watching the cyberwars happening is surreal. Nuclear material production being attacked by Stuxnet, this current event, others I'm sure, is amazing.
The cyberwars of disinformation as well - completely surreal to see this all play out. Sorry I don't have more to add. It's hard to describe how it feels to see the future arrive like this. Pandemic. Rocket milestones, Mars plans. Nuclear-targeted cyberwar. Cryptocurrency. And flying cars are seemingly coming before self-driving cars perhaps. (Edit: And all backed by an increasingly divided America.)
What a weird twist into the future the last few years have been.
Information Technologies have been weaponized, but not hardened, if that makes any sense. A lot of soft targets and heavy ordinance, not so many fortresses.
Yeah, it feels like the "golden age" in some way - there's lots of developments available on both sides.
I expect things will "calm down" over the next fifty years as defense-in-depth and security become ingrained into how we work. Compare a "modern network" with the first ARPANET.
Micheal Hayden during a Blackhat keynote likened 'cyber' to a new domain (like air, land, sea), that's universally like early WWI with open fields of men with no defenses being mowed down by attackers' machine guns.
As an aside, it probably would have been smarter to make Cyber Command it's own branch rather than the Space Force. Space operations are basically figured out with the Air Force taking most of the lead. Cyber Command is apparently a cluster fuck of separate command structures all vying for power. Spending the time making a Space Force always seemed like a 20th century move in a 21st century env.
Too much of a dystopia for my taste. I wish that we had solved climate change, stopped a few useless wars, and fixed a big part of the cronic health problems.
We are much better than a hundred years ago, but we have much more to improve.
Just the other day i was watching a video of protestors taking down a drone with hundreds of laser pointers. People are literally having laser battles in the streets with police robots.
I knew someone with plans to protest traffic ticket cameras by aiming a directional photocell at the flash and wiring it to activate a laser aimed at the camera for a few seconds. I wonder if they ever got around to it.
I think most drones wouldn't be 'taken down' by lasers: flight control and GPS should still work fine. But seems reasonable that enough lasers could blind the camera, eliminating it as a surveillance asset.
My assumption is that people have cheap high power ~50 mw rated green laser pointers of questionable origin. The green is generated by optical pumping with an IR laser. Unscrupulous manufacturers omit an IR filter, allowing the much more powerful IR beam to also pass. This is problematic because the laser eye protection you're supposed to buy to match the green wavelength wont protect your eyes from this. Anyway given the number of beams it seems like there could conceivably be enough power delivered to overheat or damage something.
all the possible scenarios that may happen are playing out equally and in parallel. I think it is part of everyone living different realities and we no longer share (e.g. we are all lonely and isolated). those who haven't been radicalized until now will be so in the future[0]. I think the outcome depends on how _much_ and hard we're squeezed. But everyone eventually falls over the edge. Our reaction to how we deal with it also depends on the individual (directing violence against ourselves e.g. depression or violence against others - e.g. mobbing). Adam Curtis made a fantastic documentary[1] earlier this year on how we got here. It had mixed reviews here on HN
[0] "The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed" -- William Gibson
Amazing because so far the big attacks have come from what the western powers consider the good guys. The day North Korean hackers leave Seoul without power or Iranian hackers fuck a reactor in France people will scream bloody murder.
The fiction-to-reality pipeline is getting scary fast!
I'm with you on all of the things except for flying cars. I don't want some drunk driver(pilot?) flying over my house, but I want to be able to land at home. There are twice as many regulatory issues as tech challenges in my book.
"cyberwar" soften what may be a far worse situation. We may be witnessing the ignition -in slow-motion- of a generation defining global armed conflict. When it all finally goes hot nobody will remember how it started.
Sure, but totally not the U.S.'s job to police this. Best let them address it with their own terms. Internation interjection only made these problems so much worse.
This makes you wonder if we might see a resurgence in old school control systems without processors, and def no networks.
The Manhattan project was able uranium purified to get a bomb working without PLCs and networks.
All else being equal it's more expensive, but not compared to being unable to keep your network safe from attack. You need to reconfigure the line? Send eight techs down one by one to set new parameters and octople check the first tech's work.
And the Americans put one in the Soviet embassy’s Xerox machine.
I think a potential lesson of the story is to use technology that you understand at least as well as your enemy does. The communist bloc maintained registries of typewriter fingerprints so they could identify which typewriters were used to reproduce samizdat; I think it’s fair to assume that the Russians understand typewriters very well.
It seems that there's also some lack of defense-in-depth going on - if the centrifuges need power to power down, why isn't that built into each one?
It's interesting that the Manhattan project had to build everything themselves - which if Iran was NOT using off-the-shelf parts and instead was developing everything in-house they'd be less susceptible to certain types of attacks.
They didn't even know they were building the bomb. They just had to enter the room, dial knobs back-and-forth for 8-hours/day, and then go home.
Today, that sort of stuff SHOULD be automated. It made sense back then because there weren't computers, but... you really can't just get people to balance knobs 8-hours / day anymore.
The youth unemployment rate in Iran is ~25%, overall rate is 10%. They issue their own fiat currency, and their GDP per capita is comparable to Thailand and Botswana.
So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.
Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden are EU members with their own currencies. The Eurozone does not encompass the entire EU.
That's not really a workaround, just put the fact that you edited the comment in the original comment. Better yet, add the new info as an edit and leave the original comment text as was so people can follow the conversation
If the job market is more saturated, there’s simply fewer people available to do bullshit work, at the necessary bullshit cost. Resources would be naturally allocated to more valuable efforts, and lured by better wages, by the market. As a general rule, the richer the country, the more expensive humans are, and the commodities become cheaper (relative to income)
In the US, I can’t afford a full time maid. In India, I could probably afford 10.
Or more pointedly, in the US you can afford a car far earlier than you can afford a maid. In India, it’s the opposite.
I understand your point, but how does minimum wage for unskilled workers factor? For example, in the US you could pay some $8/hour to 500 teenagers to achieve the same net result. No?
It‘s why, for example, middle class households in the US don‘t have live in maids, because rising living standards made that unaffordable at a middle class income level.
It makes it worse — if the job only makes sense (produces value at least at) $7.50/hr, you simply can’t execute it — even if you had people willing to work at that wage (because no better alternative exists)
An interesting aspect of poorer economy I’ve noted but haven’t seen anyone discuss otherwise is you can live a much better life being poor in India, than you can in the US — the really low income economy is far healthier (the quality of everything degrades continuously). I’m sure it’s not a novel insight, but I don’t know what others would call it.
In the US you pass under the minimum wage bar of value production and you’re immediately in a tent under an LA bridge — with everyone else ranging from $7.99/hr to $0.01/hr. Of course an economy exists to support them anyways, but it’s largely underground, illegal (bypassing safety and regulations, e.g. selling very old cars; selling cigarettes individually) and actively zoned into oblivion
> So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.
But what would prevent this system from being compromised?
Seems pretty easy for an adversary to "inject an exploit in these controllers" by paying a few of them to keep the knobs in the wrong position for a bit more time than strictly necessary, or to flip a switch earlier/later than ideal.
Auditing this is seems worse than checking the code for an old-style, non-networked, PLC.
Also, mass tracking through mobile devices. Even if said devices are in faraday cages, it doesn't take a genius to see that something exists in some area when there are many devices going dark and then coming back up again after some hours. It only takes access to cellphone towers and data.
Legend has it that Stalin knew about the American bomb before Truman knew about it. Hiring literally thousands of high-schoolers without much job training has the advantages of being cheap back then, but you don't really know who was or wasn't a Soviet Agent.
Similarly: having literally thousands of modern techs build a bomb manually would only turn the computer-security problem into a human-security problem. Who do you trust? Who do you keep track of?
There's something to be said about trusting fewer people: and checking those few people more vigorously. That simplifies the human-security portion of the puzzle, even if it complicates the computer-security portion.
That's what I was curious about. Indeed the more persons the more leaks potentially, yet it seems that they took care of dilluting knowledge so nobody really knew what was for. I'd love to read about the soviet side of this story.
I think it would be easier to own the stack. Don't use third party network equipment. Formally verify every layer of the stack. In the end this is probably cheaper then going back to computerless.
My understanding is that Iran needs high performance centrifuges to enrich Uranium as they do not have an abundance of the stuff, unlike the Manhattan Project. They were able to pile up 50 tons of uranium and light up a lightbulb while other experiments were carried out in parallel to enrich uranium and synthesize plutonium.
The problem is that many Iranians do not agree with the current government or the revolutionary guard. Some of them have access to key infrastructures such as the building that contains the centrifuges.
Reverting to old methods might not work so well when you face that situation.
This sounds like how the Galactica survived in the 2003 BSG reboot. All of the critical systems (fire control, navigation, life support, etc.) were standalone & not networked. The baddies took out all of the new ships & defense networks with a computer virus, and the old Galactica couldn’t be hacked that way.
What does it even mean to “not be networked” and on a Galactic spaceship?
I can imagine all of those systems need to communicate within their domain somehow, so they need to be connected. You could make a point that they have “not been connected to the internet”, but then it only takes one node to become a bridge between WAN and LAN and you are Pwned.
It’s even worse now because there’s a tendency in software development to discount security this way: “we don’t need to think about security because we have a firewall”.
But if that GPIO triggers an interrupt, you might be able to get the processor to do interesting things by oscillating the signal faster than the processor can disable interrupts and run the ISR.
The one I know of that glitched lines at the right time (the xbox 360 reset glitch hack modchips) worked by glitching the reset line at the right time via a CPLD that had been attached in such a way as to bypass the analog filtering.
I agree that this scheme doesn't protect against hardware implants modifying lines, but the threat model discussed thus far was around propagation of software implants throughout a system.
I think the various ship subsystems were isolated and they used analog voice telephones to request various ship operations from crew in those sub areas.
They're talking about a TV show[1], where one early episode revolved around the fact that they had avoided connecting the computers to keep the bad guys out. (Sorry if I'm telling you something you already knew; the question you started with made it unclear.)
