| Kasz216 said: See, the real question... and the disapointing one that nobody bothered to ask is.... "Is it really possible to keep nuclear weapons away from these countries forever? If not, is there that much value in stalling for a decade or so? |
Iran unlike Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea has signed up to the NPT so it' not allowed to have nukes however evidence does to point to it trying to do a Japan i.e having the capability to quickly build one should the need arise, in fact Leon Panetta believes this to be the case. It is possible to stop Iran from having this capability but it will most likely require a massive military campaign which will cause the region will go up in flames, think Iraq and Afghanistan together and then times that by 2. Sanctions so far haven't worked. Though the Iranian economy has been badly hurt, they are still able to find ways of selling their oil mainly to Asian nations in particular the one's not in the US orbit of influence like India and China.
From a purely Western perpsective there is point in stalling Iran acquiring the know how to build nukes because it gives the West more time to build a more technically sophisticated and robust Global ABM network. 10 years is a long time though undoubtly Iran will be improving it's ballistic missile forces in range, accuracy and payload during that time as well. But they won't have anything like the Russians have to defeat the ABM network (i.e quasi ballistic hypersonic TBMs and hypersonic maneuverable ICBMs)
