Israel said Iran racing toward a nuclear weapon. US Intel says it was years away | Hacker News Reader

Israel said Iran racing toward a nuclear weapon. US Intel says it was years away

cnn.com

42 pointsprmph52 comments

Why is this flagged? Uncomfortable point of view for Israel?

Israel has the same number of nuclear war heads than China and didn't sign any nuclear international treaty.

Who's got that chart with Israeli gov't "They're [2,3,4] years away!!!" statements from the last ~40 years

edit: Here we go: https://i.imgur.com/3vIr5dE.png (I have not verified the accuracy tho)

Just so we're clear every time they said this, they also did something to prevent it from actually happening, whether that's stuxnet, targeted assassinations, other forms of sabotage, they always found a way to push that timeline out, but they couldn't do it indefinitely.

No, some of it was to complain about the nuclear deal Iran had with the west and try to prevent it. Deal that saw Iran stop development and stop some of its research.

Now when I see what happened to Ukraine, Libya/Irak and what might happen to Iran, and compare it with NK/Pakistan, my position on nukes is: get nukes. Especially if a western country say you have nukes: get them.

Iran getting nukes would arguably make the middle east way more stable, and possibly also mitigate further genocide

I'm not sure I agree with that totally, but for sure threat of force from the US is worse for the middle east stability than Iran getting nukes.

My point was that preventing countries from getting nukes used to be an acceptable, if not a majority opinion, and a lot of countries more or less accepted it. From now on, I feel that that opinion will become a minority opinion, even on the anti-nuke/hippie left. And if the hiipies start agreeing with the tankies on a point, you can be sure it's the majority opinion in the non-west world.

what i find most interesting about that list is the 7 year gap between 1993 and 2003 and the 8 year gap between 2013 and 2021.

US Intel didn't know about the nuclear reactor in Syria. That's all you need to know about US intel capabilities in the Middle East (or interests)

I get the impression that Israel is making bloody hay while the sun shines. They have an extremely favorable political climate to engage in some extreme military actions. Russia's stalled invasion of Ukraine and the election of Donald Trump have pretty much ensured that they will not have to deal with blowback from their aggression.

They don't have to worry about sanctions from the USA led coalition. The don't have to worry about Russian reinforcement of Iran. So they pretty much have a free hand at this point to completely demolish Iran's military and nuclear capability.

It's amazing how many factors lead to situations like this. The current geopolitical climate is total chaos.

That's exactly what's going on. Bibi just uses a window of opportunity and forces USA to join in an attempt to regime change in Iran.

it was always said that attack on the iran will lead to a regional war, as iran will activate it proxies: hamas, hezbollah, houthis, various militias in iraq. maybe syria.

now all those pieces are mostly out of the game and the major factor that led to this is October 7th attack on Israel.

October 7th is looking more and more like a disastrous move by Israel's enemies.

Sounds like every time Israel enemies attack it they end up losing more ground, and yet they never stop to try another way. They handed Israel the perfect pretext for devastating blows.

What other way could they try?

And it is great that at least some of the Axis of Evil countries are punished instead of being appeased and encouraged endlessly.

All of the recent geopolitical events really drive home one conclusion: Trump is an incredibly weak president, entirely controlled by non-US interests on international matters. Furthermore, actions that can be credited as his own also mainly just hurt the US and its allies.

He does seem to be quite capable of making promises that he cannot keep. He never did figure out a new Iranian nuclear deal after breaking the first.

To all the conspiracy theorists who claim it's just an excuse Israel used to bomb Iran... the UN has independent agreement with Israel's claims.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/iaea-report-says-iran-had-1059147...

Trump: Netanyahu wants me to say they have it.

Gabbard: Putin wants me to say they don't.

And... is this nuclear weapon in the room with us, right now?

Is it the same source of US intel which said Kyiv would fall within couple days if russia launched a full scale invasion?

Meanwhile, as that same US intel correctly called out that Russia was gearing up to invade, and plenty of other countries insisted that was needlessly provocative to claim and Russia would never.

So maybe we shouldn't treat the US intel community as a monolith, or uniform in its competence.

Meanwhile people in this comment section are talking about "They are always 2 years away" as if Israel hasn't been striking them and assassinating nuclear engineers that whole time. Usually that sets your project back a bit.

They have multiple tons of sufficiently enriched Uranium. My understanding was that they were basically sitting "3 months" away from a bomb as a bargaining chip; They could clearly present they didn't have a bomb, but if they were attacked they could rush build a bomb as deterrence.

We shall see I guess.

Even adversary nations were straight up unprepared with the breakdown of American norms with this presidency though. I don't think Iran expected this situation.

Are you saying they wouldn't have if the warnings were not heeded? It was the Kremlin's plan.

What a clown show. But I'm not surprised, USA intel is now controlled by the religious sect member, who also vocally supports Putin's war.

The easy control question to this news is this - did Iran had multiple uranium enrichment centrifuges or not? If yes, then Iran was obviously actively developing A-bomb and was close to it by any possible metric. If no, then Israel with its famed intelligence agency has now started an open war for nothing and bombed empty (no centrifuges, remember) bunkers and facilities.

To me it is pretty clear who is lying and who is right.

Quick, get Colin Powell in here to show us where the WMD are at!

The first casualty of war is truth.

It's state secrets all the way down. None of us plebs know what is happening deep in Fordo. Similar strategy was employed when the US went after Saddam, and it will work again whether they are arguing the evidence is one way or the other.

They do what they want, they were selected by God, chapter 3 paragraph 4.

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