The show created an aesthetic like an old submarine, even using set pieces salvaged from other submarine movies. That was an aesthetic choice, making everything look cluttered and cramped and slow, increasing tension in exactly the way old submarine movies used to. In those movies, the computers weren't connected because they didn't exist. Actions were coordinated by phone.
It's a bit contrived that they had computers but not networks. It was just a conceit of the show, and actually it was really mostly just in that one episode. But the aesthetic carried through and made for great atmosphere.
In a lot of conflicts today the Kalashnikov is the highest tech used in combat so these simple systems are more the rule than the exception.
High tech combat gear with VR and exoskeletons is more of a gun dealer's wet dream(e.g. costs a ton, breaks often) than anything that usually gets deployed.
The Kalashnikov looks low tech because it was designed to be cheap to manufacture but I'd argue the AK is one of the technical milestones in the 20th century on par with the assembly line (as horrible as the effects have been). It's carefully designed to operate reliably despite crappy manufacturing and ammunition tolerances after taking a beating in the field, made using whatever crappy metal is available for the receiver and barrel.
I used to work at a small company that manufactured medical equipment.
One of the products we made was a pick-and place robot that handled urine samples.
It needed a coordinated 3-axis motor servo motor control, which we initially planned to use PLCs for, however after looking around and seeing the price tag of the stuff that matched our required feature set, we decided to build our own.
We were up and running within 2 months, and I can tell you, writing code in C for the control loops is infinitely preferable to whatever monstrosity PLCs can be programmed in.
I'd say this is a much more complex scenario than running a single motor at a certain speed depending on some sensor readings.
Iran leadership routinely makes threats to destroy America and Israel. This often get ignored or dismissed. But like waving a gun in a cops face. Well bad things happen.
One nuke will piss America off.
One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.
From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.
Pushed hard enough they may just so that.
However it’s a massive gamble if surrounding counties would eliminate Israel afterwards
These hack jobs,
assassinations, etc are all half measures to prevent a full scale war.
Life is hard when much of the world wants you dead.
It doesn't have to be on a warhead but smuggled somehow.
It would certainly be traced back to them so I don't think they will ever target America directly.
Maybe, maybe not. Once you have shown you have the capabilities it's a different story, but then again you don't have to directly do it, just leak it to your "friendly" neighborhood terrorist group and let them take the blame. Maybe Iran is a different story but what if a dirty bomb was made from India's or China's nuclear materials for example, would an international coalition invade them? I doubt it.
While this is possible, it's clear that this would be a deterrence first. The point would be that minor strikes or political actions would not have a much higher cost. For example, North Korea does not want to nuke the US. They want to possess nukes such that US actions are more constrained. It's a very unfortunate incentive.
While I agree that the main point is deterrence, the rules have changed in the last 50 year and it's not always a country vs country. Israel created their nuclear program to deter an all out war that could lead to Israel destruction but today Israel isn't fighting their direct neighbors in a conventional warfare.
Nukes in the hands of North Korea are bad no matter what, don't underestimate a mad man and their cult followings.
Not yet, but eventually they will. North Korea has intercontinental missiles. This is 1950s technology: if a country wants it badly enough they'll get it.
If much of the world wants you dead (your words, not mine) then maybe it's time to look in a mirror.
Edit:
HN commenters are so thick. First of all GP says everyone hate Israel. So that must include you the reader of this comment. If you actually take that shit serious and then have a problem with my comment instead all I can say is that you should look in a mirror too. It's a fat lie. Not everyone hates Israel. Actually most on HN loves Israel and always heavily upvote pro-israel stories.
If one person thinks you're an asshole they might simply be wrong about you. If everyone in the world thinks you're an asshole then you, almost by definiton, are one.
There's a reason why there's a separate word in most languages for "anti-semitism" but not for "anti-italianism" or "anti-brasilianism".
I see you are not even pretending not to be antisemitic. Most antisemites hide under cover of "anti-zionisim".
And to other people reading this, this poster seriously thinks that antisemitism is because "all Jews are assholes". I'm truly shocked to see such things on this site, although maybe I should expect that.
I'm unfortunately not surprised - there is a strange "intellectual dark web" bent among the HN crowd, despite it being transparently pseudo-intellectual garbage.
Please don't respond to flamewar comments by perpetuating the flamewar. That just damages this place even further, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not do:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
Israel is a democracy, has human rights, conducts elections, has free trade and great tech scene, currency is stable and they've got one of the best intelligence agencies. Israel's population is some 9 million which is half of Beijing city and little bit larger than SF Bay Area.
Let's contrast it with fundamentalist Iranian islamic government, hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's, hanging their journalists and publicly executing dissidents.
I am not sure there is a shred of doubt who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here.
Israel is occupying Palestine, mobility controlled by checkpoints and passes a la South Africa, and actively takes actions to ensure that non-jewish people do not gain a majority in the country.
Israel extends a "right of return" only to displaced people who are of a certain ethnicity.
> hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's
I have no ideea why you think this is relevant to your otherwise valid point. Iran and Israel are very similar here, one never signed the NPT and other signed it but is in non-compliance with the terms. Both states essentially don't care about what the other countries think of their nuclear activities - as is their right under international law.
It's all blah blah blah to me. The point is that GP is full of crap. Not everyone hates Israel as you yourself have just proven. Yet posts like it are seen multiple times at every thread that mention Israel.
Israel is not a democracy. It is a country ruled by religious fanatics, basically. If you are not a Jew, you do not profess Judaism you are denied some of the civil rights, maybe not officially, but practicaly. Think of all the Palestinians there.
Edit: actually, you've posted so many of these that I've gone ahead and banned you. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Let's be honest though, had Iran carried out such attack we would have called it a terrorist attack.
I know you're about to go on about how awful Iranian regime is and they SAY they want Israel gone. But remember, Israel actually DOES carry out associations.
Like your mental gymnastics. If Iran carries out such attacks on Israeli installations, who do have nuclear weapons. We would be framing it as terrorist attack.
I think the narrative build that Iran is evil and Israel is devine only allows one side to do what they want till full blown out war breaks out.
I think it's a little murky given that they're not officially at war.
Anti-terrorism conventions define terrorism as explicitly including unlawful killings with the intent to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.
The scientist I'm referring to (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh) was not killed as part of a legitimate strike on a military facility, he was killed in his car with his wife sitting in the seat next to him, on a road with many civilians around.
I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
> The scientist I'm referring to (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh) was not killed as part of a legitimate strike on a military facility, he was killed in his car with his wife sitting in the seat next to him, on a road with many civilians around.
What are you talking about "facility"? The human, named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was a military target, since he was the head of the nuclear weapons program in Iran.
I'm unclear what the relevance of "many civilians around". Do you imagine military targets are always isolated with never any civilians near them?
> I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
A scientist in the US or Israel working on developing a nuclear weapon would be a military target. Why does this surprise you?
There's a reason you don't know the names of any scientists in the US or Israel working on nuclear weapons: They would instantly become targets.
Do you imagine war is some kind of game where everyone is like "it's my turn now", and there's a referee?
You have a long history of posting flamewar comments to HN. Would you please stop doing that? I've banned a whole bunch of accounts on both sides of this hellish thread, and it's dismaying to see a long-established account like yours getting in there and dragging things deeper into hell along with all the trolls. This is not what HN is supposed to be for. Surely you know that.
The 2001 attack on the Pentagon is usually cast as a terrorist attack in the West. Words change: terrorism is now really more about who committs the attacks, and how much you like them, than the mode of attack or the target.
Iran funds and supports groups who have declared, and continue to make war on Israel as a proxy for themselves doing it. They are happy to expend every single one of their proxy armies and munitions if they can avoid the direct consequences of action.
The groups that Iran supports carry out assassinations. Kidnappings. Mass murder. Direct attacks on non-combatant populations, aka war crimes. They cyber attack where they can. They physically attack where they can get their cannon fodder to do the wet work.
So, what's your point? That Israel is "evil" for demonstrating dangerous teeth behind its deterrence?
I'm not defending iran.im just saying we build a narrative against one side. Look at your comment, everything you said about Iran usa, Britain and Israel does too.
But you highlighted Iran's evil while we excuse "our own" side awful actions.
There's a game siblings sometimes play. One hits another. The injured party responds in kind. The first, the aggressor, calls their parents and complains that the second hit the first and was the aggressor. The second is then punished by the parent for aggression.
This has been the rhetorical, and effectively actual history of the conflicts since prior to the founding of Israel. Iran was a "friend" until they ... changed direction ... in 1979.
Israel is defending itself, actively, against existential threats. If the act of defending itself and its people causes you to label it as evil, that's your business.
Iran is not defending itself against existential threats. It is actively on the offense along multiple fronts. Its activities directly and indirectly cause death of non-combatants. That is, IMO, a very basic and simple definition of evil. This isn't defense. This is offense. For the express purpose of achieving the goals they have enthusiastically repeated for decades.
If you don't think that is evil, that is your business as well.
So Iran SAYS "Israel should be wiped out of the map", and that makes all ACTIONS (including boarder line terrorism) by Israel justified.
Our way of buying into narratives and pushing them allows justifications for wars so easy. Just look at Iraq war. Narrative build and bought by us was that Sadam is bad and has bar weapons so let's go to war.
Again I'm not defending Iran. In fact I really hate the regime. I'm just saying what's wrong is wrong no matter who does it.
As I noted, it's not what each say. It's what they do.
If you find yourself arguing against the entity that is the victim of the aggressor entity, I think you have some deep internal reflecting to do. Because such a position, is advocating against defending against actual attacks. Which the aggressor entity has done, in the open, through proxies, as well as in secret. Israel is not the aggressor entity.
If this is what you support, or cannot bring yourself to accept, and insist that this is "narrative" ...
Again, best thing to do is lots of internal reflection.
I bet you're no where to be found when all this "Israel is the victim, Iran is the aggressor" narrative turns out to be bs. Just like all those Iraq war supports have disappeared. Even fox news back peddles now. None of them like to even admit they supported the war.
