For all those I see teetering on the brink of falling for the foul-smelling propaganda about Iran and its "nuclear threat" to the world:

From the New York Times:

"Western nuclear analysts said Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has estimated that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020."

So, taking an average, we can say that Iran has 10 years to go before it could make ONE Nuke. Now what would it do with that Nuke, if it were even to decide to make it? Threaten the entire world?

Just to put this in perspective, the following table shows the nuclear-equipped countries and the number of nukes they possess:

You may have heard of the alleged nuclear safeguard of "mutually assured destruction." It is the theory that no nuclear-equipped country will ever use nuclear weapons against another nuclear-equipped country because of the obvious threat of retaliation and therefore the "mutual" destruction of both countries. That's all well and good, but what, you may ask, is to stop a nuclear-equipped country from nuking a non-nuclear-equipped country?

There are many reasons why certain countries have nukes and others do not. One factor would seem to be the resources and relative wealth of a country, which in turn seems to be a function of the size of the population of a country. This is evidenced by the fact that, of the 8 nuclear-equipped nations, 5 appear in the top 8 most populous countries in the world. France and Britain holding positions 20 and 21 respectively.

The theory then is that any country that does not possess nukes is, by definition, not much a threat to anyone, or, at least not much of a threat to the nuclear-equipped countries. In the case that such a country was nevertheless deemed to be in need of a good invading by a nuclear-equipped country, there would probably be no requirement to use nukes. See Iraq and Afghanistan for two recent examples of this.

There is one exception to this rule however - Israel - and this exception reveals one of the other factors that can lead to a country acquiring nuclear capability. Different from its mainly Jewish population, Israel the state is, as a noted French politician opined, "a shitty little country" totaling a mere 5 million people. Despite this, Israel possesses more nukes that India and Pakistan combined, two countries which together have close to 1 billion 250 million people, or about 250 times the population of Israel. I know, sounds kinda crazy, but we are talking about a very particular type of human being here, the type that actively pursues ever more exquisite ways to wipe out all of life on earth, so sanity is not a factor. Basically, Israel was 'nucularily' equipped by the USA to act as an American policeman of the Middle East and its precious oil resources, a task at which it has excelled, in no small part due to its nuclear muscle.

Anyway, getting back my point...which was...ah yes, "mutually assured destruction". So say Iran gets to make its one nuke in 10 years time. What would it do? Threaten the entire planet? Hardly. The best it could do would be to threaten one country. Who would it threaten? Israel? France? Britain? Pakistan? India? Possibly. If Iran lobbed its one nuke at Israel for example, Israel would probably respond with 100 or 200 nukes, or as many as were needed to turn Iran into a 1,648 million square kilometer glass parking lot for U.S. military Humvees. Basically then, if some future Iranian leader were to get his one nuke in 10 years time, and tried to threaten anyone with it, the only real threat posed would be to himself and the Iranian people.

But none of this is the point of my musing here. The real point that I want to make is to impress on you all to forget such critical thinking and analysis and just focus on the words of the leaker in chief President Bush and his cohorts when they say: "Run for you lives!! It's Iran with its plan to build ONE NUKE in 10 years!!! Flee, flee in terror you fools!!!"