This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
The only viable isotopes to use in a gun-type are U-233 bred from thorium and U-235 purified from natural uranium to >90%. The problem is that spontaneous fission can pre-ignite the reaction before the two masses are in the optimal configuration; even-neutron isotopes have a higher rate of spontaneous fission than odd-neutron isotopes and plutonium has a higher rate than uranium, so a little bit of contamination of a uranium core with U-232, U-234 or U-238 is tolerable, but even pure Pu-239 is very hard to use and even a little bit of contamination with Pu-240 (which you will always get if you're breeding it in a reactor) renders it impossible.
I couldn't build an implosion weapon myself with what I know (whereas I could build a gun-type if I had the materials), but with a few years and a well-stocked lab to perfect lens geometry and understanding of the material properties of Pu-Ga alloy it's not that hard AIUI.
More options
Context Copy link
Regarding your point about weapon design: that’s the easiest part of building a nuclear weapon. Far easier than refining the fissile material. And there’s good evidence that Iran already bought the necessary weapon schematics on the black market in the late 1980s. Overall I agree that their intention and ability to get a nuke might be overstated.
More options
Context Copy link
It's called 'foreshadowing' I think. Or maybe it's just noise and you're seeing noise. Iran has been at the stage of being a week away from a bomb for years now. It's irrelevant, really. It's a bunch of old men, if they have a nuclear standoff with Israel no one's going to care, I think.
Or maybe you're onto something, and next month Trump is going to get killed by 'Iranians' over ordering the killing of their their favorite general, and US, whose foreign policy establishment at this point all subscribes to what used to be called 'neocon' beliefs will use that opportunity to kick off WW3 by attacking Iran or something equally harebrained.
Do not think the people running US are sane or well-informed. They genuinely believed when the sanctions started that Russia would be destroyed by sanctions and wouldn't be able to build PGMs (the narrative about washing machines).
Earlier they convinced themselves Iraq had unexpired chemical weapons. Iraq had loads of expired chemical weapons, but these are basically mere toxic waste and dangerous only to people who do disposal of such. Then they convinced that promoting a wave of revolutions in the Arab world was going to be a good thing.
Back to this war: Meanwhile, everyone interested in war tech knows something like the Tomahawk - a cruise missile with satnav and terrain matching -is 1980s technology and Russia can make such at home..
They should've checked wikipedia. Would have been enough to know.
More options
Context Copy link
In short, shaping context about the pending Hezbollah-Israel conflict spilling over to Lebanon. Hezbollah recently launched (yet another) a rocket strike that created a mass-casualty incident in Israel. Israel is pretty heavily signaling its intent to strike back, something that's been building up for awhile. If Israel does, Iran- which directly coordinates with Hezbollah and other proxies for attacks on Israel- will likely get involved as well.
The 'subtle' reminder of the Iranian breakout capacity thus serves as a reminder / shaping device to signal / pressure against Israel responding with any strikes against Iran directly, either as part of the plan or in retaliation for Iranian support to Hezbollah. The Israeli-Iranian exchange earlier this year did not cause breakout capability, but it's not something western governments want repeating either.
More options
Context Copy link
If people loudly express fear of Iranian nuclear weapons then every country will want them.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm definitely not an expert on this, but I follow some folks that are, and I think Iran seems to have decided that being imminently nuclear-capable maximizes its negotiating position. It likely prevents (or at least makes unreasonably costly) an American invasion to force regime change, and doesn't have the international reputation costs of actually being a nuclear state. And it's not like smuggling warheads to Hamas or Hezbollah would be a winning strategy anyway: breaking the near-octogenarian nuclear force taboo even to destroy Tel Aviv probably galvanizes the rest of the world against their religious causes for decades, and probably wouldn't tactically accomplish much. And that's assuming that it wasn't intercepted: evidence of a nuclear plot would probably push even the Biden administration to retaliate heavily on Iran.
Yeah, being sly about it pays off.
Take Japan. They are believed to be able to make nukes at will, launch their satellites using solid fuelled rockets, typically not a first choice, and even had a comet sample-retrieval mission that demonstrated the ability to accurately return spacecraft through the atmosphere.
So demonstrated competence in all three major components of a nuclear ICBM program.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/the-legacy-of-shinzo-abe-a-japan-divided-about-nuclear-weapons/
I wonder if Chinese are ever angry about it.
More options
Context Copy link
Giving Hamas a nuclear weapon would be a disaster. If Israel got word, it would preemptively nuke Gaza and then launch against Iran. If Hamas lobbed first, Israel may choose to launch all nukes against all targets on the theory that more are coming anyway. Surely Iran is not that insane? I suppose someone will be eventually.
Iran wouldn’t give Hamas nukes. Primarily because they’re on de facto opposing sides in the Syrian Civil War and, after Israel, the prime target would be the Assad government.
Wait, Hamas are mortal enemies of Assad?
Hamas moved it's political headquarters from Syria to Qatar in late 2011, at the end of the opening year of the Syrian Civil War, rather than join in on Assad's side at a time Assad was trying to pressure anyone approaching a militant group to pick a side or else. Afterwards, it generally supported Qatar's pro-Sunni-jihadist position, rhetorically and possibly with manpower/supplies it had, even as Hezbollah responded to Iranian requests to support Hezbollah.
The dispute between them wouldn't be called a feud, though there were allegations by Hezbollah that Hamas support to anti-Assad parties led to Hezbollah casualties. The Hamas-Hezbollah split was part of the basis of narrative accusations that the Syrian Civil War was an outsider ruse to split the anti-Israeli resistance, with Hamas and Hezbollah being the resistance in question.
The issue largely subsided around '13 a manner I've heard framed as 'agree to disagree,' particularly as Iran increased it's influence with Hamas via supplying it's military wing in Gaza (part of the military-political wing split in Hamas itself). By being patron to both, Hamas-in-Gaza, which is dominated by the military wing, largely stopped agitating for/ publicly supporting the anti-Assad side of the civil war.
However, to the point of being opposite sides: yes, Hamas's default response when Iran needed to invoke allies was to support Iran's enemies, not Iran. This is, and will always be, why the Hamas-Iran relationship is more transactional/utility-driven than the Hezbollah-Iran relationship.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you have the fissile material, I think that just watching Oppenheimer will get you halfway there. If you want to fusion weapons - just send couple of students in Russia universities with enough budget to get the old guard of professors drunk.
The question is what is Iran's goal - to destroy Israel - then you need quite sophisticated delivery system with Iron Dome and all. To prevent Operation Iranian freedom? Then probably you need something that can get close enough to a carrier to sink it. Nuke Riyad? Why bother, MBS will probably tear the country apart.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link