known to be in Iran helping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard “space program” that provides cover for developing ICBMs.

As we warned five years ago, it is implausible and imprudent to assume that Iran refrained from making atomic weapons for more than a decade, when they could do so clandestinely:


Why has Iran not gone overtly nuclear, like North Korea? There are several explanations. For one, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer neighborhood, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support U.S. military options to disarm Pyongyang. In contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are far more likely to support air strikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible:


Moreover, Iran wants to preserve the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has derived far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to “go nuclear” than has North Korea from “going nuclear” overtly. Ominously, Iran may be forgoing the deterrence benefits of an overt nuclear posture because it is building toward surprise future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization.

So what can we do to meet this almost-certain threat? Some better options are, unfortunately, far more difficult at this juncture. Arms control non-solutions like the JCPOA will only make matters worse, just as arms control did with North Korea, by offering false hope while the nuclear threat grows. Disarming Iran of nuclear capabilities by airstrikes or invasion would be very risky since we do not know where all of its nuclear missiles are hidden. The U.S. was deterred from disarming North Korea when that nation’s nuclear-missile capabilities were merely nascent. Regime change by sponsoring a popular revolution may be a practical solution — the Iranian people would overthrow their Islamist government if they could. But the regime itself has proven adept at suppressing popular uprisings, and may use U.S. involvement, whether purported or actual, as a propaganda tool in such an effort, as it has before.

But there are things we can do right now, including:

• Harden U.S. electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures against a nuclear EMP attack, which is described in Iran’s military doctrine and would be the regime’s most easily executed and most damaging nuclear threat.
• The White House and STRATCOM should regard Iran as a nuclear-missile threat right now, increase scrutiny by national technical means of verification and by human intelligence to locate nuclear-weapons capabilities, and prepare preemptive options should action become necessary.
• Strengthen National Missile Defenses and especially deploy modern space-based defenses. For example, the 1990s Brilliant Pebbles project, canceled by the Clinton administration, could begin deployment in five years, cost an estimated $20 billion in today’s dollars, and intercept essentially all ballistic missiles ranging more than a few-hundred miles, including from Russia and China. Our national survival should not depend only upon striking first or deterrence. The American people would rather be defended than avenged.

Ambassador R. James Woolsey is a former director of central intelligence; William R. Graham was President Reagan’s science adviser and acting administrator of NASA, and chaired the Congressional EMP Commission; Ambassador Henry F. Cooper was director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; Fritz Ermarth was chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.

Iran & the Bomb: What to Do | National Review

I don't get along in two points:



This was right in the past, but today Russia, China and Pakistan have no interest to support Irans nuclear and/or missile programms. If at all, Iran only gets assistance from North Korea.



On the contrary:

www.defence.pk/pdf/threads/iranian-public-opinion.542342/

The lefties are on their deathmarch will be soon wiped out once and for all.


But apart from that, it's a good article.

Article is just bullshit to be honest. Just sensational headlines to attract viewers. Lol

 

[ARMalik]

Iran Probably Already Has the Bomb. Here’s What to Do about It

By R. JAMES WOOLSEY, WILLIAM R. GRAHAM, HENRY F. COOPER, FRITZ ERMARTH & PETER VINCENT PRY

March 19, 2021 3:24 PM

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech in Tehran, Iran March 11, 2021. (Official Khamenei Website/Handout via Reuters)

We can start by figuring out how to defend ourselves.

Washington’s policy-makers are being misled by the intelligence and defense communities that are grossly underestimating the nuclear threat from Iran, just as they did with North Korea.

Washington’s mainstream “worst-case” thinking assumes Iran does not yet have atomic weapons, but could “break out” to crash-develop one or a few A-bombs in a year, which the intelligence community would supposedly detect in time for warning and preventive measures. Rowan Scarborough recently reported in the Washington Times that “during a private talk in July 2017 before a Japanese-U.S. audience,” the Pentagon’s director of Net Assessment James H. Baker briefed that “Iran, if it chooses, may ‘safely’ possess a nuclear weapon in 10-15 years time.”

Another mainstream “worst-case” view is that Iran could abide by the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and legitimately glide toward nuclear weapons capability in ten to 15 years. The Trump administration canceled the JCPOA for legitimate reasons, but the Biden administration has pledged to revive it.

