Nuclear terrorism

[steve_bnk]

An accounting was done decades back on all the enriched uranium thought to have been made.

A significant amount is missing beyond any measurement errors. Where all the Russian nukes and those from Soviet client states went is unknown.

Old warheads in some form may be out there along with processed uranium.

Even with weapons grade materials and experienced nuclear scientists and engineers, it would be difficult to surreptitiously manufacture a reliable transportable fission device.

These days moving contraband nuclear materials is very difficult. When I got injected with a nuclear tracer material for a medical test I was asked if I took the Puget Sound ferries. The trace amount I carried for a few weeks would set off the radiation detectors.

Israel began a nuclear program right after its founding working with South Africa. Israel is believed to have gotten technology from the UK.

For Israel to have reliable weapons the key technology is the trigger mechanisms. Any underground tests would have been detected by global sensors. So Israel would have to get tested triggers from a source. In the times, 50s-70s, that would only be China, Russia, USA, and France. I do not think the Brits made their own devices.

It is debatable exactly what Israel's nuclear capability is.

All that being said, i do not have a clue what 'a line has been crossed' means.

Iran for many years could have supplied materials for a dirty bomb. My guess is they are rational enough to realize such an act would result in a massive retaliation. Same if Hamas used a dirty bomb.

 

[steve_bnk]

Curtis Le May who led the bombing of Japan said post war had it gone the other way he would have been hanged for war crimes. The thing is I doubt he had any regrets. Post war he ran the nuclear Strategic Air Command, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the hawks who wanted to start a war even if it went nuclear..

On the flip side the Japanese launched incendiary balloon devices in the jet stream designed to start large scale fires on the west coast. And they experimented on Chinese people with biological weapons.

WWII was an existential battle of annihilation of cultures. Do you think there was moral equivalence in the war between The Axis and The Allies?

The use of nuclear weapons in WWII forced Japanese capitulation. Had the conventional bombing continued it would have meant the end of Japanese culture. We would have reduced Japan to rubble before invading.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Smaller targets need not be civilian targets.

Sneak through a border crossing (military target) to bomb civilians--clearly terrorism.

So, Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo? Aimed at a civilian population for the express purpose of attacking a civilian population?

Not really--it was about making the Japanese redistribute their defenses.

"The Japanese people had been told they were invulnerable ... An attack on the Japanese homeland would cause confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders. There was a second, and equally important, psychological reason for this attack ... Americans badly needed a morale boost"

So THAT was terrorism.

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Targeting civilians?

More like bombing cities because we couldn't target accurately enough to hit the things in the cities we wanted to hit.

So... as long as we're intending to hit military targets, with the full knowledge that we're going to hit civilians, that's acceptable, as long as we don't choose to hit civilians with our inaccurate payload delivery system.

Um. Either way, we fire or drop a weapon, knowing it's going to hit civilians and not calling off the attack because of that fact. What's the moral difference, there? What makes it NOT be terrorism?

1) While killing more civilians than need be may be a war crime that doesn't make it terrorism.

2) The basic rule is to be as accurate as you reasonably can under the circumstances. If Hamas were aiming at military bases that were near civilians (in reality cities tend to grow around bases) it wouldn't be terrorism. They generally say what they're aiming at, though--and it's usually nothing military.

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Straight from the horse's mouth:

We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo – men, women, and children… [U.S. General] Lemay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost … But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win? LeMay said ‘if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals’. And I think he’s right – and I’d say – we were behaving as war criminals. (Robert S. McNamara to interviewer Errol Morris, The Fog of War).

It could be called immoral but the reality was we had no other way of destroying the Japanese manufacturing capability as it was too distributed.

Furthermore, even if it was a war crime that's not the same thing as terrorism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

These days moving contraband nuclear materials is very difficult. When I got injected with a nuclear tracer material for a medical test I was asked if I took the Puget Sound ferries. The trace amount I carried for a few weeks would set off the radiation detectors.

Don't be too sure of that. The labs give out the cards--that doesn't mean there are detectors. My wife flew soon after a nuclear test. Las Vegas--no alarms. San Francisco--no alarms. Shanghai--she set off two despite two more half-lives having passed.

Furthermore, even if there are scanners they're not very good as seeing bomb stuff. U-235 and Pu-239 don't emit much in the way of gamma or neutron radiation and anyone who knows enough atomic physics to make a bomb out of them also knows how to shield against alpha and beta.

For Israel to have reliable weapons the key technology is the trigger mechanisms. Any underground tests would have been detected by global sensors. So Israel would have to get tested triggers from a source. In the times, 50s-70s, that would only be China, Russia, USA, and France. I do not think the Brits made their own devices.

