Look for things to start heating up with Iran over the coming months...

U.N. slaps sanctions on Iran - Iran - MSNBC.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23451338)

Wow, no one has any intellectual comments about this?

It's the UN, which tends more toward the ineffectual than to the intellectual.

This whole situation is stupidity on all sides. First off, a nuke reactor takes a lot of work to construct and maintain, eating up tons of hydrocarbons -- it takes nearly two decades to recapture the energy expended in making the thing. So it's not exactly clean energy, even without the toxic waste left behind. That huge amount of energy needed to built the plant is a main reason why the environmentalists don't want more nuclear plants here in the USA, not just the radioactive sludge.

Secondly, perhaps Iran ought not subsidize gasoline prices to $0.25/gallon or so if it wants its people to not use so much gasoline. Duh.

Third, there is no freakin' way that Iran can create 90-95% pure HEU necessary for a uranium-gun nuclear weapon given their current technological abilities. The best they're going to achieve is 5% -- barely enough to run a power plant. Even then, where is Iran going to use a gun-type nuclear weapon? There's a good reason no country uses gun-type nukes: they're extremely dangerous, and just as apt to blow up the nuke-er as the nuke-ee. Not to mention the fallout in an attack on Iraq or Israel would come right back to blanket them in highly toxic radioactive dust, because the vast majority of the fissile material would simply be blown into the upper atmosphere due to the inefficient design of a gun-type nuke.

Fourth, there's no way they can make an implosion weapon either. The Iranians don't possess the ability to produce plutonium in any substantial quantity, and even if they did, plutonium production is extremely easy to detect. On top of that, unless Iran had extremely advanced explosive, metallurgical and supercomputer modeling based on decades of nuclear testing as we do, the weapon design would be so massive as to be undeliverable to their missiles. (Think "Fat Man", which required the entire bomb bay of a B-29.)

Fifth, the Iranians in question are still alive. If Israel thought that Iran was really making a nuclear weapon, there would be a serious lack of breathing on the part of the people responsible, or a large slag of glass where the Iranians were enriching uranium.

What really gets my goat is that our intelligence services are well aware that the "threat" Iran poses is practically nil, and the Iranians know it. Yet the Iranians are able to score fear points with the American people via our own government, which is all too willing to play along.

Excellent post.