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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (35174)	7/28/2002 6:41:32 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re Iran's supposed threat to nuke Israel. Thanks for finding the context, Carl.

To: Bilow who wrote (35174)	7/28/2002 6:57:15 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

And it doesn't say that Iran will "use an Atomic Bomb against Israel", what it says is that they will counter Israeli threats to use nuclear weapons with their own. Not quite. The typical nuclear threat involves mutual destruction -- if you destroy us, we'll destroy you too, so better not! Here Rafsanjani made a point of saying that a nuclear exchange would benefit the Muslim world, because part of the Muslim world would still be standing, while all of Israel would be gone. Saying, "we think a nuclear exchange is a good idea, and the day we have the weapons, it will happen" -- which is what Rafsanjani did say -- goes far beyond your standard policy threats. However, it is true that Rafsanjani is not currently President of Iran, and his statements were not confirmed by the ruling mullahs.

To: Bilow who wrote (35174)	7/29/2002 2:32:40 AM
From: tekboy	Respond to of 281500

we don't really know much about what new WMD powers will do with their weapons. Our knowledge is based partly on models of what the older powers did (which may or may not be relevant), sketchy details about what's happening now, and lots of pretty shaky assumptions (about how certain leaders and regimes generally behave, what kinds of policies the weapons themselves might induce, etc.). Most of what is actually known (at least in public) about the actual and likely future WMD doctrine of the key countries in question is assembled here: amazon.com The book is not great, and varies in quality as all edited collections do, but many of the chapters are quite solid. This is the kind of question, btw, that a well-ordered discipline of international relations would be pursuing actively, given its obvious importance. But since policy-relevant stuff is frowned upon in the academy, few are doing it. An up-to-the-minute, trustworthy basic source on who has what in the WMD arena, finally, is this: ceip.org tb@askjeeves.com