In contrast to these views, we warned in these pages in February 2016 that Iran probably already had atomic weapons deliverable by missile and satellite:


When our World War II Manhattan Project reached this stage, the U.S. was only months away from making the first atomic bombs. This was Iran’s status 18 years ago. And the Manhattan Project employed 1940s-era technology to invent and use the first atomic weapons in only three years, beginning from a purely theoretical understanding.

So by 2003, Iran was already a threshold nuclear-missile state. But for at least the last decade, the intelligence community has annually assessed that Iran could build atomic weapons in one year or less. On the other hand, less than a month ago, independent analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security assessed that Iran had a break-out time of as short as three months for its first nuclear weapon and five months for a second.

And there is no reason to believe U.S. and IAEA intelligence capabilities are so perfect that they can assuredly detect Iran’s clandestine efforts to build atomic weapons. Indeed, the U.S. and IAEA did not even know about Iran’s clandestine nuclear-weapons program until Iranian dissidents exposed it in 2002.

The IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community have long been poor nuclear watchdogs. IAEA inspections failed to discover clandestine nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 1998, the intelligence community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” failed to warn that, just a few months later, Pakistan and India would overtly “go nuclear” with a series of nuclear-weapons tests. U.S. intelligence often underestimated nuclear threats from Russia, China, and North Korea. It is likely now doing the same with Iran.

Contrary to mainstream thinking:

• Iran can build sophisticated nuclear weapons by relying on component testing, without nuclear testing. The U.S., Israel, Pakistan, and India have all used the component-testing approach. The U.S. Hiroshima bomb was not tested, nor have been more sophisticated U.S. thermonuclear warheads during the past 30 years. Pakistan and India’s 1998 nuclear tests were done for political reasons, not out of technological necessity.
• IAEA inspections are limited to civilian sites, and restricted from military bases, including several highly suspicious underground facilities where Iran’s nuclear-weapons program almost certainly continues clandestinely. Imagery of one vast underground site, heavily protected by SAMs, shows high-voltage powerlines terminating underground, potentially delivering enormous amounts of electricity, consistent with powering uranium enrichment centrifuges on an industrial scale. So IAEA reports on Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile almost certainly are not the whole story.
• The U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran suspended its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is contradicted both by Iran’s nuclear archives, stolen by Israel in 2018, indicating Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program (reported at several sites in 2006, 2017, and 2019) and by Iran’s rapid resumption of enriching uranium to prohibited levels. This demonstrates an existing capability to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium. Reports from the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission elaborate these and important related issues.
• Most estimates assume Iran needs five to ten kilograms of highly enriched (over 90 percent) uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to make an atomic weapon, as with the first crudely designed A-bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But a good design requires only one to two kilograms. Crude A-bombs can be designed with uranium-235 or plutonium-239 enriched to only 50 percent.
• Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are not just indigenous, but are helped significantly by Russia, China, North Korea, and probably Pakistan.
• While the intelligence community uses an in-country nuclear test as confirmation that a country, including Iran, has developed a nuclear weapon, this leaves it wide open to deceiving itself, our leadership, and our allies. Iran and North Korea have close working relations, North Korea will do anything for Iranian oil, and Iranians have reportedly been present at some of North Korea’s nuclear tests. North Korea could easily have exchanged information with Iran and even tested Iranian nuclear weapons as well as their own — if there is any difference — without the U.S. and its allies knowing whose weapons were being tested. North Korean scientists are known to be in Iran helping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard “space program” that provides cover for developing ICBMs.

As we warned five years ago, it is implausible and imprudent to assume that Iran refrained from making atomic weapons for more than a decade, when they could do so clandestinely:


Why has Iran not gone overtly nuclear, like North Korea? There are several explanations. For one, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer neighborhood, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support U.S. military options to disarm Pyongyang. In contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are far more likely to support air strikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible:


Moreover, Iran wants to preserve the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has derived far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to “go nuclear” than has North Korea from “going nuclear” overtly. Ominously, Iran may be forgoing the deterrence benefits of an overt nuclear posture because it is building toward surprise future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization.