There's also a suspected nuclear detonation not tied to any country.

All that being said, i do not have a clue what 'a line has been crossed' means.

I meant that the world has now seen nuclear terrorism.

Iran for many years could have supplied materials for a dirty bomb. My guess is they are rational enough to realize such an act would result in a massive retaliation. Same if Hamas used a dirty bomb.

Dirty bombs are more scare tactics than a real threat. Of course Iran hasn't done it.

 

[Keith&Co.]

So, Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo? Aimed at a civilian population for the express purpose of attacking a civilian population?

Not really--it was about making the Japanese redistribute their defenses.

That is what happened. But that doesn't appear to have been on anyone's list of goals.

They wanted to shake the Japanese citizen's faith in their leaders and their invulnerability.
And they wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor.
And they wanted to lift American morale.
So most of the goals were emotional, in the enemy mind, and they bombed a city.

It could be called immoral but the reality was we had no other way of destroying the Japanese manufacturing capability as it was too distributed.

Furthermore, even if it was a war crime that's not the same thing as terrorism.

Only as a matter of labels... The whole point of categorizing acts as 'war crimes' is to point out things that should not have been done. A line that should not have been crossed.
Which is your whole premise for this 'nuclear terrorism.'

Pfagh. It's all about labels, and whose flags they're applied to, though the actions are the same.

 

[Jayjay]

All that being said, i do not have a clue what 'a line has been crossed' means.

I meant that the world has now seen nuclear terrorism.

If that's the case, nuclear terrorism is hardly anything to worry about.

 

[Nexus]

Loren not everyone is as emotionally invested into the word terrorism as you are. Other posters are showing you examples of American terrorism to help shake you out of that mindset. Your semantics over the terms war crimes and terrorism won't help you overcome that excessive emotional baggage to the word.

 

[angelo]

Bias? My gawd they talk of bias! Poor Hamas are the victims here it would seem.

They are. Feel free to call them the aggressors when they attack, unprovoked, after getting a sovereign state.

You do know that the majority of the "Free" world regards this organisation as terrorist?

 

[Jarhyn]

They are. Feel free to call them the aggressors when they attack, unprovoked, after getting a sovereign state.

You do know that the majority of the "Free" world regards this organisation as terrorist?

Then maybe you should stop calling the collective of groups fighting for Palestinian independence 'Hamas'. They are 100% justified to participate in armed resistance against Israel, and because of western interference, Israel's military targets are too fortified to attack with Palestinian means. Military strategy says when you can't come at someone with a regular army, you get them in the soft and danglies, if Israel wants to stop the attacks, they just have to give Palestine a state.

 

[angelo]

Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades and would only ever use them if the Jewish state was being destroyed, as a last resort. Were the Arab nations surrounding them have nuclear weapons, think they would think twice before using them to achieve their aims which is to destroy the Jewish state?

 

[angelo]

You do know that the majority of the "Free" world regards this organisation as terrorist?

Then maybe you should stop calling the collective of groups fighting for Palestinian independence 'Hamas'. They are 100% justified to participate in armed resistance against Israel, and because of western interference, Israel's military targets are too fortified to attack with Palestinian means. Military strategy says when you can't come at someone with a regular army, you get them in the soft and danglies, if Israel wants to stop the attacks, they just have to give Palestine a state.

This is the most provocative post I have ever read. Israel has offered on numerous occasions to create a Palestinian state to exist side by side with the state of Israel. Palestinians do not want a state to exist side by side with the Jewish state. They want nothing less then to annihilate the Jewish state. By saying hamas are justified in their attacks of terror shows you for what you are. An anti Western ideologue that in another place would get you thrown into the slammer for life for treasonable offences.

 

[Togo]

Then maybe you should stop calling the collective of groups fighting for Palestinian independence 'Hamas'. They are 100% justified to participate in armed resistance against Israel, and because of western interference, Israel's military targets are too fortified to attack with Palestinian means. Military strategy says when you can't come at someone with a regular army, you get them in the soft and danglies, if Israel wants to stop the attacks, they just have to give Palestine a state.

This is the most provocative post I have ever read. Israel has offered on numerous occasions to create a Palestinian state to exist side by side with the state of Israel.

No, they haven't.

They've been offered a semi-autonomous territory. For example, under the Camp David proposals, the territory would have borders controlled by Israel, immigration and emigration controlled by Israel, the water supplies controlled by Israel and prioritised for Israeli use, patrolled by Israeli soldiers, and subject to Israeli decisions overruling them at any point. The best and most valuable Palestinian land would be reserved for Israel, and existing mineral and fishing rights would be controlled by Israel even if they were on Palestinian land. In return for this, the Palestinian territory would have to take responsibility for Palestinians rights globally, even over groups over which they had no contact or control, and actively cooperate to arrest and handover to the Israelis persons Israel deemed to be criminal without any legal recourse or due process on the Palestinians side.

