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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20335 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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As I understand it, you can absolutely produce Tc-99m with LEU rather than HEU. Is it optimal? No. But any explanation for Iran's enrichment other than nuclear weapons requires them to be insanely unoptimal for zero reason, so at least this would be unoptimal for a good reason.

You're also introducing a weird chicken-and-egg situation. If the reason they have a sketchy nuclear program is for medicine production, which they ony need because they've been sanctioned for having a sketchy nuclear program...

Yeah, they went out of their way to signal their goodwill by keeping enrichment levels below 3.67% during the Iran Deal.

What is the point of having 60% enriched if not for weapons? I’m not arguing they don’t need them, or they shouldn’t be allowed to have them, or anything else, I’m just saying that they obviously want to retain the ability to create them very quickly if necessary at the least, and that counts as ‘wanting nuclear weapons’. Kent is saying they don’t want them, which is very different from admitting they do but justifying it. The unspoken ‘or else’ part of Obama’s Iran Deal (which I don’t think Trump should have broken) was implicitly an admission that the enrichment was ultimately for military purposes.

So you claim that they get to 60% in 10 years?

I think you can get to it in months from 3% if you have the capabilities of Iran, but this is a double moot point: DNI + five eyes says no desire to build one (no whistleblower has said otherwise), DNI says destroyed in Operation MC Hammer (sub-operation can’t touch this). Maybe even a triple moot point because of the fatwah, a quadruple moot point because it would be an irrational decision for them to ever aggressively launch a nuke, and a quintiple moot point because Israel is an aggressive power (increasingly religiously extremist at that) in the Middle East with nuclear weapons that aren’t inspected.

And when I buy couple of tonnes of peroxide and acetone it is because I really like to get my nails done and I am very clumsy and always have road rash on my knees.

I think the question could be delegated to the intelligence-gathering of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. They would make sure that the rumors of your nail-polishing habits aren’t being disseminated by a company that produces clip-on nails.

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