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Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
In the end, Iran will have nukes. They’re too large, too developed and have a relatively good academic pipeline in the hard sciences such that it’s inevitable. It might be a year, three years, five years, but they will have them.
A ground invasion of Iran by the US is impossible. The only hope for regime change is either that there’s some mass minority uprising against the Persians (very unlikely, they’re not staunch ethnic nationalists and have mollified most of the minorities quite well) or that there’s a middle-class ‘color revolution’ in Tehran and the mullahs and IRGC just kind of give up in that late stage GDR type way and melt away into the crowds (which is also extremely unlikely because they know what they have to lose).
At the same time, Iran’s near term options for retaliation are limited. They can’t shut down the strait because the Chinese will hit the roof and selectively bombing ships is a bad idea (the true shutdown scenario, as I understand it, would be mining the strait, and that’s not going to distinguish between Chinese ships and Western ones). If they bomb Saudi oilfields it will only hasten the return of Abraham Accord type stuff just when they’d achieved some diplomatic successes with the Gulf Arabs.
This. The question is simply if it is better to delay their bomb by a few years at the cost of further antagonizing them.
Most nuclear powers have paid a very low blood toll for their nuclear weapons program. (Arguably, the US paid a tremendous indirect toll, as all the resources they earmarked for the Manhattan project would otherwise have gone into mundane military equipment which would have saved the lives of their soldiers, which is doubtlessly one reason why the pressure to use the bomb was so high. But emotionally, this is not equivalent to the Axis having assassinated Oppenheimer and a dozen of his colleagues and having selectively bombed Los Alamos.)
Not so the Iranians, when they finally hold the bombs in their hands they will have paid dearly with the lives of their best and brightest as well as hundreds of workers and years of sanctions. Simply going the North Korea route of MAD, announcing that their days of getting bombed are now over, and thank all the martyrs for securing the peace of Iran might not play well with their stakeholders, who have been raised on the promise of driving the Jews back into the sea. (Of course, it could also be that they plan to nuke Tel Aviv the minute they have a bomb, consequences be damned, and that this was the plan since the 80s, in which case antagonizing them further would not matter.)
From a tactical perspective, Iranian nuclear missiles will be extremely fragile. You can put your centrifuges in a deep mine to recover them after they get bombed, but there is no way to have your ballistic missile launch-ready and still have it launch-ready after its silo gets hit by a conventional bunker-buster. I think in wargaming, threatening your enemies nuclear missiles, so that they either have to use them or lose them is how conventional wars go nuclear.
A lot of nuclear powers do not really have to worry about someone taking out their retaliatory capabilities. The USSR had ICBM silos a thousand kilometers within their airspace, and nuclear missile subs which would have been hard to take out. They certainly had satellite surveillance to detect US mass launches.
Now consider Iran with a few nuclear silos. They know that the West is willing to bomb them to destroy their nukes. They also know that Israel can violate their airspace with impunity. (Presumably, Israel would first knock out their radars during a normal attack, which would give them some advance warnings, but how confident are they that they can see the latest US stealth bombers on their radar? And given that Western intelligence was able to infect their centrifuge control system with malware once, how confident are they that their radar systems are clean?) They know that Israel has invested a ton in missile defense and would probably gamble on being able to shoot down a lone surviving ballistic missile or two.
This means that they will be on a hair trigger. The US and Israel will have no credible way that they are willing to engage in MAD with Iran instead of trying to take them out with a first strike. Any time an animal gets into a transformer and electrocutes itself, cutting power to a radar station, there is a decent chance that whoever is in charge will decide that this means that Israel is finally going for their nukes and launch.
Warheads on missiles are removable. All they'd need to do to launch a nuke is replace the warhead in one of their missiles with a nuclear one.
Israeli ABM consistently fails to intercept fast missiles that evade. It's simply too hard a problem. You need to track them exactly and guide interceptors, which have guidance issues bc of aerodynamic heating onto the incoming stuff.
They can intercept ballistic missiles all right, but not the more modern, faster ones that glide ..
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