Israel engages in as much despicable behaviour as Iran does. Only you paint Israel's actions as justified because it's Israel.
Once again Iranian regime is god awful, this is not a defence of them. My point is, stop buying into narratives that governments build.
...and Iran routinely attacks Israel. Most recent attacks have targeted Israel's water supply, a civilian ship, funding Hezbollah to fire rockets on their behalf, training guerillas in Syria and Lebanon...
Gone are the days where threatening to wipe jews off the planet was considered rhetoric. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
There's no indication that Iran is any less deterrable than every other nuclear power.
We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac, it would also be a bad idea to do it over Iran's posturing.
The US killed their national hero last year and we got a measured, proportionate response rather than lighting Iraq on fire.
Trying to pre-emptively "bomb Iran into the stone age" would not only be barbaric, it would result in a hail of scuds hitting Tel Aviv. You don't want that.
A 'hail of scuds' would be temporary and mild in comparison to a 'real' nuclear threat from Iran.
Of course - nobody has any intention of actually dropping nukes on anyone.
It's about power and leverage, and Iran's ability to project their dominance towards destabilizing and overthrowing House of Saud, and maybe disrupting/overthrowing Israel some day as well.
Since House of Saud actually has nukes (they paid for Pakistani program so that 'in a time of need' nukes will magically appear in their arsenal) all of this is bad for everyone.
In the 'balance of power' it actually makes a tiny bit of sense that 'small actor surrounded by 10 enemies', Israel, has 'secret nukes' because from a strategic perspective, it would be suicidal for them to use in anything other than an existential scenario of defence. If they were not building homes in Occupied Territories, I think more people would probably more readily acknowledge their defensive requirements. Also of course the fact that most people alive today don't have living memory of the many times Israel was invaded/fought wars with direct neighbours, many times bigger than it, and the outcomes were never going to be clear.
It would be better for everyone if Iran just gave up it's nuclear ambitions - there is zero chance anyone is going to invade them, they could join the rest of the world and start using their Oil dollars to buy plastic junk from China and software from the US, and physical gear from Germany - just like the rest of us - their people can be much wealthier, and we could all get along.
EDIT: Ignore this post. I misunderstood OP. The rest of this is just here to preserve what I originally wrote.
---
Serious question: at what point is it no longer rational to return land wrongfully taken? To displace millions of people and remove their right to self-govern? Practically every nation in existence came to be by taking land from someone at some point.
I agree that the "right of return" thing was BS. But it happened. I think the best course of action now is figure out how to move forward without wronging even more people.
Okay, but Israel still has a right of return. Should that right not be granted to displaced Palestinians? Laws making it more difficult for people of Arab descent to get citizenship were passed in 2003.
This is not about long-ago occurences, this is about active steps Israel is taking now to maintain their status as an ethnostate.
"There's no indication that Iran is any less deterrable than every other nuclear power."
Iran is an extremist theocratic dictatorship with a history of violence and threats.
There's very little rational concern about the U.S. or the U.K or China using nuclear weapons against Iran. If nothing else, they've had decades to do so and have chosen not to.
There is completely valid concern that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel or the U.S, in some future circumstance.
At the very least, Iran might hold Israel hostage by threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Dismissing this as an extremist, imperialist, or Zionist viewpoint just doesn't cut it. This would be a very reasonable viewpoint of for any rational disinterested observer.
"We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac"
The U.S. had tons of evidence and intelligence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the USSR had zero interest in a full scale nuclear exchange. In fact, the U.S. employed the "Mad Man" strategy throughout the Cold War, which meant it was generally more belligerent about threatening nuclear war.
In that case their highest religious authority has issued a fatwa against weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and since they're religious zealots they would honour that fatwa.
So they're either very religious, and should pose no danger because of that, or they're not very religious, in which case they would pose no danger.
First we feared the godless communists having the bomb because they were not held to a higher moral authority.
Now we fear the theocratic muslims because their fanaticism is stronger than their sense of self preservation.
It turns out this is all propaganda, no state is keen on destroying the world, and it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.
> it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.
No, it's really not. It's akin to citizens wanting to walk around with ARs in case they need to defend themselves. No, worse, because at least an AR wont annihilate everyone around you after you're already dead.
The value in having nuclear weapons is the threat that you could spitefully take your opponents out with you. The danger in having nuclear weapons is that some day it could actually happen.
Mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent. It's an eventuality - one which we should be vigilantly protecting against.
Libya wanted nukes. They were convinced not to. Now see where they are and compare with North Korea.
This is why Iran wants nukes and it is very logical.
Because people are anti-semitic. In this particular case, you have a muslim majority country on one side of the equation.
In case you really need this much of a primer: (some) Muslims don't like Jews because they're following Muhammad's lead. Specifically, Muhammad had this to say about Jews in one of the Hadith:
> The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.
Of course the Jews (for their part) say that Muhammad was a false prophet. On balance though, they also say this about Jesus.
LONG predate? Sure, instances of Muslims attacking Jews certainly do, just as instances of Jews attacking Muslims certainly predates Mandatory Palestine by thousands of years.
But in the centuries preceding Mandatory Palestine, there was not a sizable Jewish population in the area.
"The Nakba is not the reason for animosity against Israel because there were attacks against Jews prior to the Nakba" doesn't strike me as a solid argument either.
Really? If Muslims were attacking Jews for being Jews before the Nakba, then obviously Muslims disliking Jews does not lie at the feet of the Nakba. That is like the most solid argument I've ever heard.
Attacks by Christians against Muslims long predate 9/11, but that doesn’t mean that attacks by certain specific predominantly Christian groups against certain specific Muslims, particularly in and around Central and South Asia starting shortly after 9/11 were not motivated by the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda.
If you can accept that, the same thing with “events related to Mandatory Palestine” in place of 9/11, Muslims in place of Christians, and Jews in place of Muslims should not be much of a stretch.
They could push for the nuclear agreement to come back and get the IAEA inspectors in. Long term these clandestine operations won't work. If Iran gets a nuke, it won't be too long before Saudi also has one. Saudi did pay for Pakistans nuclear bomb. There is probably a knowledge and materials sharing agreement in place. Having a nuclear states in one of the most volatile areas in the world seems like a huge global issue.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
lolwut? Absolute nonsense. A 60kt nuke, size of the largest India has ever tested, wouldn't even dose like half of Tel-Aviv's land area, let alone the whole country.
This is a hilarious position to take. Israel should relax because losing 5% of its population (and another 5% due to later side effects), which includes most of its export and good portions of its youth, technically wouldn't destroy every part of the country.
Sorry I didn’t do a full break down on on how to eliminate all life in a country.
Others have certainly made efforts to exterminate Jews. Perhaps you would care to study how that went.
Only a few big cities.
So maybe a dozen nukes would be sufficient.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.
Area of Hiroshima: 350.1 square miles
Area of Israel: 8,019 square miles
Yeah I'd say [citation needed] for that.
> From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.
This really isn't helping you, because if you're an Iranian and your government says "That country over there says their only logical choice is to bomb us into the stone age!" well what do you expect to happen?
Of course, predictably, both countries can (and will) play the same game, distracting people from actual issues like corruption. In the end, both governments win, while people loses everywhere.
Your argument would be stronger if you added up the area of the inhabited areas of Israel rather than the total area, but yea, one nuke wouldn't take out a country unless the country was just a single city like Singapore.
Nukes are way more powerful than they were at the end of WW2, and most of southern israel is not populated. I'm pretty sure an H-bomb to Tel Aviv would kill >20% of Israel's population. So yeah, not exactly "One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely", but still "one nuke and 1/5 of the population is gone, and countless more injured"
If the US genuinely wanted to prevent Iranian weapons research, they wouldn't have simply walked away from the deal regulating it. The Trump administrations goals were complicated (and largely self-contradictory, and in most cases just poorly-informed), but they were not motivated by a practical desire to prevent proliferation.
This is what everyone knew was going to happen. The interesting question is if "this" (an unstable persian geopolitics) is what they wanted or just an accident.
"they wouldn't have simply walked away from the deal regulating it."
The deal did not 'regulate' Iran - is the argument being made.
Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough, and that Iran would effectively pursue nukes along with economic liberalism.
> Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough
This might be true! But it was replaced with a situation where there are no requirements at all. And here we are. If you have a better policy idea you need to implement the better policy and not just take your toys and go home.
This is my understanding as well, although I disagree with it. I know I'm not the first one questioning if sanctions even work most of the time, or if an economically crippled country is better for the long term health in a region known for its extremists versus one where its economy is not held back in any antagonistic manner, even if it has a nuke.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.
What? How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver? Tsar Bomba could take out a major city, and had a blast radius roughly comparable with Tel Aviv. This is horrific to even contemplate; I've got friends who live there. But it's nowhere even close to the entirety of Israel; and you can bet your ass that their nukes are distributed well enough to prevent a single point of failure. If Iran got a single nuke off, Israel would still be capable of a disproportionate response.
> How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver?
Agreed. This is the key phrase here. "Deliver". Building a nuclear weapon is only part of the equation. Delivering it such that it gets somewhere that evades defenses and detonates in a place and manner in which it's effective is hard.
Tsar Bomba, since it was mentioned, was an impressive device, but utterly impractical as a weapon. It was of enormous weight and required unreasonable engineering just to drop it.
You're also quite right in that nuclear weapons, while powerful, are not necessarily the "end all" that they're often made out to be. Israel's geography does complicate this somewhat; there's little strategic depth and much of the population is concentrated along the coast which makes the impacts disproportionately larger against Israeli national assets.
I assume it's also jailing kids for peace, and stirring the hornet's nest doesn't sound very peaceful when there are peace talks coming up on the same subject.
They might have the better PR team, but for sure looking at actions rather than just words, it's clear who's the bad guy putting aside the whole typical "our ally" narrative.
A Palestinian might find that statement ironic but either way I'd disagree with it.
Threaten as they might I don't believe Iran to be suicidal.
>One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
Do you think they're building a bigger tsar bomba or something?
