The character assassination is coming from the left.
He platformed right-wingers, he threw trans people under the bus, etc., some of it blatantly false like he doesn't believe in LGBTQ rights. No right winger critique would be about that.
War with...Iran?
- Thread starter Technarch
- Start date
The character assassination is coming from the left.
He platformed right-wingers, he threw trans people under the bus, etc., some of it blatantly false like he doesn't believe in LGBTQ rights. No right winger critique would be about that.
That's really funny, remembering the Bush Jr. administration declaring every week that they took out the newest leader of Al-Qaeda.
Last edited:
If Trump TACOs then it may be bad news for Cuba since Trump will be looking for a way to prove he's a "winner". Or maybe Panama? He hasn't made any noise about that lately.
Sorry, another thought on the matter:
Personally, I don't think Israel will consider the mission truly finished until they can get inside those underground facilities and ensure every piece of equipment needed for making a nuclear bomb is destroyed. That means convincing Trump to stay in the fight, and it means boots on the ground. Maybe mostly Israel boots, but ground forces of some type.
Can't they buy more centrifuges?
Nuclear weapons is now technology which is over half a century old.
Israel doesn't have the troops and they want US to do it.
It would have to be an extended occupation.
We saw how that worked out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soviets couldn't pull it off either and they have no qualms about massive collateral damage rather than letting insurgents blend into the civilian population.
[citation needed]
The Republicans have shown they have no strength or will to limit Trump. I believe they will simply blame Iran, Biden, Obama and anyone else. They will not reject Trump.
And when USians were massing in the streets to protest ICE they didn’t care at all. They aren’t moved by protests.
Because Trump knows that he will have a huge blowback at home, he's going to try to goad anyone else to rebel/have troops on the ground. The Kurds, Israelis, anyone... since he didn't plan for a damn thing beyond the start of this shitshow.
Precision machines are not easy. Even for China, a lot of their equipment (turbine, engine, etc.) are coming from Germany's and other Europeans' companies. That is with China's government actively pushes their own in-house solution.
There may be people who are will to sell to Iran, but likely not that many. You can bet that a lot of countries/intelligence agencies are monitoring the supply chain as well.
Are you suggesting you think Iran is 80 years behind the United States in the ability to manufacture precision machines?
Define "precision". Centrifuges require some precision but less than manned aircraft turbines or chip fabs IIRC.
I think we do not know. The ability to manufacture is also not a linear progression. It is possible to have such ability and lost it. Israel and USA have been killing a lot of Iranians. I am sure some of them are leaders in the nuclear research and manufacturing.
Not to nitpick, but do you think the Soviets and the recently de-cucked warriors under Hegseth are going to be that different in this regard? They're done with silly rules of engagement.
Trump said today that he thought Iran bombed that girls' school with one of their tomahawks, but he was fine with whatever the investigation would show.
How are they to know for sure?
Unless the Iranians have been sitting on their hands, some of this equipment is probably dispersed in anticipation of such an event. Secondly, Iran is a large country. Any foreign power attempting would be searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Lastly, by whose metric will the job be considered "done"? The information on the program is probably well compartmentalized, with the addition of deliberately seeded misinformation. It could take years to produce a report and accounting, and even then be riddled with doubt.
As long as the knowledge—which is highly portable and easily concealed—is preserved, the program will go on, regardless of resolution. And the actions of Israel and the US have probably only increased the appetite for nuclear proliferation worldwide. They have been proven to be bad-faith partners, who will easily renege on any agreements if they feel it suits them to do so.
From what I've seen of the GOP rank and file, they'll grouse but go along, convinced by rhetoric like, 'They're coming for your guns!' or 'Woke people will be teaching your kids!'
"Stop trying to build nukes or face consequences" isn't a compelling argument when recent history shows the only thing that really stops an invasion is having nuclear weapons.
Dunno about aircraft turbines but the discussion is pointless because centrifuges aren't the only way to enrich uranium and enriching uranium isn't the only way to build a weapon.
He literally has been launding money for them willingly since the 90's. This bullshit everything is a conspiracy theory so we can mock those who believe it is pure bullshitanounced.'
Why are we not asking the polluters to justify their right to damage our shared environment at our expense for their profit?
Some reporting on this subject from TMZ, concentrating on Iran's stockpile of partially enriched uranium. They mention the uncertainty you highlighted as well as the high risks involved. Personally I think they're overstating the capabilities of US special forces and the chances of success, but I'm no expert on the matter.
Just because they don't win doesn't mean that the rest of us don't lose.
