Iran A-Bomb Complete

[teeteringhead]

It was patently obvious I was discussing the relative technologies of the weapons, not the outcomes. And it is the technology, not the outcome, that is relevant in this discussion. So was this due to misunderstanding, or something else?

Oh dear, what have I started.

Yes KenV, you were indeed "patently obvious" but in the wider geopolitical context, surely it is outcomes (inshallah potential outcomes) that have as much a place in any discussion as technologies.

Given the choice of being in Hiroshima on 6 Aug 45 or Nagasaki 3 days later, what difference would it have made? (not that I was born anyway)

So was this due to misunderstanding, or something else?

I guess the "something else" might just have been innocently contributing to the wider discussion of nukes, and pointing out the sometimes apparently little known facts of the essential difference between Little Boy and Fat Man.

Nor did I realise the constraints on the breadth of the discussion. One always finds "thread drift" one of the most endearing things about Pprune ......

But I'll say no more (other than to say there is no significance whatsoever in the italicised word I use above )

[KenV]

Yes KenV, you were indeed "patently obvious" but in the wider geopolitical context, surely it is outcomes (inshallah potential outcomes) that have as much a place in any discussion as technologies.

OK, so you decided to use a reply to my post as jumping off point to go into a completely different direction than my post. Got it.

Given the choice of being in Hiroshima on 6 Aug 45 or Nagasaki 3 days later, what difference would it have made? (not that I was born anyway)

Very little. But there would not have been much difference either if you'd been in Tokyo on March 9 or in Dresden in February. BTW the Tokyo Operation Meetinghose raid was the single most destructive air raid in history, and involved no nukes. So your point escapes me.

Since this thread is about IRAN and the threat the world faces from a nuclear armed Iran, which WW2 bombing raid is relevant? Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki? There's zero chance Iran will get their hands on several hundred heavy bombers, so the Dresden and Tokyo raids are out. It seems unlikely that Iran can develop a plutonium powered implosion weapon, so that takes Nagasaki out of the picture. Iran may be able to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a uranium powered weapon. And they certainly have the technology to develop a gun type nuke. So that would seem to mean our policing efforts should focus there. Which means focusing on centrifuge technology, equipment, and facilities, and not on plutonium producing research/weapons reactors (commercial power reactors do not produce weapons grade plutonium.)

And on a related note, it is very hard to mass-produce weapons grade uranium. That is why the US only had two uranium powered (gun type) bombs. The rest were all plutonium powered. If Iran is successful in building a nuke, they likely will only be able to build very few of them. They just would not be able to produce enough weapons grade uranium for a large number of uranium weapons. And gun type weapons are inherently unsafe because unlike implosion weapons, gun type weapons have several failure modes that can result in a nuclear yield. The upside is that gun type weapons cannot be miniaturized, thus significantly complicating delivery of the weapon.

[glad rag]

I'm with Geordie on this one.

[AreOut]

I can't understand why US should be more concerned about iranian nuclear weapons than Russia, Iran borders with Russia and you never know when and how will they change their foreign policy...