>Pushed hard enough they may just so that.
Somehow I think starting an almost unwinnable war that'll probably lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths isn't going to improve Israels security situation.
I think the main reason Iran wants the bomb is the same reason North Korea wanted the bomb and in fact all other countries wanted the bomb: National security.
Nuclear weapons are not offensive weapons, certainly not when you're small enough so that any such attack on your part would only result in you being completely annihilated in retaliation. Nuclear weapons are an insurance policy against others deciding that you're ripe for "regime change" and/or invasion.
From what we know Israel also has the bomb and for the exact same reason.
> Iran leadership routinely makes threats to destroy America and Israel
So do North Korea and used to do Cuba. For at least some part, that’s for internal politics. Also, it’s typically the weaker party that makes such explicit threats (if the weaker party knows they’re the weaker one, the stronger party doesn’t need to be so explicit)
> One nuke will piss America off.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
One nuke on Israel likely will piss America off, too, and rapidly will lead to the end of the Iranian regime.
I think Iran won’t launch a nuke at Israel because they know that, even if Israel cannot retaliate, the USA will.
Some people say Iran, having seen what happened to Iraq, simply wants to have the deterrent of nuclear weapons, just as Israel does. I think there’s at least some truth in that.
> it appears the facility’s main power distribution equipment was taken out with explosives
How do the Israelis keep managing to get explosives into Natanz? They blew up a hall last July. I would have thought everyone entering the premises goes through a body scanner like an airport to make sure you're not carrying bombs, spy cameras, etc.
Right?! Sorry for the empty comment, but I'm fascinated to know this is happening. If there's one place that bombs are unwelcome, it'd be a nuclear facility.
One also wonders whether an Israeli planted the bomb, or an Iranian. You'd have to be pretty daring either way.
I'm guessing an Iranian. From articles I've read, it sounds like Mossad has a huge network of ethnic Iranian agents carrying out the ground work in Iran. This stuff is fascinating indeed.
How Israel, in Dark of Night, Torched Its Way to Iran’s Nuclear Secrets
> The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.
> The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.
> The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs. When time was up, they fled for the border, hauling some 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos and plans.
...
> In most Mossad operations, spies aim to penetrate a facility and photograph or copy material without traces. But in this case, the Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, ordered that the material be stolen outright. That would drastically shorten the time that the agents — many, if not all, of them Iranians — spent inside the building.
(continued in the article)
I wonder what the calculus is like on whether to be an Iranian mole. Either the Israelis were blackmailing them into cooperating, or they're offering some very lucrative rewards, or the Iranian is doing it for some other reason (e.g. personal beliefs, or maybe just "being a super{hero,villain} for fun".)
I imagine a combo of all of those reasons would be effective in convincing them to become agents. Like "hey, you can work for us, and we'll exfiltrate you and your family anytime you want and give you a great retirement package...or you can risk ending up like one of those nuclear scientists..." and they probably target the non-hardliner people.
You suborn the whole chain. Instead of one guy, you bribe or threaten the guy at the front gate, the guy who runs the metal detector, the guy who monitors the video cameras. Afterwards you exfiltrate them from the country to some third nation. (Or you don't, and instead do something less nice.)
I don't know the answer to your question, but if you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman. Very well-sourced and readable account of Israeli spycraft.
Say what you will, but being able to smuggle a bomb into a heavily fortified military installation is pro. I'd give a lot for a peek at that world: the planning, the logistics, the people. They probably have one of the most sophisticated spy networks in the world.
Is Israel that much different? It seems like if you're committed to empowering all BIPOC you would not restrict their access to the weaponry needed to defend their homelands.
Israel is not governed by religious law, and has full rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ. Its basis for most policy is a blend of social democracy and neoliberalism. Its military is purely defensive. I cannot say any of those things about Iran in good faith.
Also, the what-about-ism is not a great defense of anything geopolitical btw.
What do you think would happen if the US and all of Europe completely pulled out of the Middle East? Would Israel stay the size it is now? If not, can you really say it's "purely defensive"?
I am not sure what you are implying. Can you elaborate? Are you saying Israel would go attack its neighbors and seize land? From Egypt? Jordan? Lebanon? If so, that's an absurd proposition with absolutely no geopolitical data points to back it.
I don't think it's too absurd to imply that a country would expand into weaker neighboring countries if it could. One example where the US has intervened is Egypt -- without the US the Sinai Peninsula would surely be part of Israel right now. So yes I'd say it would seize land from Egypt, as it already has.
If the US and Europe pulled out of the Middle East it would be too chaotic to predict anything. It depends on the presence of other superpowers (Russia, China) and the pecking order that would be established between the regional powers (Turkey, Israel, Iran, Egypt + the Sunni world).
Also, "pulling out" is too simplistic. There are not only troops on the ground, but also military bases, joint exercises, weapon sales, commercial ties, industrial ties, scientific collaborations, cultural influences, and so on and so forth. Short of disappearing from the globe the US cannot just 'pull out'
Not governed by religious law? 9000 Israelis get married in neighbouring countries each year because their relationship wouldn't satisfy the Orthodox rabbis who run the show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel
Sorry, what was this about "not being governed by religious law"?
> full rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ
So not full rights for religious minorities. Moreover, conversion is quite difficult and the process is made much easier if you have a parent who is Jewish (which generally forms an ethnic group). Only recently were non-Orthodox conversions recognized for this purpose: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/world/middleeast/israel-j...
ie. specifically on the basis of your ethnicity &/or national origin.
I find it hard to take seriously claims of equal & full rights for minorities when those rights require converting to a different religion or being of a different ethnicity in order to apply to you.
It's important for people to understand that Judaism is a minority religion that has been historically persecuted. There is nothing wrong with working to preserve the tradition and culture, and if it ends in a small amount of ethnic homogeneity then it has to be accepted as necessary, especially since "Jewish" is both a religion and an ethnicity, so in the current historical context failing to preserve Judaism means failing to preserve Jews.
Empowering BIPOC isn't about expecting all the same things. It's about giving BIPOC the resources they need for their ethnic and cultural self-determination.
> There is nothing wrong with working to preserve the tradition and culture, and if it ends in a small amount of ethnic homogeneity then it has to be accepted as necessary
"a small amount of ethnic homogeneity" seems like a deliberate minimization.
Israel is an apartheid state that has been persecuting based on ethnicity and religion for decades.
What do you mean? Can a Senegalese become a citizen of the USA (or of almost any country on Earth) without a lengthy naturalization? If not, is the USA discriminatory.
Of course the right of return is just for Jews. Every country gets to set its own rules for citizenship. But Israeli citizens enjoy a reasonable democracy, with advanced civil rights, and respect human rights of others, too. Of course not at 100% but way better then all of their neighbors
Think of judaism as ethnicity. You can be an atheist jew and be granted Israeli citizenship. Israel is the historic homeland of the jewish culture/people.
I'd liken it to something like Country X giving special immigration privileges if you have ancestry from country X.
They don't deny citizenship if you're palestinian, granted it's as difficult if you were trying to get citizenship coming from any other country
In general, I am opposed to ethnostates and granting nationality based on what bloodline you come from. I think it is ironic that there is a right of "return" for Jewish people, but no such right of return for people who were displaced during the Nakba.
I'll be honest - I'm also opposed to "ethnostates" in general, and would much prefer the world moved beyond looking at each other based on ethnicity.
But given the fact that Israel was kind of explicitly created because the world hasn't moved past looking at ethnicity, I'm not sure what my solution is. I'm an Israeli
Jew - I know that if Israel wouldn't exist, my life would be far more dangerous. And that's not a hypothetical - a huge chunk of my family were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. The only guarantee I have that this won't happen again is that there is a strong Jewish state.
Do I like that the world is like this? No! Not at all. But that's the way the world is. And considering that most other groups do have effectively their own countries, I don't see a reason that Jews shouldn't also have their own country.
(This is all talking about the concept of an "ethnostate" in specific, not getting into the question of whether Israel being founded in the location it is was wrong in the first place - the arguments above would work just as well if Israel had been founded anywhere else.)
Purely defensive? What a joke. The Zionist Apartheid state of Israel was literally formed by stealing the land of Palestine and murdering its population. So much for "self defense".
Is this some kind of a bad joke? Because some countries have BIPOC if they want nukes to not hinder their empowerment nobody should intervene.
If all the countries in MENA have nukes, this would be terrible for everybody, it would exponentially rise the risk of nuclear warheads being used.
Only one of the countries out of Israel and Iran have nukes, a superpower as benefactor, and lobby continuously for an invasion by that benefactor, an invasion that would kill hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the sanctions that are reshaping an entire society.
There's no such a thing as "rights" in international affairs. International relationships are not managed by what's right or wrong, but according to countries' interests and needs.
Now, under this paradigm, we as the free world have to ask ourselves - is it of our interest that Iran will gain access to nuclear weapons? The answer is absolutely no.
I assume you are asking why Iran shouldn't have nuc. weapons.
A detailed answered would require several pages, but in short - Iran and the west have opposing views and conflicting interests. The western interests would be put in compromise if Iran gains such a leverage.
As a theocratic regime, Iran has been actively exporting it's shiite fundamentalist ideology by force (from Yemen to Lebanon and even some non-muslim countries in South America).
It would be naive to think that Iran will stop there.
For example, just imagine what would happen if a nuclear Iran invades Saudi Arabia and take over its oil fields.
Or if a nuclear Iran decided to block the Suez canal, effectively cutting off all of Europe from China, India and Japan.
They don't have to use nuclear weapons to inflict damage upon the west.
> But sadly the US has not been taking a leadership role recently.
I'd wager the US will dismantle it's nuclear weapons the day other nations stop seeking to produce nuclear weapons. ie, this will never happen.
The US, China, Russia, India, UK, etc having nuclear weapons is a lot less of a threat to global security than a nation-state such as Iran, which vows to destroy it's surrounding nations every chance it gets.
