I will concede your point about the suitcase nukes, though there is no knowing wht the Russians mayhave sold Iran.

Odd..I’ve seen several reputable scenarios of dirty bomb attacks on a major city and all place the death toll at several hundred thousands.

Your Chernobyl comparison is not accurate IMO. (A)It was a nuclear accident, not a deliberate explosion designed with destruction in mind and (B) Chernobyl was not a major city on the lines of say, New York.

Even if you’re correct, are you content with the idea of a terrorist attack if it merely involves fewer casualties? I hope not, and don’t believe you are.

As for Iran, once again, I must reiterate that I’m not concerned with their paranoia OR their jihad inspired imperialist ambitions.Israel and the US are not their `mortal enemies’ on a factaul basis..though perhaps they should be, based on Iran’s embrace of terrorism and the amount of American deaths they and their proxies have been directly responsible for.

You are correct about the Arab/Sunni rivalry with Shiite Iran, but it is not as pronounced as I think you suppose when it comes to jihad and killing off the infidel..more like a power struggle and a difference in method, but the goal is the same.

And I believe you are mistaken about Pakistan..if relations were`so bad’ why did Pakistan & AQ Khan give them clandestine nuclear weapons technology?

Again, I appreciate that you feel Iran is not an existential threat, and at the PRESENT TIME that’s true..the future is someting else again.

Just imagine how many lives might have been saved if the British and French had sent a couple of combat divisions into the Rhineland to stop Hitler and enforced the Versailles Treaty to prevent Germany from rearming.

Instead, we were urged to `understand’ Germany’s position and its need for `security’!

Thinking further about what our new sidebar feature may be saying, we note Dan Drezner. He opines that the decision to attack Iran may already have been made, though he doubts its potential effectiveness, concluding: “all policy options still stink”….

Given these realities, it’s pretty easy to see why they would want a nuclear capability. You say you don’t care about Iran’s paranoia or what it views as its security needs - well you should if you want to understand the whole picture. Iran internal politics is much more complex than most realize.

You’re right, I certainly did not mean to make any comparisons to Hitler or the Nazi’s, for there is little to compare. I fail to see any similarities to 1930’s Germany and europe beyond the rhetoric.

I guess I’m lucky that my wife is a nuclear engineer who has worked non-proliferation issues for the government for many years, and so I can speak with some authority on this matter. Creating a “suitcase” bomb is several orders of magnitude more difficult than simply creating a bomb. The enigneering required is very difficult and requires a level of expertise, precision, and experience in working with and building nuclear weapons the Iranians simply don’t, and won’t, have for some time. Even if they had a valid suitcase bomb design (let’s assume the Russians gave them one) and the tools and knowledge necessary to build it, that is still no guarantee it will work, or work as designed. We are lucky here in the US in that we can use our considerable bomb experience, expertise and the most advanced computers on the planet to virtually test our bombs. Nations with developing programs don’t have that advantage, and without testing, extremely advanced designs are prone to a high failure rate. And testing is impossible if you want to keep your program covert. The Iranians jumping ahead to such an advanced device would be similar to them jumping ahead in their ballistic missile program to ICBM’s with MIRVs. It’s simply not as easy as it appears.

A nuclear truck-bomb is much more feasable option, but obviously isn’t as tactically flexible as a “suitcase” design.

As for a radiological device, it’s very unlikely any RDD would kill anywhere close to several hundred thousand people minimum. Actually, your first statement is correct - it would probably kill several hundred people minimum. The upper limit of deaths would depend on a lot of factors, including uncontrollable ones such as weather. It would also make a big difference if you included things like increased cancer deaths years down the line in your figures. It’s impossible to predict the precise number of deaths, but it’s safe to say that “several hundred thousand minimum” isn’t remotely close to the truth. Even the “worst case” scenario of a large RDD in Manhattan at noon would probably only kill 2-3 thousand people. The real effect of an RDD weapon, beyond the pyschological, is the disruption caused by the contaminated environment. If a bomb were detonated in Manhattan, efficiently particulated and dispersed into the air, and had favorable weather and winds that blew the material the length of the island, then large swaths of that city would become unsuitable for long-term habitation until it was cleaned up. The expense from that disruption and clean-up would be enormous, not to mention the displacement of millions of people. That is the real power of an RDD, not mass casualties.

And just to think logically for a minute - if a suitcase size RDD (or any RDD) would kill several hundred thousand people MINIMUM, then why develop conventional nukes at all since they are so much harder to make? Several hundred thousand is more deaths than a small conventional nuke would probably cause. And considering that the fire in the Chernobyl reactor pumped hundreds of pounds of RDD material into the atmosphere, you’d think we would have seen millions of deaths from that, especially considering the plume crossed through half of Europe and eventually circled the globe.

Interesting post but doing nothing means that we allow them to supply weapons to terrorists who use those weapons to kill our soldiers. Which they have been doing since 1983. Seems that sooner or later we might need to deal with that sort of attitude.

Pierre
The Pink Flamingo Bar

mea culpa