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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (150448)	12/11/2005 8:39:32 AM
From: Hoa Hao	Respond to of 793824

I think your previous article denoting Televiv as the primary target was more accurate. Course, if the Iranians use a version of a scud, they may miss and hit Jerusalem instead. I'm sure they hope to use more then one bomb too. At this point, I think we're going to let the Iranians get the bomb and set up a local ABM system to deal with it. What's interesting is that no one seems to think that Israel won't take out targets every where in a "Feel our Pain" thing if they get hit. The Soviets were planning to hit everybody in an effort to reduce everyone to an equal footing come time for "reconstitution" post a nuclear war. 0230 GMT December 11, 2005 Israel Further Ratchets Up Pressure on Iran as "military sources" reveal that Prime Minister Sharon has given his military the go ahead to move forward with a preemptive strike against Iran's N-installations in March 2006. That is the date Iran will supposedly have enough enriched uranium for one bomb 2-4 years down the line. We respectfully disagree, Iran will have no such thing in March 2006, but then it isn't Washington that first on Iran's "Nuke 'Em" list. We've said previously Iran ahs every right to develop N-weapons; by the same token, Israel has every right to preempt. Right now all this talk of preemption is just a game with multiple objectives. One is to force the US to do the preemption at a time just about no one in Washington is prepared to take Israel's word for anything, after the WMD fiasco. In 1991, the US did warn Israel to sit out the war and let the US do the work, on the theory Israel's "help" would only inflame the Arab world and make the US job in Iraq harder. So Israel immediately and happily stood down, and had the cheek to keep exclaiming through the war: "America, you're doing a lousy job of protecting us, someone hold us back, we're going in". After the war the Israelis had the further cheek to say: "See, Patriot is lousy, world, buy our Arrow" - which happens to be almost as much an American missile as an Israeli one and is in a completely different class - and has never been tested under battle conditions." We Don't Think The US Will Fall For The Israeli Trap Again Now, personally we admire the Israelis for the way they try and get away with the maximum. But they have to understand there are very few people left in America who are going to fall for this "hold us back or we're going to punch the ayatollahs" approach a second time. Moreover, there is a growing anger in the US with the EU failure to bring Iran to heel, There is a faction - not in the majority right now but we believe it is growing - that is saying: "Let the Israelis and Euros handle this. They'll be the first to lose if Iran goes nuclear, and its time the Euros started looking after themselves. We've got our ABM defense in place and its getting stronger day by day." The Issue of the ABM Interceptor's Warhead We've said this before, and readers have disagreed with us, but we'll say it again. Arrow is designed to take a nuclear warhead if necessary and so are US ABMs. That changes the dynamics of intercepting ICBMs quite considerably. Wait till Iran stages a test, you will not see anyone in America objecting to a US breakout of the test-ban treaties for fine-tuning testing of an ABM interceptor warhead. If there's an N-warhead for the ABM interceptor and quite like for Standard 3 as well, why is the US going through all the agony of trying to whack an incoming warhead via direct hit, which surely has to be about the most complex engineering task today? Well, the closer you can get your kinetic kill vehicle, the smaller the N-warhead has to be. There's a lot of advantages to not lighting up the upper atmospheres with 1 MT explosions. Please don't think we are giving you a complete explanation of the whys: the subject is very complex, very political, with huge sums of money already spent and at stake, and all we're touching is one small part of the issue. In 1999, incidentally, when the US was telling the Russians it was going to break out of the ABM treaty, it gave the Russians some figures for anticipated kills with non-nuclear warheads. You can read one document at fas.org, it suggests 4 to 10 interceptors per incoming missile with target decoys. That is without the second tier Standard 3 and the THAADS, which is being called by some a point defense system, but has a maximum range of 250 km. Confusing. orbat.com