The history of humans has been rife with armed conflict. It's an anomaly that the last 70 years have not seen massive global armed conflict, particularly in the "digital age". Perhaps nations that have nuclear weapons, but don't desire to use them are the reason? Perhaps not... but what is certain is Iran has stated they intend to use nuclear weapons, and that's not ok by anyone.
Iran is a large nation of millions of people with a relatively developed government (even if we don't like the way it is currently structured).
I doubt they would initiate a nuclear strike, knowing it means their annihilation.
Also, most modern statements by Iran focus on the "Zionist regime", not the literal killing of the residents of Israel. You can find similar rhetoric in the United States about the CCP.
> what is certain is Iran has stated they intend to use nuclear weapons
> Israel has kidnapped tourists before. Vanunu is still trapped in Israel.
Mordechai Vanunu? His situation is quite a bit different than kidnapping a tourist that literally has done nothing to Iran except show up - or a freight ship traversing international waters. Vanunu leaked a ton of nuclear secrets about Israel and fled - ie, he was no tourist and your point makes no sense.
Whataboutism isn't a good reason to excuse Iran's extremely poor international behavior, nor condone their relentless threats against Israel and other nations (including the US). Nor does whataboutism excuse Iran's direct funding of terrorist groups that have killed Americans and other nationals alike.
With all these discussions, it's important to note the regime of Iran is not the people of Iran. The people are likely amazing and full of culture and history - the regime is oppressive and aggressive, which is not tolerated in modern times.
Still, keeping the guy who served his full sentence of nearly 20 years in the country (and with various additional restrictions) for anothe 15 years is not a nice thing to do. They should have shot him dead in Rome and be done with it, like in 2.5k other cases.
Nothing to do with the discussion here, just a random thought on the Vanunu matter.
>I doubt they would initiate a nuclear strike, knowing it means their annihilation.
If someone with a gun holstered at their waist asked you to give you your money, would you refuse?
If Iran will get access to nuclear weapons, it's status in international politics will change drastically, all leverages the west has on Iran (like the ability to impose sanctions upon human right violations and counter their violent export of the shiite ideology) will more or less disappear
Firstly, the NK situation is terrible. South Koreans are basically living with a sword hanging above their neck 24/7.
I don't think that the middle east, being an unstable region to begin with, would benefit from yet such a major destabilizing factor.
Iran has an ability to inflict much more damage upon the west than NK and Pakistan combined. It is an oil rich country, neighbor to the one of the biggest oil exporters in the world and is located in the center one of the busiest naval traffic routes.
It's hard to differentiate an actual threat though. Trump is an example here who also stated he intended to use nuclear weapons, often times in stupidly ignorant ways.
I think there are parallels with Iran, in that a lot of BS & insane rhetorical bluster we hear(d) feed the base so they can maintain power. They need to keep the religious base flustered and angry at an enemy to maintain their own power.
While Trump's rhetoric about "fire and fury" and retaliation against other countries was insane for a US President, he never explicitly said anything about nuclear and it's a grasp for others to imply he meant that.
Yeah I wouldn't read to much into his addled 'brain' lol but he also asked his advisors if he could Nuke hurricanes and there are lots of reports that he is fixated on them, asking 'why can't i use them' like a 8 year old wanting to use dangerous adult power tools but WHYYYY. Or responding why do we have them if we don't use them.
Sorry that's probably too much editorializing for HN but it's extremely farcical on its face.
This type of attack isn't likely to cause a 'meltdown', since the uranium is usually in a very hot vaporous form while being centrifuged. If the containers rupture, it will spread out and condensate in a thin layer that's not very likely to reach criticality. Nuclear reprocessing absolutely has dangers, but meltdowns aren't really the issue.
> To mark the event and send a message to its negotiating partners, technicians at Natanz began to operate a small batch of IR-6 centrifuges as well. The majority of centrifuges at Natanz are a model known as IR-1, which is much less efficient at enriching uranium than the IR-6 design. The nuclear agreement signed with Iran in 2015 (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) limited it to using only IR-1 centrifuges, so the installation of the IR-6s is widely seen as a provocation designed to give Iran leverage in the revived talks. To add to the tension, Iran has been enriching uranium gas to 20 percent since the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement two years ago. Prior to this, it was enriching uranium to 3 to 5 percent. The higher levels put Iran closer to the 90 percent enrichment that is needed for nuclear weapons, all of which raises the stakes for Israel.
Why should anyone believe they are pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy program when they do things like this? Surely the best way to convince people you are the peaceful victim is to continue to demonstrate peaceful intentions even when others don't reward you for it.
Could you elaborate on what kind of leverage this gives them? Does anyone doubt they had the capability to employ more efficient centrifuges and enrich uranium beyond 20% prior to this. How does choosing to actually do those things benefit them in negotiations?
If the criminal in a hostage situation starts shooting their hostages, does that give them leverage in negotiations? I would think it just devalues their hostages and gives the police more incentive to shoot before things get worse.
In this case the prev-police broke a promise with the criminal, while the criminals held other VVIP hostages. Current police hates the prev-police , but thats fait accompli.
In addition unlike irreversible killings, they can freeze high enrichment as leverage. Of course both party must let IAEA do the works.
Trump violated the JCPOA first. Why should Iran hold up their side of a broken agreement? The JCPOA was working fine but Netanyahu didn't like it because he wants to destabilize Iran.
> Why should Iran hold up their side of a broken agreement?
Because - and correct me if I'm misunderstanding things - so far as I can tell it wasn't really an "agreement" to begin with. The US essentially just said they would tolerate an Iranian nuclear program so long as it adhered to a set of guidelines which assured Iran was being honest about their goal of pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy program. The US was providing Iran an incentive to keep its word.
For better or for worse, that incentive was removed. But that doesn't mean Iran is incentivized to go against its word. Continuing to adhere to those guidelines would help build trust from the rest of the world that Iran really just wanted a nuclear energy program. Instead, their recent actions only continue to build distrust.
>Because - and correct me if I'm misunderstanding things - so far as I can tell it wasn't really an "agreement" to begin with.
Your somewhat understanding things. It definitely was an agreement, passed by the UN, the EU, and thus somewhat the US.
The disagreement is whether a congressional vote is necessary as well, which most UN agreements don't require but allow for congress to vote against them. There weren't enough senators against the agreement for that to happen, but because there weren't enough to vote in favor of it either Trump's team argued it wasn't an official treaty.
So whether it was an official agreement is somewhat unclear, but your description that it was an ad-hoc trust building exercise is not correct.
Like them or not the Israeli Defense Force is arguably the most effective military in the world. From the Iron Dome, the Uzi, and the Arrow missile, the IDF has a track record of successful military projects. They seem lean and effective, unlike the US military. The US Military recently has had a track record of project failures from the F-35 to the Comanche helicopter and now they are spending $20B for Microsoft Hololens, which I bet is going to be another bust. The US Military could take some lessons from the IDF.
The most effective military...that got owned by some Lebanese guerillas in 2006, and has to bomb kids on beaches with white phosphorous to get their way. Yeah chemical weapons are super effective.
Holocaust day was one week ago, I thought a lot about my relatives that were murdered. The atmosphere in Israel right now is very solemn and difficult (was before but now even more). Seeing the unravelling situation with promises of 60% enrichment, I fear the trains are set in motion and hard to stop. And as 70 years ago, Britain and US knew what the Germans were doing with these trains but did nothing, there is a real possibility of repeat.
Frankly, Israel needs to stop waging these wars in the Middle East. Apart from moral issues, they impact everyone. The refugee crisis is affecting us Europeans. We paid the cost for US wars.
JCPA was working, except for a small group that benefit from its cancellation. Iran agreed to remove its uranium under strict checks and verifications. Why killing it?
Gosh, well if it is effecting Europeans, dear oh dear..
The ME is just this peaceful relaxed place that wouldn't have any conflicts if it weren't for Israel blowing up Iranian centrifuges whose sole purpose is the fabrication of nuclear weapons, eh?
Lets just give nukes to Iran and Iraq and Syria (the later two Israel was similarly criticized for blowing up in previous decades, with Iran cheering Israel on in the 90s... food for thought..)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Israel is responsible for ME problems.
On this topic, Israel has significant nuclear weapons. Iran’s pursuit of weapons is likely a deterrence strategy. Thus a good way forward is to work constructively with countries in the region towards establishing a nuclear free zone that includes Israel, Iran and Pakistan.
JCPA was a step towards that direction, which could potentially be extended to a broader agreement that gradually includes other countries as well.
We really need to get away from these powerful weapons. The crises of past decades have shown us that the issues that we are facing are global.
Unfortunately in reality this is considered wishful thinking by every competent intelligence agency (not just Israel, and not just western).
I suppose you could say North Koreas pursuit of nuclear weapons is likely a deterrence strategy. Kim Jong-un and the ayatollahs are afraid primarily of their own oppressed citizens, it is not a difficult concept to grasp.
Certainly the threat of terrorism and refugees is a global one as Europe is slowly coming to realize. So is the threat of nuclear proliferation, especially when it comes to unstable regimes.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadwatching the cyberwars happening is surreal. Nuclear material production being attacked by Stuxnet, this current event, others I'm sure, is amazing.
The cyberwars of disinformation as well - completely surreal to see this all play out. Sorry I don't have more to add. It's hard to describe how it feels to see the future arrive like this. Pandemic. Rocket milestones, Mars plans. Nuclear-targeted cyberwar. Cryptocurrency. And flying cars are seemingly coming before self-driving cars perhaps. (Edit: And all backed by an increasingly divided America.)
What a weird twist into the future the last few years have been.
I expect things will "calm down" over the next fifty years as defense-in-depth and security become ingrained into how we work. Compare a "modern network" with the first ARPANET.
As an aside, it probably would have been smarter to make Cyber Command it's own branch rather than the Space Force. Space operations are basically figured out with the Air Force taking most of the lead. Cyber Command is apparently a cluster fuck of separate command structures all vying for power. Spending the time making a Space Force always seemed like a 20th century move in a 21st century env.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drone+lasers+protestors&t=fpas&iar...
