Iran to give

[BobHunt]

50 mil to Hamas....says if we strike, there are 40,000 suicide bombers ready to strike Americans....yet do we allow them to develop nuclear capabilities? What are our alternatives?

[Ian Gentles]

Well its a hard question, obviously some would say, "Hit them hard now, show em you mean business". Course this would probably mean tactical nuclear strikes! Question is, if you leave em alone, will they attack anyway? Many would feel that this would be an obvious conclusion. I doubt if they have the potential they claim for suicide bombers, but would guess they got enough to cause plenty havoc. Massive terrorist attacks will always affect our markets, wests achilies heel.

[Bruce Carriker]

This is the world in which we now live. We may as well get used to it.

Even if they develop a nuclear capability (and they will...if Pakistan can do it, so can Iran...surprise is that they haven't done it sooner), I doubt they will use it haphazardly. It would be years before they ever developed a first-strike knockout capability. Frankly, I doubt that they have the economy to build that many nuclear weapons without bankrupting the country. But without first-strike knockout capability, they have to know that the repercussions would simply be too great to justify the risk of first use.

Even if they nuked Israel, there would be fallout (no pun intended) from the more moderate Arab countries, as well as the entire Western world, and much of the Far East. Not to mention a retaliatory nuke strike from Israel. Achieving a nuclear weapons capability may actually be a step towards forcing Iran to behave responsibly.

[BobHunt]

Bruce, you dont think that they have as much money as the Taliban has? I would hope that we could infiltrate and see for ourselves before anything drastic happens. If they would hit Israel, they would be sorry because I think Israel has a lot of capabilities people do not realize. I have been told a number of times that Israel has much better security at its airports than any other nation. Sometimes I think they are living more in the 20th century than we are.

[Bruce Carriker]

Sure, Iran has as much money as the Taliban. I would imagine they have far more. How is that in any way, shape, or form relevant to Iran developing a first-strike nuclear capability without bankrupting their country? Are you suggesting that Afghanistan has such a capability when the Taliban was in charge? I'm fairly certain they didn't. In fact, I'm fairly certain the only two nations in the world who have ever come close to that kind of capability were the US and the USSR. And it was the uncertainty of whether or not they'd actually achieved it that kept both of them from escalating to a nuclear exchange.

Back to Iran (a country) and the Taliban (not a country): One is a sovereign nation with a substantial oil reserve. The other is a terrorist organization/political party that is no longer in power, in a nation where the primary natural resources are rocks and opium.

If the Taliban ever developed a first-strike nuclear capability, that's news to me. If you're talking simply about first use, there's a huge, huge difference between the Taliban (at least as they exist today) and the nation of Iran. Iran is still a member of the community of nations, even if they are a so-called "rogue state".

Speaking of Israel, I'm confident they have all kinds of capability that they publicly deny...including nuclear weapons. As for their security, they've been essentially a police state since their founding. Their survival has depended on it. I'd think they're pretty good at it by now.

[Ian Gentles]

UK has a fairly good nuclear patential, one that many forget, so we dont boast too loudly.