xablor
10mo ago
It's been a visible technique in psych inventories I've taken to invert ~half the Likert questions-scale questions, which seems like correcting for precisely this type of bias. I haven't seen it in political polls I've taken. I infer that it's a Best Practice for those who really care about such things, or at worst net-zero cargo-culting, and that invoking this bias is a useful technique for those who want to engineer a biased survey.
An undercurrent of anxiety about Iran being nuclear-latent has come to my attention lately - I think I noticed it via Warographics on Youtube? In brief, they have fissile material, but thus far haven't demonstrated a complete device which requires a casing, fission initiation, etc, and the amount of max-effort work to cross that line seems small. Gun-type fission weapons are of course super-simple and reliable, the biggest problem to solve has always been the industrial capacity to refine the necessary amounts of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. I don't know how hard the R&D and engineering problems of implosion-type weapons are, or multi-stage fission-boosted weapons, and I don't know how hard the miniaturization and operationalization problems are to create, say, a 10-KT device that is small enough to be man-portable, or rugged enough to be delivered via artillery or a ballistic reentry vehicle.
Except - isn't this old news?
Iran's been running gas centrifuge farms for a long time now, that was what Stuxnet was about, turning up the cost of operating them by abusing the bearings, ergo turning down the rate of weapons-grade uranium purification. Probably they've had multiple devices' worth of weapons-grade material for a long time. While that stockpile accumulates, it's not like the math for old designs of fusion weapons is hard to back out of modern physics, that gives you the prerequisites for your fuse engineering effort to run in parallel, up to testing with inert cores.
In summary, Iran has been "on the brink of getting access to nuclear weapons" in the same way they're claimed to be today for years. They've actively chosen not to cross that line in a way observable to Western intelligence. This is an open secret to everyone professionally in the game, and commentators of low-medium sophistication on up. So why are mutterings only surfacing now about the risk? I can only speculate it's a quiet angle of pressure against further increasing the scale of Israeli combat operations, but I don't understand to what end, or why it isn't simply being said in diplomatic meetings.
Why turn up public fear about the Iranian nuclear program? Why do it now? Why do it so subtly?
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