[0] "The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed" -- William Gibson
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I9nquHUE0Y&list=PLtPP_-rkrT...
Amazing because so far the big attacks have come from what the western powers consider the good guys. The day North Korean hackers leave Seoul without power or Iranian hackers fuck a reactor in France people will scream bloody murder.
I'm with you on all of the things except for flying cars. I don't want some drunk driver(pilot?) flying over my house, but I want to be able to land at home. There are twice as many regulatory issues as tech challenges in my book.
The Manhattan project was able uranium purified to get a bomb working without PLCs and networks.
All else being equal it's more expensive, but not compared to being unable to keep your network safe from attack. You need to reconfigure the line? Send eight techs down one by one to set new parameters and octople check the first tech's work.
Parts of the Russian government have reverted to using mechanical typewriters in lieu of computers, which are too susceptible to malicious hacking.
Also, the US Navy started instructing enlisted seamen how to navigate at sea by the stars, in case GPS stops working.
I think a potential lesson of the story is to use technology that you understand at least as well as your enemy does. The communist bloc maintained registries of typewriter fingerprints so they could identify which typewriters were used to reproduce samizdat; I think it’s fair to assume that the Russians understand typewriters very well.
Is the threat model there that someone hacks the GPS signal, or that someone shoots down the GPS satellites? Lots of countries have ASATs these days.
It's interesting that the Manhattan project had to build everything themselves - which if Iran was NOT using off-the-shelf parts and instead was developing everything in-house they'd be less susceptible to certain types of attacks.
This article says they used air-gapped Siemens industrial control systems:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/revealed-how-a-secret-du...
By enlisting thousands of young women to watch the knobs and dial buttons.
https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/articles/women-who-buil...
They didn't even know they were building the bomb. They just had to enter the room, dial knobs back-and-forth for 8-hours/day, and then go home.
Today, that sort of stuff SHOULD be automated. It made sense back then because there weren't computers, but... you really can't just get people to balance knobs 8-hours / day anymore.
-------
EDIT: https://www.energy.gov/articles/five-fast-facts-about-calutr...
Seems like Department of Energy has some historical articles on them too.
So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.
So the idea might not work for Iran, but it probably would for North Korea.
In the US, I can’t afford a full time maid. In India, I could probably afford 10.
Or more pointedly, in the US you can afford a car far earlier than you can afford a maid. In India, it’s the opposite.
It‘s why, for example, middle class households in the US don‘t have live in maids, because rising living standards made that unaffordable at a middle class income level.
An interesting aspect of poorer economy I’ve noted but haven’t seen anyone discuss otherwise is you can live a much better life being poor in India, than you can in the US — the really low income economy is far healthier (the quality of everything degrades continuously). I’m sure it’s not a novel insight, but I don’t know what others would call it.
In the US you pass under the minimum wage bar of value production and you’re immediately in a tent under an LA bridge — with everyone else ranging from $7.99/hr to $0.01/hr. Of course an economy exists to support them anyways, but it’s largely underground, illegal (bypassing safety and regulations, e.g. selling very old cars; selling cigarettes individually) and actively zoned into oblivion
But what would prevent this system from being compromised?
Seems pretty easy for an adversary to "inject an exploit in these controllers" by paying a few of them to keep the knobs in the wrong position for a bit more time than strictly necessary, or to flip a switch earlier/later than ideal.
Auditing this is seems worse than checking the code for an old-style, non-networked, PLC.
Legend has it that Stalin knew about the American bomb before Truman knew about it. Hiring literally thousands of high-schoolers without much job training has the advantages of being cheap back then, but you don't really know who was or wasn't a Soviet Agent.
Similarly: having literally thousands of modern techs build a bomb manually would only turn the computer-security problem into a human-security problem. Who do you trust? Who do you keep track of?
There's something to be said about trusting fewer people: and checking those few people more vigorously. That simplifies the human-security portion of the puzzle, even if it complicates the computer-security portion.
Why not?
Reverting to old methods might not work so well when you face that situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(fictiona...
I can imagine all of those systems need to communicate within their domain somehow, so they need to be connected. You could make a point that they have “not been connected to the internet”, but then it only takes one node to become a bridge between WAN and LAN and you are Pwned.
It’s even worse now because there’s a tendency in software development to discount security this way: “we don’t need to think about security because we have a firewall”.
I don’t think this is a valid scenario.
It's pretty hard to buffer overflow
I agree that this scheme doesn't protect against hardware implants modifying lines, but the threat model discussed thus far was around propagation of software implants throughout a system.
The show created an aesthetic like an old submarine, even using set pieces salvaged from other submarine movies. That was an aesthetic choice, making everything look cluttered and cramped and slow, increasing tension in exactly the way old submarine movies used to. In those movies, the computers weren't connected because they didn't exist. Actions were coordinated by phone.
It's a bit contrived that they had computers but not networks. It was just a conceit of the show, and actually it was really mostly just in that one episode. But the aesthetic carried through and made for great atmosphere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_...
High tech combat gear with VR and exoskeletons is more of a gun dealer's wet dream(e.g. costs a ton, breaks often) than anything that usually gets deployed.
"Kids these days etc."
It needed a coordinated 3-axis motor servo motor control, which we initially planned to use PLCs for, however after looking around and seeing the price tag of the stuff that matched our required feature set, we decided to build our own. We were up and running within 2 months, and I can tell you, writing code in C for the control loops is infinitely preferable to whatever monstrosity PLCs can be programmed in. I'd say this is a much more complex scenario than running a single motor at a certain speed depending on some sensor readings.
Iran leadership routinely makes threats to destroy America and Israel. This often get ignored or dismissed. But like waving a gun in a cops face. Well bad things happen.
One nuke will piss America off.
One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.
From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.
Pushed hard enough they may just so that.
However it’s a massive gamble if surrounding counties would eliminate Israel afterwards
These hack jobs, assassinations, etc are all half measures to prevent a full scale war.
Life is hard when much of the world wants you dead.
It's not clear that they could actually deliver a nuclear weapon, of course. And certainly not all the way to America.
Edit: HN commenters are so thick. First of all GP says everyone hate Israel. So that must include you the reader of this comment. If you actually take that shit serious and then have a problem with my comment instead all I can say is that you should look in a mirror too. It's a fat lie. Not everyone hates Israel. Actually most on HN loves Israel and always heavily upvote pro-israel stories.
There's a reason why there's a separate word in most languages for "anti-semitism" but not for "anti-italianism" or "anti-brasilianism".
And to other people reading this, this poster seriously thinks that antisemitism is because "all Jews are assholes". I'm truly shocked to see such things on this site, although maybe I should expect that.
Surprised to see that here.
True anti-zionists, who are not also antisemitic, are extremely rare.
I don't deny that anti-semitism exists, but to suggest that a principled opposition to Israel is "extremely rare" is bogus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Let's contrast it with fundamentalist Iranian islamic government, hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's, hanging their journalists and publicly executing dissidents.
I am not sure there is a shred of doubt who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here.
Israel is occupying Palestine, mobility controlled by checkpoints and passes a la South Africa, and actively takes actions to ensure that non-jewish people do not gain a majority in the country.
Israel extends a "right of return" only to displaced people who are of a certain ethnicity.
I have no ideea why you think this is relevant to your otherwise valid point. Iran and Israel are very similar here, one never signed the NPT and other signed it but is in non-compliance with the terms. Both states essentially don't care about what the other countries think of their nuclear activities - as is their right under international law.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, you've posted so many of these that I've gone ahead and banned you. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
An attack like this is military - which could be carried out by terrorists or a govt.
The difference is important.
This is in contrast to the MO of most of Europe and even the United States.
> Would it be acceptable for Iran to assassinate Israeli nuclear scientists in Israel?
Acceptable? No. Terrorism? Also no.
A military attack is a thing you know. Not everything is terrorism.
Anti-terrorism conventions define terrorism as explicitly including unlawful killings with the intent to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.
I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
What are you talking about "facility"? The human, named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was a military target, since he was the head of the nuclear weapons program in Iran.
I'm unclear what the relevance of "many civilians around". Do you imagine military targets are always isolated with never any civilians near them?
> I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.
A scientist in the US or Israel working on developing a nuclear weapon would be a military target. Why does this surprise you?
There's a reason you don't know the names of any scientists in the US or Israel working on nuclear weapons: They would instantly become targets.
Do you imagine war is some kind of game where everyone is like "it's my turn now", and there's a referee?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Iran funds and supports groups who have declared, and continue to make war on Israel as a proxy for themselves doing it. They are happy to expend every single one of their proxy armies and munitions if they can avoid the direct consequences of action.
The groups that Iran supports carry out assassinations. Kidnappings. Mass murder. Direct attacks on non-combatant populations, aka war crimes. They cyber attack where they can. They physically attack where they can get their cannon fodder to do the wet work.
So, what's your point? That Israel is "evil" for demonstrating dangerous teeth behind its deterrence?
There's a game siblings sometimes play. One hits another. The injured party responds in kind. The first, the aggressor, calls their parents and complains that the second hit the first and was the aggressor. The second is then punished by the parent for aggression.
This has been the rhetorical, and effectively actual history of the conflicts since prior to the founding of Israel. Iran was a "friend" until they ... changed direction ... in 1979.
Israel is defending itself, actively, against existential threats. If the act of defending itself and its people causes you to label it as evil, that's your business.
Iran is not defending itself against existential threats. It is actively on the offense along multiple fronts. Its activities directly and indirectly cause death of non-combatants. That is, IMO, a very basic and simple definition of evil. This isn't defense. This is offense. For the express purpose of achieving the goals they have enthusiastically repeated for decades.
If you don't think that is evil, that is your business as well.
If you find yourself arguing against the entity that is the victim of the aggressor entity, I think you have some deep internal reflecting to do. Because such a position, is advocating against defending against actual attacks. Which the aggressor entity has done, in the open, through proxies, as well as in secret. Israel is not the aggressor entity.
If this is what you support, or cannot bring yourself to accept, and insist that this is "narrative" ...
