Weakness invites aggression. Foreign nations have certainly been feeling their oats the last 18 months, too, with Russia’s Ukraine invasion and China threatening the United States and Taiwan. Now Iran is also roaring, saying it could create nuclear missiles that would turn New York into “hellish ruins” — and will do so if the United States or Israel makes “any stupid mistakes.”
As Fox News reports:
The Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Saturday said that it can develop a nuclear weapon within a rapid-fire amount of time and obliterate New York with ballistic missiles.
The London-based Iran International news organization reported that the Bisimchi Media (Radioman Media) Telegram Channel aired a short video titled, “When Will Iran’s Sleeping Warheads Awaken.” The video said the Islamic Republic of Iran is capable of building nuclear bombs in a compressed period of time “if the US or the Zionist regime make any stupid mistakes.”
The Iranian theocratic state refers to Israel as the “Zionist regime.” The IRGC-affiliated video said that Iranian ballistic missiles have the capability of “turning New York into hellish ruins.”
The video said, “the nuclear facilities of Fordow have been built deep under mountains of Iran and are protected against trench-busting bombs and even nuclear explosion… all infrastructures required for nuclear breakout have been prepared in it.” According to the Iran International report, the video said Iran has advanced its uranium enrichment process to develop a nuclear weapons device in the underground facilities of Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. Some other key takeaways from the IRGC-affiliated videos include Iran’s dangerous proximity to developing nuclear weapons, joining the club of nuclear powers.
The New York Post adds:
The clip at one point shows President Biden and cites Iran’s purported secret Emad nuclear project, which began in 1989 and was later stopped by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog in 2003.
Former President Donald Trump withdrew the US from a 2015 nuclear deal with the country during his presidency and immediately imposed economic sanctions on Tehran, but Biden raised the idea of renegotiating the pact when he took office in January 2021.
However, indirect talks between the US and Iran stalled last month and no new negotiations are planned.
Iran has enriched about 60 percent of the uranium for the fissile material needed to build a nuclear bomb. If the nation nears the 90 percent threshold, that would be enough to power a nuclear bomb within a “few weeks,” Iran International reported.
Just two days after the IRGC message, on Monday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a timely warning at the opening of the 10th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. “Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” he said.
“There are almost 13,000 nuclear weapons being held by countries across the globe ‘at a time when the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening,’” the Washington Examiner reports Guterres as also stating. “The U.N. head also referenced the ‘simmering tensions’ in the Middle East and Asia, noting that ‘the threat of nuclear weapons to enduring conflicts’ is bringing ‘these regions toward catastrophe.’”
The bright side, if one can thus term it, is that there are far fewer nuclear weapons now than in the late 1980s, when they numbered 70,000 worldwide.
Yet it’s not just a numbers game, especially since 13,000 nukes are enough to end life as we know it. The sword of Damocles the United States and Soviets held over each other’s head still exists, too, of course, though there are other threats as well.
For starters, it’s said that a smart high-schooler could build an atomic bomb, and a college kid did construct one in his dorm room in 1976. The difficult part is acquiring the fissile material needed to make the weapon functional. Yet al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden did try to obtain uranium for a bomb 20 to 25 years ago, and Popular Science wrote in 2005 that of more than a dozen nuclear-arms experts it interviewed, “almost all agreed that assembling a crude nuclear bomb, though extremely difficult, is by no means impossible.” In fact, creating a 15 kiloton (Hiroshima-sized) weapon — one of which caused 70,000 to 140,000 casualties in 1945 — appears a realistic terrorist goal according to ex-secretary of defense Bill Perry.
There’s also the possibility of a regional nuclear war, such as one between India and Pakistan. Having together approximately 300 warheads, a robust nuclear exchange between the two nations would affect the wider world profoundly.
There is additionally the prospect of an accidental launch or a false alarm sparking a retaliatory strike. We’ve come close to such on multiple occasions throughout history, notably in 1983 when “a Soviet sattelite [sic] had mistaken sunlight reflecting off the top of clouds as missiles,” as Business Insider relates. Fortunately, the commanding officer at the facility detecting the “missiles,” Stanislav Petrov, suspected a false alarm and took the gamble of not calling it in to his superiors.
Then there is, of course, the Biden administration’s bush-league foreign policy, which is bringing us closer to war with Russia and China.
As for Iran, given that some of its leaders appear to have a theology-based apocalyptic worldview, we can’t count on their being as reluctant to invite mutually assured destruction as were the atheistic Soviets. Homicidal maniacs can perhaps be managed, but not when they’re suicidal as well.