So what can we do to meet this almost-certain threat? Some better options are, unfortunately, far more difficult at this juncture. Arms control non-solutions like the JCPOA will only make matters worse, just as arms control did with North Korea, by offering false hope while the nuclear threat grows. Disarming Iran of nuclear capabilities by airstrikes or invasion would be very risky since we do not know where all of its nuclear missiles are hidden. The U.S. was deterred from disarming North Korea when that nation’s nuclear-missile capabilities were merely nascent. Regime change by sponsoring a popular revolution may be a practical solution — the Iranian people would overthrow their Islamist government if they could. But the regime itself has proven adept at suppressing popular uprisings, and may use U.S. involvement, whether purported or actual, as a propaganda tool in such an effort, as it has before.

But there are things we can do right now, including:

• Harden U.S. electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures against a nuclear EMP attack, which is described in Iran’s military doctrine and would be the regime’s most easily executed and most damaging nuclear threat.
• The White House and STRATCOM should regard Iran as a nuclear-missile threat right now, increase scrutiny by national technical means of verification and by human intelligence to locate nuclear-weapons capabilities, and prepare preemptive options should action become necessary.
• Strengthen National Missile Defenses and especially deploy modern space-based defenses. For example, the 1990s Brilliant Pebbles project, canceled by the Clinton administration, could begin deployment in five years, cost an estimated $20 billion in today’s dollars, and intercept essentially all ballistic missiles ranging more than a few-hundred miles, including from Russia and China. Our national survival should not depend only upon striking first or deterrence. The American people would rather be defended than avenged.

Ambassador R. James Woolsey is a former director of central intelligence; William R. Graham was President Reagan’s science adviser and acting administrator of NASA, and chaired the Congressional EMP Commission; Ambassador Henry F. Cooper was director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; Fritz Ermarth was chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.

Iran & the Bomb: What to Do | National Review

I don't get along in two points:



This was right in the past, but today Russia, China and Pakistan have no interest to support Irans nuclear and/or missile programms. If at all, Iran only gets assistance from North Korea.



On the contrary:

www.defence.pk/pdf/threads/iranian-public-opinion.542342/

The lefties are on their deathmarch will be soon wiped out once and for all.


But apart from that, it's a good article.

No it doesn't.

 

[Dariush the Great]

You are joking right? Nukes are the big stick you and your enemy both hope you never have to use. Countries do not spend billions just for "fooling your masses". Entire doctrines are built around nukes. You are either trolling or woefully uneducated on the subject, no offence.

You use that ''nukes are useless'' when you are either incompetent or simply unaware due to religious beliefs. I think it is a combination of both.

 

[FuturePAF]

Lol You have to consider the interests of the bigger powers in the region. Geo politics is not a zero sum game. Many interests and back door deals/machinations have to take place to even think of such a unification. Have you thought of how China and even Russia would have reacted to such a unification? So Koreans unification doesn't rely primarily on themselves to be honest. Lol. It depends on foreign powers . The US,China and Russia. If this 3 sides can strike a deal and agree then Korea can be more easily United. However a unified Korea might not served their interests since it will depend under whose leadership a united Korea will be. China and Russia wont want a US friendly government at the top, US won't want a Beijing friendly one . So the standstill and status quo will carry on until there's a dramatic event that will change the current status quo. It's was same case in Vietnam, only difference was the US gave up on South Vietnam (mostly due to the strong anti Vietnam war sentiment in the US and constant internal opposition in the US to their Vietnam presence) else Vietnam Will still be divided like North and South Korea. With a Beijing supported north and US aligned South with a huge US military presence.

In the early 90’s, the soviets had just collapsed and the Chinese had just been sanctioned after Tiananmen. The US was in an enviable position. At that point FDI into China was minimal and the Russians had a lot on their plate. At the same time, the Russians had agreed to allow German unification, a far more closer threat then Korea. For the Chinese, they had not yet even entered the WTO. If the US had leveraged it economic and political might to offer earlier WTO access and with it the FDI that came anyway for economic reasons, as well as some assurances to both the Russians and Chinese of Korean neutrality, there may have been a solution that worked.

Some kind of amnesty to the North Korean leadership in agreement for them to be exiled to Russia (similar to the Saddam offer prior to the 2003 war would not be unreasonable to assume could have been offered).

Maybe there was just too much on the American plate to consider such things, but the South Koreans should have had the imagination or forethought to lead such an effort similar to the efforts of German Chancellor at the time Helmut Kohl. South Korea, meanwhile, had a General for President, more use to suppressing dissents and domestic political battles then getting ready to take on the task of unifying all of Korea.

