In 2002 and 2003 I was one of the few people writing for a major media organization willing to say that we were being lied into war in Iraq, which was obvious to anyone willing to face the facts. Management was not happy, but to their credit allowed me to keep writing.
What I learned from those days was never to trust people who obviously want a war. Don’t trust what they say about the justifications; don’t trust what they say about how it’s going. This was true even for the Bush people, who were models of honesty compared with the current crew.
This time even mainstream media more or less acknowledged that the intelligence didn’t support claims about Iran’s nuclear program. And it took only days rather than years to acknowledge that the attack appears to have been basically a failure.
The fissile uranium in nuclear weapon primaries usually contains 85% or more of 235U known as weapons grade, though theoretically for an implosion design, a minimum of 20% could be sufficient (called weapon-usable) although it would require hundreds of kilograms of material and “would not be practical to design”;[13][14] even lower enrichment is hypothetically possible, but as the enrichment percentage decreases the critical mass for unmoderated fast neutrons rapidly increases, with for example, an infinite mass of 5.4% 235U being required.
So it would be a trade-off of needing more uranium, perhaps a lot more, that you had to enrich to a large degree already versus finishing the enrichment to full bomb grade. Plus practical considerations of making a deliverably compact and lightweight bomb.
According to this (not the best source) you could make an atomic bomb with 42 kilos of 60% enriched uranium. More but not a whole lot more and I believe the chances are excellent that Iran has more than that at 60%.
There were discussions of negotiations between the US and Iran in the weeks leading up to us arbitrarily bombing a sovereign nation:
On April 12, 2025, the United States and Iran began a series of negotiations aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement,[1][2][3] following a letter from President Donald Trump to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.[4] The former set a two-month (60 day)[5] deadline for Iran to reach an agreement.[6] After the deadline passed without an agreement, Israel attacked Iran and thereby ignited a full-scale war between the two countries.[7]
Yes, exactly. They didn’t reach an agreement within the time limit Trump gave them, and they weren’t even making enough progress to get Trump to extend the talks.
Gee, how dare we violate their sovereignty. It’s not like there’s any such thing as “war” which has sought to violate or even extinguish other’s sovereignty since the dawn of civilization.
But is it a war with Iran? Interesting question with a not really certain or obvious answer it seems (you’d think it would be obvious but it isn’t).
The YouTuber LegalEagle just posted a video discussing this. I am not sure I can summarize…it is, it isn’t, it depends who you talk to and so on. It’s a good video if you like such topics. (26 minutes)
I’ve never really been sold on the legitimacy of the American revolution, tbh. Canada never had a Revolutionary War, and things seemed to have turned out alright for them.
And the Civil War wasn’t started to end slavery, it was started to keep it. I’m glad the war failed, and that the slave-owning warmongers who started it lost, but everyone involved (including the slaves) would have been better off if the slave-owners hadn’t decided to choose violence over political engagement.
But, really, I was just commenting on Lumpy’s absolutely idiotic, “This bad thing has always existed, therefore it’s not a bad thing!” argument.
Fair enough (although one wonders what path the British Empire would have taken had it not lost much of its North American holdings).
It takes two to fight a warm if the North were pacifists who thought that war was the worst thing ever, they could have just let the South secede. But they didn’t - they fought a brutal, savage war to keep America intact.