Does that sound like two states side-by-side?

There was a proposal for a the green line being used as the basis of a border, with land swaps to ensure that the largest Israeli settlements and particular Palestinian enclaves each ended up on the right side of the border. Jerusalem to be an Israeli city with an autonomous district controlled by Palestinians, and the border patrolled by soldiers from a neutral country (the suggestion was Sweden). The Right to Return would be settled by a very limited number of actual returnees being allowed to pursue their claims through Israeli courts, and the bulk of the claims settled by cash payments. The actual money would be heavily subsidised, with the bulk of it coming from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Libya etc. so that Israel didn't suffer financially. The scheme was supported by those countries.

That was a serious attempt at a negotiated solution, but it was proposed by Hamas. Israel turned it down flat, refusing to negotiate.

An anti Western ideologue that in another place would get you thrown into the slammer for life for treasonable offences.

Free speech not really a priority for you then?

 

[angelo]

What you don't seem to get through your thick skulls is that prior to annexation in 1947-48 the Arabs had no interest at all in what's today called the land of Israel. There were no fucking Palestinians prior to 1947. Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

 

[Jarhyn]

What you don't seem to get through your thick skulls is that prior to annexation in 1947-48 the Arabs had no interest at all in what's today called the land of Israel. There were no fucking Palestinians prior to 1947. Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

Oh, then where did the multitudes living on an ever-shrinking portion of the 'Israeli' coastline come from? They just precipitated from thin air when the Jews arrived?

Last I knew the entire region that is modern day Israel was Palestine.

 

[Jayjay]

What you don't seem to get through your thick skulls is that prior to annexation in 1947-48 the Arabs had no interest at all in what's today called the land of Israel. There were no fucking Palestinians prior to 1947. Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

Which is their prerogative. If you think Israel has the right to refuse to settle the Palestinians, then you have to grant the Arab countries the same right. As for the stupid claim that Arabs didn't care about the land, they certainly cared enough to go to war over it.

 

[laughing dog]

What you don't seem to get through your thick skulls is that prior to annexation in 1947-48 the Arabs had no interest at all in what's today called the land of Israel. There were no fucking Palestinians prior to 1947.

Prior to 1948, the area was called Palestine and its inhabitants were Palestinians.

Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

And all the Jewish emigrants to Palestine could have easily settled elsewhere, but they choose not to.

 

[arkirk]

Then maybe you should stop calling the collective of groups fighting for Palestinian independence 'Hamas'. They are 100% justified to participate in armed resistance against Israel, and because of western interference, Israel's military targets are too fortified to attack with Palestinian means. Military strategy says when you can't come at someone with a regular army, you get them in the soft and danglies, if Israel wants to stop the attacks, they just have to give Palestine a state.

This is the most provocative post I have ever read. Israel has offered on numerous occasions to create a Palestinian state to exist side by side with the state of Israel. Palestinians do not want a state to exist side by side with the Jewish state. They want nothing less then to annihilate the Jewish state. By saying hamas are justified in their attacks of terror shows you for what you are. An anti Western ideologue that in another place would get you thrown into the slammer for life for treasonable offences.

You have no understanding of what is actually going on in Palestine or Netanyahu's cabinet. He is just continuing policies laid down by Shamir and Sharon. That being that Israel retain all the land gained by Israel in the West Bank and that
Gaza never be allowed independence. Jarhyn is right and you are wrong. Railing that Jarhyn would or should be persecuted for WHAT YOU CALL anti-western ideologies is way out of line and patently untrue.

You look especially bad when you support continued killing of civilians.

 

[bilby]

 

[angelo]

What you don't seem to get through your thick skulls is that prior to annexation in 1947-48 the Arabs had no interest at all in what's today called the land of Israel. There were no fucking Palestinians prior to 1947. Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

Oh, then where did the multitudes living on an ever-shrinking portion of the 'Israeli' coastline come from? They just precipitated from thin air when the Jews arrived?

Last I knew the entire region that is modern day Israel was Palestine.

Yes, it was called Palestine and it was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.

 

[angelo]

Prior to 1948, the area was called Palestine and its inhabitants were Palestinians.

Furthermore, these so called refugees could easily have been settled in the surrounding Arab lands but they chose not to.

And all the Jewish emigrants to Palestine could have easily settled elsewhere, but they choose not to.

Why should they? Jews can prove they have been there for millennia. It was the Roman/Jewish war of circa 60-70AD that scattered them to all parts of the Roman Empire. But always there was left behind a remnant, even during the Babylonian exile centuries before that.