No, but they are the easiest ways. Enriching plutonium requires an entire reactor.
Fortunately uranium bombs are relatively weak, though the distinction might not matter to the people caught in the blast.
Depends on what you mean by "easy". Uranium enrichment is "easier" if you want to be able to partition the work and make parts of it clandestine, but the total industrial effort is greater than breeding plutonium.
Of course, centrifuges aren't the only way to enrich uranium. If Iran has to start from scratch I imagine they will consider laser enrichment, which requires many fewer stages and has a much smaller footprint.
There's no reason a uranium bomb can't be tritium boosted, and there's no reason it can't be used as the primary in a Teller–Ulam type multi-stage weapon.
Nope. They will say everything is the fault of Biden and his Democrats and the people will eat it up and double down in the next election......
C'mon. That's not even the impression now. Trump is underwater on every issue that got him elected.
I get that US politics tends to provoke cynicism but treating it as absolutely inviolable just means you're not paying attention. Just because a fraction of the faithful will never give up on him doesn't mean that perfectly predicts the entire country. Of the many, many defects the US electorate can be justly accused of (goldfish memories, white supremacism, temporarily embarrassed millionaires), never getting pissed off at the incumbent when things are bad is not one of them.
You have no proof for any of this. As far as I can tell it was the other way around (just like Trump forced 3 bad ceasefire agreements on the coward Netanyahu last year, all 3 of which started unraveling long before this war, because he lost interest), and you are engaging in the same distortion of a fact with your newspeak.
Bullshit.
The Iranian regime never ever capitulated, and specifically said they weren't. The rhetoric never changed, and they continued exactly on the religious genocidal antisemitic track they've been on since the 1980s, always attacking civilians (e.g. the April and October 2024 attacks using ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones).
There won't be any Israeli boots on the ground, possibly excepting a very limited special-forces operation to extract the enriched nuclear material.
Regime change can't be achieved without both killing at least a million Basij & IRGC, and then placing ~2 million troops to back whatever puppet regime is promoted for an indefinite amount of time, and there's zero chance of that being attempted.
The Iranian opposition is by all signs not unified enough to do it on its own.
Wasn't familiar with that one. Thanks!
I looked it up and the song came out in 1965. Quite prescient.I wouldn't quite describe him as as agent, because he has zero loyalty to them, just like towards anyone else except himself (AFAICS it's all based on bribery & blackmail) -- but otherwise we agree. Reading between the lines of the Mueller Report Trump knew what was going on and who got him elected.
No, it was always the Al Qaeda number 2 that we kept killing as Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed until Obama was President.
At this stage Id be more surprised about attrocities Israel didn't commit... The more dead brown folk the better, even moreso if they can be made to suffer horribly it seems.
Sigh ... I can't talk about details, but centrifuge enrichment needs some very serious high tech stuff and insane precision machining. Also getting them to work reliably requires some seriously artisanal skills and knowledge. Nobody produces even sub components for centrifuges. Only Urenco does. And Pakistan (who stole most of the technology) and Iran on a small scale clandestinely.
And enrichment from natural uranium to high enrichment (60%) is a pure numbers game. Lots of centrifuges operating for long times continuously. You can read more about this here: https://www.wise-uranium.org/
Plutonium breeding has it's own issues. The reactor side is the easiest part of it. The ugly/difficult part is the reprocessing and extraction of plutonium.
Orange Herald gave an observed yield of 720kt (rather less than expected) purely from HEU. A fuckton of HEU, to be sure, it consumed an entire year's worth of Britain's production capacity at the time, justified by a rush order to demonstrate a megatonne-class bomb before the possible introduction of a test-banning treaty, along with backup status if the fusion bomb programme did not yield desired results.
Introducing a fusion-fission secondary is relevant if you either want to shrink the warhead, or bloat it up into a multi-megatonne device. The latter was a brute-force solution to the appallingly low accuracy of gravity bombs and early generation missiles; the former depends a lot on the intended doctrine for how the bomb will be used (or, indeed, not used), but you can get plenty of bang out of pure fission if you're prepared to pay the efficiency cost to do so.
Last edited:
What makes you believe that the USA is going to step back from Israel? They're full-on asking "how high" when Netanyahu says "jump" right now.
The TPP actually got a lot better once the USA was out of it. In particular the insistance that US law prevail over other signatories and that USA pharmaceutical rulings be applied to other nations - it was a huge issue in Australia when the TPP was first being hammered out. No way would we give up our PBS in order to prop up USA pharma profit margins.