This is an interesting article that concludes a strike on Iran is inevitable. "If Iran has nuclear weapons, there will be a nuclear attack on the United States. Either they will do it themselves, or theyâll give it to Hezbollah to do. Or terrorists will get a weapon from one of the other states in the region that will be forced to build nukes if Iran gets them." http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2010/09/24/obama-strike-iran/
I wonder if the Nobel Prize committee has figured out yet how utterly stupid they were to award Dumbo the peace prize.
I think Iran would not risk it. They would be anihilated. They might hand a nuke off to terrorists but that would be easy to trace back to their enrichment process like a DNA test and, again, they would be anihilated. Personally I believe that Iran would like to possess nuclear weapons and be able to threaten to use them. They could potentially destabilize the region and keep Israel in a constant state of alert. They would gain some kind of twisted prestige by having them and they believe it would deter the West in various ways. I don't think they are crazy enough to lob nukes at anyone. But I could be wrong, biased by my Western conviction that a country of 74 million people cannot be completely suicidal. Iran is playing with very dangerous stuff.
Sadly, Truman's decision was the correct one. Without the terrible effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war would have lasted years. The powers controlling Japan at the time, would not have surrendered until forced by a mainland occupation forcing or eliminating them. The death tolls on both sides would have been dramatically higher if the bomb had not been deployed as the civilian population would have been armed with what ever was present to counter any invading force. Operation Downfall, invasion of Mainland Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall There's no pretty side to a war.
Don't forget that the leaders in Iran want to hasten the return of the 12th Imam by starting a conflict were the Imam returns to save them. That is some real dangerous thinking if they have nuclear weapons.
That is one opinion. Here is another: http://www.spectacle.org/696/hiroshi.html Chairman of the wartime Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy: "It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.... Bomb is the wrong word to use for this new weapon. It is not a bomb. It is not an explosive. It is a poisonous thing that kills people by its deadly radioactive reaction, more than by the explosive force it develops. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." Further from the link where the above quote is posted: On certain issues, we are taught not to think, either with the brain or with the heart. It is possible for an Admiral Leahy, who was fully formed before the bomb, to react before it like a human being; but for many in our generation, the bombing of Hiroshima is a pre-existing fact as unassailable as the stone lions on the steps of the New York Public Library; it is harder to re-examine something that has always been, than something that has just happened. I have always admired, and still admire, Harry Truman, who did the best he could, and who said, after a hand-wringing session by Oppenheimer: "Don't you bring that fellow around again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I'm the guy who fired it off." Sitting at Harry Truman's desk, behind the sign which said, "The buck stops here," one would be hard put not to use a major, curious new weapon, against people who had murdered civilians and prisoners of war. Having made the decision, he is shrouded in, and protected by, history; it was done, the war ended, and almost no-one cried out; it was done, so it was rightly done. But, if you take a step back, and examine the events of 1945, you learn a few things: * The Japanese had already asked the Russians to intercede for them and had indicated they would surrender if allowed to keep their emperor. We proceeded to drop the bomb while calling for unconditional surrender; immediately afterwards, we made peace on terms allowing them to keep their emperor. * It is hard to know, of the many causes men allege, which are their real motives, which are subsidiary, which are trivial or meaningless. But there were people who said at the time that the bomb would send an assertive signal to the Russians. * The selection of Hiroshima was made because the city had not been bombed, and we would learn more about the effects of an atomic bomb upon a virgin city. * There was profound racism against the Japanese, and one wonders if we would ever, under equivalent circumstances, been able to bring ourselves to use the bomb against the Germans. * The idea of dropping a demonstration bomb, or of dropping the bomb upon a large uninhabited area, was considered but rejected. The fear was that a pre-announced bomb might lead the Japanese to move POW's to the site (which they might have done), while a dud under those circumstances would have been a huge embarassment. But no-one has definitively explained why the bomb had to be dropped on a place of little strategic significance, inhabited mostly by civilians. * The second device was dropped on Nagasaki only days afterward, before the Japanese even had assimilated what had happened at Hiroshima. They certainly would have surrendered without the necessity of a second bomb. * The estimate that the invasion of Japan would have cost us a million casualties is ludicrous and not based on anything. The studies done at the time and presented to the president showed that the soldiers killed would have been about 5% of that number. The fact that the Japanese were already trying to surrender when we dropped the bomb--and that we ultimately gave them the terms we first refused--makes the allegation that we would have had to invade Japan particularly ridiculous. * There were even those who believed, in a tortuous example of one extreme of bomb thinking, that we must drop the bomb to show the world how horrible it is, so that we may never drop the bomb again. Another way of placing the bomb in perspective is to think like this: If you have a terrible weapon in your hand, the morality of tool use should demand that you not consider using it until you are in extremis. Were we in extremis? The evidence listed above indicates we were not. We had won the European war, were ahead of the game in men and material and our Russian ally was ready to enter the war against Japan. If we were not in extremis, the only remaining rationales for use of the bomb were murderous vengeance, detached sadistic curiousity, or amoral realpolitik, none of which are foundations upon which we want to build our humanity. Even if we were in extremis, there would still be a moment to ask the question: what do I become if I use this weapon? Because if the behavior in self-defense makes us no better than the enemy, what is left to defend? At that point, we are no longer defending democracy, or liberty; we are defending me against you, and saying that it is better to be the torturer than to fall to the torturer. At that moment, justice tears out its own lights; if I allow myself to die, it is not fair; if I murder to live, it is not fair. While some would rather be a living murderer, there are others who would prefer to be a dead human. Sometimes survival is nothing to be proud of, as many discovered in Auschwitz. If you look with the heart, no other conclusion is possible: it would be better for us, for our humanity, if we had not done it. And we still would have won the war.
By that reasoning, it would have been good if Lincoln had gotten a nuclear bomb and just nuked Atlanta, killing women and children, and ending the war sooner and thus "saving lives" of both union and confederate soldiers... Thanks, you always make it easy...