Demosophia

Big Bam Boom Ban

David Bernstein thinks that Israel will almost certainly use force to prevent or hinder Iran's development of nuclear weapons, based on the public opinion numbers:

Given that the anti-Iranian consensus is so solid even on the Left, I would be very surprised if the Israeli government fails to follow through on its promise to prevent Iran from acquiring atomic weapons--assuming, of course, that Iran isn't stopped by other international forces.

But can Iran be stopped now, or are all efforts futile? This BBC article notes that the US has recently supplied Israel with 500 "bunker busters." These are conventional weapons, and the assumption is that they'd have minimal impact if the nuclear development facilities have been sufficiently hardened. Recently the US Congress, in its boundless wisdom (joined by Senator All-Over-the-Map Kerry) put the kaibosh on the US development of "nuclear bunker busters." At the time a number of bloggers noted that this ban wouldn't necessarily have the intended impact of reducing the liklihood of nuclear weapons use. Does anyone pay attention to Game Theory any more?

Fred Kaplan, in Slate, thinks we're probably at the mercy of whether the mullahs prefer carrots, because our sticks are of little avail:

But if the Iranians stay their course, if they don't want benefits and assurances, if all they really want is nukes, there might be nothing anybody can do.

Well yeah, we're all helpless before historical necessity, but nothing? Really? I'm not a weapons expert, but it seems to me that if you put together enough toothpicks you can do a lot of damage. Provided we know where the nuclear development facilities are located there's not really very much the Iranians could do to prevent Israel (or somebody) from taking them out. So their only real protection is secrecy. This, of course, is not the conventional wisdom... which may be all the cover that's necessary. Again, this is just pure speculation, but I should think that precision rather than firepower is the name of the game. While it's true that a conventional bunker buster would not be able to take out a deeply hardened target, it doesn't seem plausible that a series of five hundred strikes drilling down through the earth's crust with an average deviation from target of only a few inches could fail to eventually blow the smithereens out of anything inside the subterranean trajectory. Is this really a technical problem American and Israeli scientists can't possibly lick? Moreover, the deeper they go to reach the buried facilities the less likely the collateral damage would trigger The American Conservative's "nightmare scenario". In this case (in terms of raw explosive power) less might well be more.

Just speculating, of course. If anyone knows more about this I bow to your superior knowledge. On balance, I'm with David. And the mullahs are in for a lesson.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to The Jawa Report)

Posted by Demosophist at December 27, 2005 07:45 PM | TrackBack