Again, best thing to do is lots of internal reflection.
Once again Iranian regime is god awful, this is not a defence of them. My point is, stop buying into narratives that governments build.
It's called propaganda.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Gone are the days where threatening to wipe jews off the planet was considered rhetoric. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I'm not going to defend the current iranian gouverment, but aren't jews in Iran a recognized minority and have a seat in parliament?
So it seems they don't have anything against the religion per se.
https://static2.rokna.net/thumbnail/SkVEB41uf6ga/NS2RJzVApQ3...
https://cdn.yjc.ir/files/fa/news/1396/4/5/6417989_951.jpg
https://newsmedia.tasnimnews.com/Tasnim/Uploaded/Image/1396/...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%B4%D9%...
these counters are installed in every city in Iran.
We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac, it would also be a bad idea to do it over Iran's posturing.
The US killed their national hero last year and we got a measured, proportionate response rather than lighting Iraq on fire.
Trying to pre-emptively "bomb Iran into the stone age" would not only be barbaric, it would result in a hail of scuds hitting Tel Aviv. You don't want that.
Of course - nobody has any intention of actually dropping nukes on anyone.
It's about power and leverage, and Iran's ability to project their dominance towards destabilizing and overthrowing House of Saud, and maybe disrupting/overthrowing Israel some day as well.
Since House of Saud actually has nukes (they paid for Pakistani program so that 'in a time of need' nukes will magically appear in their arsenal) all of this is bad for everyone.
In the 'balance of power' it actually makes a tiny bit of sense that 'small actor surrounded by 10 enemies', Israel, has 'secret nukes' because from a strategic perspective, it would be suicidal for them to use in anything other than an existential scenario of defence. If they were not building homes in Occupied Territories, I think more people would probably more readily acknowledge their defensive requirements. Also of course the fact that most people alive today don't have living memory of the many times Israel was invaded/fought wars with direct neighbours, many times bigger than it, and the outcomes were never going to be clear.
It would be better for everyone if Iran just gave up it's nuclear ambitions - there is zero chance anyone is going to invade them, they could join the rest of the world and start using their Oil dollars to buy plastic junk from China and software from the US, and physical gear from Germany - just like the rest of us - their people can be much wealthier, and we could all get along.
Definitely would improve their international stature if they stopped occupying, but they are still a state organized around an ethnic group.
---
Serious question: at what point is it no longer rational to return land wrongfully taken? To displace millions of people and remove their right to self-govern? Practically every nation in existence came to be by taking land from someone at some point.
I agree that the "right of return" thing was BS. But it happened. I think the best course of action now is figure out how to move forward without wronging even more people.
This is not about long-ago occurences, this is about active steps Israel is taking now to maintain their status as an ethnostate.
Iran is an extremist theocratic dictatorship with a history of violence and threats.
There's very little rational concern about the U.S. or the U.K or China using nuclear weapons against Iran. If nothing else, they've had decades to do so and have chosen not to.
There is completely valid concern that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel or the U.S, in some future circumstance.
At the very least, Iran might hold Israel hostage by threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Dismissing this as an extremist, imperialist, or Zionist viewpoint just doesn't cut it. This would be a very reasonable viewpoint of for any rational disinterested observer.
"We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac"
The U.S. had tons of evidence and intelligence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the USSR had zero interest in a full scale nuclear exchange. In fact, the U.S. employed the "Mad Man" strategy throughout the Cold War, which meant it was generally more belligerent about threatening nuclear war.
Unlike other nuclear states, Iran is governed by religious zealots.
In that case their highest religious authority has issued a fatwa against weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and since they're religious zealots they would honour that fatwa.
So they're either very religious, and should pose no danger because of that, or they're not very religious, in which case they would pose no danger.
Now we fear the theocratic muslims because their fanaticism is stronger than their sense of self preservation.
It turns out this is all propaganda, no state is keen on destroying the world, and it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.
No, it's really not. It's akin to citizens wanting to walk around with ARs in case they need to defend themselves. No, worse, because at least an AR wont annihilate everyone around you after you're already dead.
The value in having nuclear weapons is the threat that you could spitefully take your opponents out with you. The danger in having nuclear weapons is that some day it could actually happen.
Mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent. It's an eventuality - one which we should be vigilantly protecting against.
In case you really need this much of a primer: (some) Muslims don't like Jews because they're following Muhammad's lead. Specifically, Muhammad had this to say about Jews in one of the Hadith:
> The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.
Of course the Jews (for their part) say that Muhammad was a false prophet. On balance though, they also say this about Jesus.
But in the centuries preceding Mandatory Palestine, there was not a sizable Jewish population in the area.
Probably not, since Islam is not thousands of years old.
Regardless though, I'm not sure "Jews weren't being attacked because there weren't many Jews to attack" is much of an argument.
If you can accept that, the same thing with “events related to Mandatory Palestine” in place of 9/11, Muslims in place of Christians, and Jews in place of Muslims should not be much of a stretch.
lolwut? Absolute nonsense. A 60kt nuke, size of the largest India has ever tested, wouldn't even dose like half of Tel-Aviv's land area, let alone the whole country.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Sorry I didn’t do a full break down on on how to eliminate all life in a country. Others have certainly made efforts to exterminate Jews. Perhaps you would care to study how that went.
Only a few big cities. So maybe a dozen nukes would be sufficient.
> From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.
This really isn't helping you, because if you're an Iranian and your government says "That country over there says their only logical choice is to bomb us into the stone age!" well what do you expect to happen?
Of course, predictably, both countries can (and will) play the same game, distracting people from actual issues like corruption. In the end, both governments win, while people loses everywhere.
hydrogen bombs are where things really get scarier though.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Doesn't look like even that would wipe out Israel in one go
(permalink: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=32.062921...)
You're technically right -- the blast radius isn't covering all of Israel -- but third degree burns across ~50% of the entire landmass would be hell.
This is what everyone knew was going to happen. The interesting question is if "this" (an unstable persian geopolitics) is what they wanted or just an accident.
The deal did not 'regulate' Iran - is the argument being made.
Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough, and that Iran would effectively pursue nukes along with economic liberalism.
This might be true! But it was replaced with a situation where there are no requirements at all. And here we are. If you have a better policy idea you need to implement the better policy and not just take your toys and go home.
What? How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver? Tsar Bomba could take out a major city, and had a blast radius roughly comparable with Tel Aviv. This is horrific to even contemplate; I've got friends who live there. But it's nowhere even close to the entirety of Israel; and you can bet your ass that their nukes are distributed well enough to prevent a single point of failure. If Iran got a single nuke off, Israel would still be capable of a disproportionate response.
Agreed. This is the key phrase here. "Deliver". Building a nuclear weapon is only part of the equation. Delivering it such that it gets somewhere that evades defenses and detonates in a place and manner in which it's effective is hard.
Tsar Bomba, since it was mentioned, was an impressive device, but utterly impractical as a weapon. It was of enormous weight and required unreasonable engineering just to drop it.
You're also quite right in that nuclear weapons, while powerful, are not necessarily the "end all" that they're often made out to be. Israel's geography does complicate this somewhat; there's little strategic depth and much of the population is concentrated along the coast which makes the impacts disproportionately larger against Israeli national assets.
They might have the better PR team, but for sure looking at actions rather than just words, it's clear who's the bad guy putting aside the whole typical "our ally" narrative.
A Palestinian might find that statement ironic but either way I'd disagree with it. Threaten as they might I don't believe Iran to be suicidal.
>One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
Do you think they're building a bigger tsar bomba or something?
>Pushed hard enough they may just so that.
Somehow I think starting an almost unwinnable war that'll probably lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths isn't going to improve Israels security situation.
Nuclear weapons are not offensive weapons, certainly not when you're small enough so that any such attack on your part would only result in you being completely annihilated in retaliation. Nuclear weapons are an insurance policy against others deciding that you're ripe for "regime change" and/or invasion.
From what we know Israel also has the bomb and for the exact same reason.
What a nasty world we live in.
So do North Korea and used to do Cuba. For at least some part, that’s for internal politics. Also, it’s typically the weaker party that makes such explicit threats (if the weaker party knows they’re the weaker one, the stronger party doesn’t need to be so explicit)
> One nuke will piss America off.
> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.
One nuke on Israel likely will piss America off, too, and rapidly will lead to the end of the Iranian regime.
I think Iran won’t launch a nuke at Israel because they know that, even if Israel cannot retaliate, the USA will.
Some people say Iran, having seen what happened to Iraq, simply wants to have the deterrent of nuclear weapons, just as Israel does. I think there’s at least some truth in that.
It reminds me of Hemingway, with the difference that he was able to write full paragraphs.
Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means no more flamewar comments.
How do the Israelis keep managing to get explosives into Natanz? They blew up a hall last July. I would have thought everyone entering the premises goes through a body scanner like an airport to make sure you're not carrying bombs, spy cameras, etc.
One also wonders whether an Israeli planted the bomb, or an Iranian. You'd have to be pretty daring either way.
Here's a good read for you: https://archive.ph/uG9Lu
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/us/politics/iran-israel-m...
How Israel, in Dark of Night, Torched Its Way to Iran’s Nuclear Secrets
> The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.
> The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.
> The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs. When time was up, they fled for the border, hauling some 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos and plans.
...
> In most Mossad operations, spies aim to penetrate a facility and photograph or copy material without traces. But in this case, the Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, ordered that the material be stolen outright. That would drastically shorten the time that the agents — many, if not all, of them Iranians — spent inside the building. (continued in the article)
I wonder what the calculus is like on whether to be an Iranian mole. Either the Israelis were blackmailing them into cooperating, or they're offering some very lucrative rewards, or the Iranian is doing it for some other reason (e.g. personal beliefs, or maybe just "being a super{hero,villain} for fun".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Kill_First
And why does Iran not have the right to build their own atomic bomb when the US, Russia or China have them and are building new ones?
