Iran can likely build several atomic bombs with its current stockpiles of enriched uranium, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear agency said Thursday.
“They have enough material for several nuclear warheads,” the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, told Bloomberg News Thursday during an interview in Davos, Switzerland.
Iran appears to be storing the enriched uranium, not making it into warheads, Grossi said, while adding that the stockpiling was “not banal.”
Iran is speeding up its uranium enrichment process, and its domestic nuclear industry is now fully independent, even as the country continues to stymie international efforts to monitor its nuclear program.
Maybe Trumo shouldn’t have broken off on that nuclear deal if they didn’t want Iran to have nukes.
Honestly if you don’t have a whole fucking bunch of nuclear weapons you might as well have no nuclear weapons. “Several” isn’t going to cut it and they’re probably smart enough to know that.
The first county to use a nuke is going to bring hellfire on themselves from the rest of the world pretty much immediately so that’s a game you don’t want to play unless you pose an actual threat.A few nuclear weapons are actually an extremely powerful deterrent. War isn’t just about getting your k/d ratio up higher than the enemy - it’s about the capacity to inflict more damage than your enemy is willing to bear. How many countries, do you think, are willing to risk one nuke on their territory for any matter less dire than their direct and immediate survival as a nation-state?
Kinda? That is the logic that the cold war superpowers employed, but it isn’t necessarily true. Having one nuclear-armed ICBM or cruise missile within range of a US city would be one hell of a deterrent.
China at least partly holds to this. Their logic is that nuclear security does not necessitate nuclear parity. So while the US and USSR made thousands of warheads and delivery systems, China maintained an arsenal of roughly 80-100 warheads with viable delivery systems.
Yeah, exactly. Nobody’s going to attack China even if technically they can’t cripple the entire country with their retaliation. Losing a few key cities should be enough of a deterrent.
A concern with nuclear proliferation is the small nation states might make nukes and give them to others to use. As an example, Iran is arming Houthis in Yemen as well as other groups. If Houthis detonated a nuke on a target, it would take some time to determine where the nuke came from, and in the days and weeks following would Iran then be nuked?
Probably not. Just conventionally bombed Dresden style.
I’m kinda confused. Just a few weeks ago, there was a report that they were enriching to 60% purity, short of the 90% required to be weapons-grade. Now they have enough weapons-grade uranium stockpiled for several weapons?