By 1998 when, the South Koreans had gotten its own house in order and could take notice that North Korea was in a vulnerable position, they started the sunshine policy, but by then the moment had been lost and the Russians and Chinese had also gotten their own houses in order.

Yes there are other players, but being ever ready , so that if the opportunity emerges, to take it, was why Europe unified and East Asia hardened. Failure of imagination, as well as intricate knowledge of what is going on in the other camps is key.

For example, the Soviets actually supported North Vietnam, while the Chinese support was more limited and Nuanced. Ultimately, the Vietnamese communist were ethnic nationalists that hated all foreign presence, especially what they perceived as ethnic Chinese in Vietnam running south Vietnam. When they won the war in ‘75, they carried out three mass expulsion/purges/massacres of Chinese peoples in Vietnam over the subsequent ten years. The US failure of imagination; only seeing the war as a fight with communism missed the underlying ethnic conflict going on, which the north Vietnamese exploited to garner their support.

 

[Bouncer]

You use that ''nukes are useless'' when you are either incompetent or simply unaware due to religious beliefs. I think it is a combination of both.

Can you please elaborate the "religious beliefs" part? Just FYI, and I know Pakistan is different, but a) there is across the board support for nuclear weapons in Pakistan, barring a few nutjobs like a professor at a liberal university b) religious elements show a higher than average support for nuclear weapons as it builds in to their defence of physical and ideological boundaries of Pakistan narrative.

 

[Muhammed45]

You are joking right? Nukes are the big stick you and your enemy both hope you never have to use. Countries do not spend billions just for "fooling your masses". Entire doctrines are built around nukes. You are either trolling or woefully uneducated on the subject, no offence.

You use that ''nukes are useless'' when you are either incompetent or simply unaware due to religious beliefs. I think it is a combination of both.

I am not claiming that nuclear weapons have no threat but they are not what American and Soviets jokers have been portraying in their cartoons. American and Soviets hegemony is/was based on lies and deceptions. And Yes, fat Kim and Pakistani elites have been fooling their masses for a long time.

@Dariush the Great

 

[Bouncer]

I am not claiming that nuclear weapons have no threat but they are not what American jokers have been portraying in their cartoons. American hegemony is based on lies and deceptions. And Yes, fat Kim and Pakistani elites have been fooling their masses for a long time.

Our elites have been fooling us on a lot of things since a very long time, no doubt about it. But nukes are not one of them. Have a good day

 

[Muhammed45]

Our elites have been fooling us on a lot of things since a very long time, no doubt about it. But nukes are not one of them. Have a good day

Have a good day sir. And thanks for the reply

 

[Michael Corleone]

To have a bomb which works you need to test it if you don’t want to test it for various reasons you need to run simulations on it, for running simulations on it you need data of atleast 5 nuclear test to model a fission explosion in a supercomputer to compute if your new shiny bomb works. This is just another excuse to invade Iran like iraq and Afghanistan, Iran sits on a good amount of natural resource...

 

[Goritoes]

Iraq was invaded based on fake reports of having WMD's.

 

[Abid123]

Iraq was invaded based on fake reports of having WMD's.

They probably would not have invaded if Iraq actually had WMD'S.

 

[Muhammed45]

Iran has already tested the device.

Our problem is not using nuclear weapons against civilians of USA but exposing the pre defined rules by elites and oligarchs controlling the economics of the world. There is where Zarif and co decided to Offer some compromises.

The difference between oligarchs, fat Kim, elites and our leader is that Khamenei cares about his people not keeping himself in power. Instead of fooling his masses, he prefers to offer his followers with freedom of thinking and some times he allows liars like Rouhani and Zarif to make some compromises just to keep selling oil as the main source of income.

 

[Dariush the Great]

Can you please elaborate the "religious beliefs" part? Just FYI, and I know Pakistan is different, but a) there is across the board support for nuclear weapons in Pakistan, barring a few nutjobs like a professor at a liberal university b) religious elements show a higher than average support for nuclear weapons as it builds in to their defence of physical and ideological boundaries of Pakistan narrative.

There are muslims who claim that nukes are ''haram''. But in reality it is a nonsense claim without any religious justification. In our case it is a matter of incompetence and baseless ''religious'' claims. The latter is being used as a political tool to hide the incompetence. There is nothing else to it really. Pakistan did a good job with nukes.