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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (55494)	9/26/2009 9:49:26 AM
From: carranza2	3 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 217868

They aren't useless as offensive weapons. They work a treat. There has already been a nuclear war and the USA won it and the people who were bombed surrendered unconditionally. After the world saw what devastation they can wreak when even the smallest nukes are used, they have not been used for over 60 years. The closest we got was during the Cuban Missile crisis; MAD prevailed. They will be used only if there is complete abandonment of the instinct for self-preservation. This of course is possible but very, very unlikely. MAD works, is wonderful and will IMO prevail. I think the Iranians are developing nukes not to use them but to deter Israel [though they don't need to since Israel would leave them alone if Israel were itself left alone, but that is how paranoia works] and, more important, to deter conventional retaliation when it starts a regional conventional war or engages in blatant and large scale terrorism through Hizbollah. I suspect that they have calculated that having nukes will preclude large scale conventional retaliation. The Iranian nukes are IMO part of a war plan but not one which calls for their use. The Iranians know full well that Israel has the capacity to turn Iran into a smoldering pile. Why would they risk such a result? The problem of course for policy makers in Israel and the US not to mention Saudi Arabia is the possibility that the analysis I make, which I think mirrors more or less the analysis the policymakers make, is that the consequences are devastating if it is wrong. The Iranian rhetoric [Holocaust denial, rabid anti-Semitism, etc.] suggests that the possibility of error is larger than if one were engaging in a nuclear calculus with the Soviets.....and there lies the present conundrum. It is essentially MAD vs. madness at play.