In addition to my reply above, I'm actually going to say that I agree with you that disarmament and non-proliferation is a fantasy that probably isn't going to ever happen (at least not until there's a full-blown nuclear war, which is inevitable). But that's only because of the existence and influence of insane RWAs such as yourself.

I think I figured out what your sticking point is. You completely lack knowledge of what nuclear weapons are and how they work. You seem to have this idea of nukes as some mythical all-destroying force. You seem to think that once a country develops nukes it instantly has the power to flatten Washington DC or New York, and can start dictating terms to everyone.

> No country that has built nukes has ever built "just a few dinky nukes" - so you are imagining a world that doesnt even fit objective reality.

Actually that's exactly what India, Pakistan, and North Korea did.

The reality is that nuclear weapons development is expensive and hard to hide. No nation has ever successfully hid its nuclear proliferation activities. Every nuclear-armed country has gone through a phase when its nukes were pretty crap and ineffective and it was vulnerable to attack and takeover by other countries. Ultimately, the reason such intervention didn't happen had nothing to do with the fear of nuclear retaliation from those nations.

I'll grant you that (B) is a good argument and the first non-psychopathic thing you've said so far. And it shows that you're simply not listening, because I'm mentioning a global non-proliferation effort that would by definition marginalize rogue states that attempted to develop nuclear weapons.

But I get it. People like you don't want peace. You want war. You'll come up with pseudo-scientific bullshit to support your cause in any way you can. Nukes are necessary, you'll say, right up to the point where some fool presses the button and we all have to deal with the radioactive consequences.

In America you need a huge amount of money to run for president. It's essentially impossible unless you're a billionaire or have mega campaign donations. On the republican side, only the far-right whackjobs get the campaign donations, and on the democrat side, only the corporate whores get them. Hence the results we see.

Are you kidding? Rand Paul may have started out as a libertarian like his dad, but now he's in line with the establishment republican stance on virtually every issue. He has lost all personal integrity.

No, I understood your point, and my second point was a direct response to it. You have a simplistic view of the world because you heard about game theory once and think that your childish interpretation of the prisoner's dilemma can be used as a direct substitute to understand something as complicated as global politics and nuclear deterrence!

I'm not even going to reply to you again, just advise you to re-read what I wrote.

I envy your simplistic view of the world. People like you try to present a false and dichotomous view. That we have to choose between nukes and annihilation, because "prisoner's dilemma doncha know."

There are two main reasons that you're wrong. 1. Real life isn't as psychopathic as you make it out to be. During the cold war, the USA had several very good opportunities to take out the USSR with a nuclear strike but it never did. Or do you think only Americans are human?

Regardless, even if you completely lack faith in humanity, you're still wrong, because 2. the combined power of the world's conventional military forces would be more than enough to counter the threat of a few dinky nukes created by some rogue state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

This is the design used in most modern nuclear warhead primaries, including all current missile-based warheads. The problem is that accidental detonation of one of the points could lead to compression to a level sufficient for a nuclear chain reaction. Some designs try to avoid this by either careful design of the geometry (the Swan primary used in the XW-45 warhead is an example) or use of insensitive explosives. For a few warhead designs, space constraints forced that these safety mechanisms be abandoned. I forget if it was the W-76 or W-78 or possibly some other one, and a lot of information relating to nuclear weapons that used to be publicly available is no longer on the web.

Actually we have a lot of nukes which could detonate (i.e. a full yield nuclear detonation) accidentally. It's a common misconception that nukes can't accidentally detonate. This is only true with designs that use multi-point explosive lenses. But to make warheads small enough to fit inside a missile, two-point detonation schemes were developed, and these have a very significant likelihood of accidentally going off in just the right way to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. A large part of current nuclear stewardship is making sure that these nukes don't go off in a military base and take out a city by accident.

Nukes are incredibly dangerous to keep lying around. Theft, terrorism, and accidental detonation are just some of the risks. The only sane option is disarmament, otherwise the bomb is going to go off in our fumbling hands sooner or later.

Actually the bitcoin network reached over 1 exaflop (equiv.) some time ago and has since passed that mark. As slashmydots says, the network self-adjusts.

Microsoft traditionally code-named its Windows projects after skiing destinations (Longhorn, Whistler, Blackcomb, etc.)

Iran wants diplomatic relations with the US. Many Iranians have fond memories of the period up to 1979. There had been a lot of sharing of culture. There was an 'America-town' in the city of Abadan.

But a military attack would change things. Despite the fact that ordinary Iranians have no animosity towards the US, if the US attacked, they'd fiercely defend their country no matter what.

By the way, we have to keep perspective here. The US is never going to attack Iran, and Iran is never going to attack Israel. This is all just routine saber-rattling for fun and benefit. The US and Iran pretty much agree that diplomacy is the most productive way forward. And it's entirely to be expected that Israel would try to incite a US attack on Iran, since they would lose nothing and gain everything. It would be the US that would lose lives and money. And Israel will _only_ attack Iran if it knows that America would follow it into the fray.

> We invaded and defeated Nazi Germany and Japan and those were MUCH tougher enemies...

Again, at enormous cost in human life. You're not listening. Could the US defeat Iran, even without nukes? Of course, that's obvious. But the only realistic option (read: without too much bloodshed on the American side) is nukes.

Iran is about 3 times larger than Iraq in size and 2x larger in population. Plus, Iraq's army basically had zero morale by the time of the invasion (this is why the US decided that invasion would be easy, and it was). In contrast the morale of Iranian troops is high. Yet another consideration is military doctrine. Iran's military doctrine is based on a fierce defensive position. They invest more in anti-aircraft tech, not aircraft. Iraq's anti-aircraft tech was basically either non-functional or obsolete. Iraq was easy pickings and everyone knew it. They had briefly become strong under US support during the early 80's but after the Iran-Iraq war they were devastated, and then a decade of US sanctions wore them down to the point that they were ready to be invaded.

It wouldn't be as hard as France, but it would be much, *much* harder than Iraq. The US would win but there would be too many casualties. The only realistic option for attacking Iran would be nuclear bombardment. So the truth of the matter is that if the US decides to attack Iran, it would have to think very hard about if it wants to create another nuclear holocaust.

> Remember, these guys

Which guys?

> get about one shot to get their test explosion right

Bomb design isn't just hammering a bunch of parts together. Every nation that has developed nukes has done so with the help of computer-aided design (yes, even in the 1950's). These days you can literally simulate a thermonuclear weapon on your laptop, if you have enough knowledge of the physics. And the physics knowledge you need isn't exactly secret either: http://www.amazon.com/Physics-...

> Maybe there's a paper that theorized that you could set a Dewar's flask of liquid hydrogen next to an A-bomb to get an H-bomb.

That's hilarious. You're *seriously* underestimating other countries if you think they'd have to rely on leaked information from US sources to build a thermonuclear bomb, and couldn't do it themselves. Russia did it themselves, and so did China. During the 80's, a number of US scientists visited China under the pretense of a 'scientific conference' on nuclear energy (their real reason was to suss out how far China was in their nuclear knowledge). The scientists reported being amazed by the level of scientific competence of the Chinese as relating to nuclear weapons. The US government had previously assumed that Chinese weapons technology was mostly a result of espionage. The results of the conferences proved otherwise.