We ALL should be reducing nuclear weapons including the US. But sadly the US has not been taking a leadership role recently
Edit: Nice to see that my global nuclear disarmament comment is getting downvoted. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
Also, the what-about-ism is not a great defense of anything geopolitical btw.
Also, "pulling out" is too simplistic. There are not only troops on the ground, but also military bases, joint exercises, weapon sales, commercial ties, industrial ties, scientific collaborations, cultural influences, and so on and so forth. Short of disappearing from the globe the US cannot just 'pull out'
> full rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ
So not full rights for religious minorities. Moreover, conversion is quite difficult and the process is made much easier if you have a parent who is Jewish (which generally forms an ethnic group). Only recently were non-Orthodox conversions recognized for this purpose: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/world/middleeast/israel-j...
Also, if you are from Palestine or Iran, you are excluded from citizenship via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_and_Entry_into_Isr...
ie. specifically on the basis of your ethnicity &/or national origin.
I find it hard to take seriously claims of equal & full rights for minorities when those rights require converting to a different religion or being of a different ethnicity in order to apply to you.
Empowering BIPOC isn't about expecting all the same things. It's about giving BIPOC the resources they need for their ethnic and cultural self-determination.
It's too bad Afrikaners didn't try harder to "preserve the traditional and culture" of minority rule in South Africa as well.
Historical persecution doesn't justify enthnostates in my mind, I didn't realize this was a controversial opinion.
e: Since you've now edited your comment to include the statement about "BIPOC", Jewishness is orthogonal to "BIPOC" and most Jewish people are white.
I say that as someone of Sephardic descent.
"a small amount of ethnic homogeneity" seems like a deliberate minimization.
Israel is an apartheid state that has been persecuting based on ethnicity and religion for decades.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/10/15/...
Of course the right of return is just for Jews. Every country gets to set its own rules for citizenship. But Israeli citizens enjoy a reasonable democracy, with advanced civil rights, and respect human rights of others, too. Of course not at 100% but way better then all of their neighbors
Israel grants privileges for being Jewish and denies citizenship if you are from Palestine.
I'd liken it to something like Country X giving special immigration privileges if you have ancestry from country X.
They don't deny citizenship if you're palestinian, granted it's as difficult if you were trying to get citizenship coming from any other country
> it's as difficult if you were trying to get citizenship coming from any other country
Nope, it's more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_and_Entry_into_Isr...
In general, I am opposed to ethnostates and granting nationality based on what bloodline you come from. I think it is ironic that there is a right of "return" for Jewish people, but no such right of return for people who were displaced during the Nakba.
I'll be honest - I'm also opposed to "ethnostates" in general, and would much prefer the world moved beyond looking at each other based on ethnicity.
But given the fact that Israel was kind of explicitly created because the world hasn't moved past looking at ethnicity, I'm not sure what my solution is. I'm an Israeli Jew - I know that if Israel wouldn't exist, my life would be far more dangerous. And that's not a hypothetical - a huge chunk of my family were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. The only guarantee I have that this won't happen again is that there is a strong Jewish state.
Do I like that the world is like this? No! Not at all. But that's the way the world is. And considering that most other groups do have effectively their own countries, I don't see a reason that Jews shouldn't also have their own country.
(This is all talking about the concept of an "ethnostate" in specific, not getting into the question of whether Israel being founded in the location it is was wrong in the first place - the arguments above would work just as well if Israel had been founded anywhere else.)
Why should the US allow Israel to have nukes when we spend so much energy preventing Iran from doing the same?
Now, under this paradigm, we as the free world have to ask ourselves - is it of our interest that Iran will gain access to nuclear weapons? The answer is absolutely no.
A detailed answered would require several pages, but in short - Iran and the west have opposing views and conflicting interests. The western interests would be put in compromise if Iran gains such a leverage.
As a theocratic regime, Iran has been actively exporting it's shiite fundamentalist ideology by force (from Yemen to Lebanon and even some non-muslim countries in South America). It would be naive to think that Iran will stop there.
For example, just imagine what would happen if a nuclear Iran invades Saudi Arabia and take over its oil fields.
Or if a nuclear Iran decided to block the Suez canal, effectively cutting off all of Europe from China, India and Japan.
They don't have to use nuclear weapons to inflict damage upon the west.
I'd wager the US will dismantle it's nuclear weapons the day other nations stop seeking to produce nuclear weapons. ie, this will never happen.
The US, China, Russia, India, UK, etc having nuclear weapons is a lot less of a threat to global security than a nation-state such as Iran, which vows to destroy it's surrounding nations every chance it gets.
The history of humans has been rife with armed conflict. It's an anomaly that the last 70 years have not seen massive global armed conflict, particularly in the "digital age". Perhaps nations that have nuclear weapons, but don't desire to use them are the reason? Perhaps not... but what is certain is Iran has stated they intend to use nuclear weapons, and that's not ok by anyone.
I doubt they would initiate a nuclear strike, knowing it means their annihilation.
Also, most modern statements by Iran focus on the "Zionist regime", not the literal killing of the residents of Israel. You can find similar rhetoric in the United States about the CCP.
> what is certain is Iran has stated they intend to use nuclear weapons
Is that certain? When have they said that?
Your other points rely on a rational actor... rational actors don't take freight ships hostage nor kidnap tourists.
Israel has kidnapped tourists before. Vanunu is still trapped in Israel.
Where has Iran said that they intend to use nuclear weapons?
Mordechai Vanunu? His situation is quite a bit different than kidnapping a tourist that literally has done nothing to Iran except show up - or a freight ship traversing international waters. Vanunu leaked a ton of nuclear secrets about Israel and fled - ie, he was no tourist and your point makes no sense.
Whataboutism isn't a good reason to excuse Iran's extremely poor international behavior, nor condone their relentless threats against Israel and other nations (including the US). Nor does whataboutism excuse Iran's direct funding of terrorist groups that have killed Americans and other nationals alike.
With all these discussions, it's important to note the regime of Iran is not the people of Iran. The people are likely amazing and full of culture and history - the regime is oppressive and aggressive, which is not tolerated in modern times.
Nothing to do with the discussion here, just a random thought on the Vanunu matter.
If someone with a gun holstered at their waist asked you to give you your money, would you refuse?
If Iran will get access to nuclear weapons, it's status in international politics will change drastically, all leverages the west has on Iran (like the ability to impose sanctions upon human right violations and counter their violent export of the shiite ideology) will more or less disappear
I don't think that the middle east, being an unstable region to begin with, would benefit from yet such a major destabilizing factor.
Iran has an ability to inflict much more damage upon the west than NK and Pakistan combined. It is an oil rich country, neighbor to the one of the biggest oil exporters in the world and is located in the center one of the busiest naval traffic routes.
I think there are parallels with Iran, in that a lot of BS & insane rhetorical bluster we hear(d) feed the base so they can maintain power. They need to keep the religious base flustered and angry at an enemy to maintain their own power.
Sorry that's probably too much editorializing for HN but it's extremely farcical on its face.
https://time.com/4437089/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-nukes/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40879868
Why should anyone believe they are pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy program when they do things like this? Surely the best way to convince people you are the peaceful victim is to continue to demonstrate peaceful intentions even when others don't reward you for it.
If the criminal in a hostage situation starts shooting their hostages, does that give them leverage in negotiations? I would think it just devalues their hostages and gives the police more incentive to shoot before things get worse.
In addition unlike irreversible killings, they can freeze high enrichment as leverage. Of course both party must let IAEA do the works.
Because - and correct me if I'm misunderstanding things - so far as I can tell it wasn't really an "agreement" to begin with. The US essentially just said they would tolerate an Iranian nuclear program so long as it adhered to a set of guidelines which assured Iran was being honest about their goal of pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy program. The US was providing Iran an incentive to keep its word.
For better or for worse, that incentive was removed. But that doesn't mean Iran is incentivized to go against its word. Continuing to adhere to those guidelines would help build trust from the rest of the world that Iran really just wanted a nuclear energy program. Instead, their recent actions only continue to build distrust.
Your somewhat understanding things. It definitely was an agreement, passed by the UN, the EU, and thus somewhat the US.
The disagreement is whether a congressional vote is necessary as well, which most UN agreements don't require but allow for congress to vote against them. There weren't enough senators against the agreement for that to happen, but because there weren't enough to vote in favor of it either Trump's team argued it wasn't an official treaty.
So whether it was an official agreement is somewhat unclear, but your description that it was an ad-hoc trust building exercise is not correct.
Militaries are political tools, and different countries have different goals. It'd be like saying a laptop is better than a data center.
Really, the marketing far exceeds the implementation.
In all seriousness, if what you say it's true it really makes me want to watch Tehran.
JCPA was working, except for a small group that benefit from its cancellation. Iran agreed to remove its uranium under strict checks and verifications. Why killing it?
The ME is just this peaceful relaxed place that wouldn't have any conflicts if it weren't for Israel blowing up Iranian centrifuges whose sole purpose is the fabrication of nuclear weapons, eh?
Lets just give nukes to Iran and Iraq and Syria (the later two Israel was similarly criticized for blowing up in previous decades, with Iran cheering Israel on in the 90s... food for thought..)
Meanwhile in reality (seems like the EU loves waging war in the Middle East when memory isn't selective): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
On this topic, Israel has significant nuclear weapons. Iran’s pursuit of weapons is likely a deterrence strategy. Thus a good way forward is to work constructively with countries in the region towards establishing a nuclear free zone that includes Israel, Iran and Pakistan.
JCPA was a step towards that direction, which could potentially be extended to a broader agreement that gradually includes other countries as well.
We really need to get away from these powerful weapons. The crises of past decades have shown us that the issues that we are facing are global.
I suppose you could say North Koreas pursuit of nuclear weapons is likely a deterrence strategy. Kim Jong-un and the ayatollahs are afraid primarily of their own oppressed citizens, it is not a difficult concept to grasp.
Certainly the threat of terrorism and refugees is a global one as Europe is slowly coming to realize. So is the threat of nuclear proliferation, especially when it comes to unstable regimes.
Libya and Syria is your mess.