Pretend that everyone in the US was on board with this idea, but every other country reacted like they would normally react. We load about 50 nuclear warheads with various delivery methods on a boat with bow on top and float it over to Iran.
What happens next? Does Iran immediately start using them? Does Israel launch a preemptive strike? Does the rest of the world start a war against the US?
I vote that nothing much at all would happen.
Well, Iran would probably be just a little flabbergasted…
But yes; in general I don’t think much would change; the region would become more stable since America wouldn’t be rattling its saber so much (ignoring the fact that if it’s shipping them nukes it wouldn’t be rattling its saber anyway).
Does the US otherwise continue sanctions? Or do we normalize relations?
I suspect that if America gave Iran nukes and otherwise continued to act as hostile as it has, the international reaction would be the diplomatic equivalent of everybody slooowly backing away from the crazy man.
I assume we’d normalize relations; my understanding is that the only reason we impose sanctions is because we want Iran to stop its nuclear program. If we give them the weapons, then we wouldn’t care about their nuclear program anymore, and would have no reason keep up the sanctions. But if we’re imposing sanctions for some other reasons, we’d keep them in place.
For quite a while I was trying to figure out what kind of craziness you meant by “boat with bow on top.”
Yes, I suppose that a radioactive plain, dotted with glassy craters, is more “stable” than all those people, plants and other life.
Iran would either use the nukes or constantly threaten to use them, thus either leading to a nuclear war (hopefully limited) , or a massive DEstabilization of the area.
Depends on how long we set the timer for, doesn’t it?
Obama would ask Iran to give them back.
[QUOTE=Sailboat]
Depends on how long we set the timer for, doesn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
That was my first thought as well.
Even leaving aside whether Iran would even trust such a gesture, my guess is that it would make Iran even more aggressive (they would probably use such a move for huge internal propaganda declarations of victory), and that instead of threatening to close the straights they would expand their threats to the use of nuclear weapons if they didn’t get their way. Of course, if we posit just caving in this way, I suppose we could posit that we’d cave into everything they want (and that the Europeans and other western powers would just go meekly along with the US on all of this), so that leads to…what do you think Iran really wants? Just to live peacefully (once they have nuclear weapons) and be good neighbors in the Middle East, living and letting live in peace and harmony? Or do they have another regional agenda? THAT’S the real question.
-XT
You know, I am not one for joke replies, but this actually make laugh out loud. Kudos!
You DO know that region has been unstable for at least 5000 years longer than America has even had a saber, right?
Either Israel or Iran would be wipped from the face of the Earth. Do you guys sincerely believe they wouldn’t fire them into Israel as soon as they have them? :dubious:
[QUOTE=etv78]
Either Israel or Iran would be wipped from the face of the Earth. Do you guys sincerely believe they wouldn’t fire them into Israel as soon as they have them?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t believe that they would necessarily fire them into Israel the moment they got them. That said, it would be interesting (in the Chinese sense of the word) to see what Israel would do if this happened…and depending on how that played out we might see an exchange of conventional or even nuclear weapons between Iran and Israel before the dust settled out. Even if that didn’t happen immediately, I wouldn’t want to bet the farm on no exchange between the two in the next, oh, say 20 years, if we did what the OP proposes.
-XT
Bombs on Monday, fallout by Friday.
They’d use em.
Tel Aviv, Washington & London.
I don’t understand why folks think they would use them immediately. Are we assuming that Iran is crazier than North Korea?
Well, it’s one of those six to one, half a dozen to the other thingies. Iran doesn’t have a China holding their leash, for instance. But IMHO, North Korea is MUCH crazier than Iran is, though they have more focused fish to fry. Both have only the most tenuous contact with reality, however, so you just don’t know what they might do. And both have incredible pressure on them to keep their people down and in line and afraid of external enemies (real or imagined) to keep the focus off what’s going on at home, which could play into someone doing something stupid.
-XT
Depending on your definition of “the region” I think this isn’t really supportable. Iran itself has had long periods of what passed for stability at the time.
According to Wikipedia History of Ancient Iran/Persia we can tote up the durations of specific empires:
[ul]
[li]Median and Achaemenid Empire (650 BC–330 BC): 320 years[/li][li]Seleucid Empire (312 BC – 63 BC): 375 years[/li][li]Parthian Empire (248 BC — AD 224)*: 472 years[/li][li]Sassanid Empire (224 – 651): 427 years[/li][/ul]
*Notice the overlap between Parthian and Seleucid; both empires controlled parts of what we’d call Persia/Iran and despite warring with each other both have been considered historical Persia.
Later on, Iran became a monarchy ruled by a shah, or emperor, almost without interruption from 1501 until the 1979 Iranian revolution: 478 years.
United States from Declaration of independence to right now: 236 years.
I suppose you can say that dynastic turnover in those empires was “instability” but you might then have to count elections in the US. I suppose you could say “but there were a lot of wars with their neighbors…” but I’m not sure that counting periodic wars with neighbors as instability would define the US as “stable.”
That’s at least five periods of stability and national identity longer than the entire existence of the United States…entirely skipping over the question of whether the early Islamic periods count. Two of those periods were TWICE as long as the US has existed…each.
If you’re going to define “the region” as “the whole Middle East” then we’ve got to expand our comparison to “North America” or “Europe,” neither of which have fared particularly well at avoiding dynastic upheaval, regime change, or war over the last 5,000 years.
I know “The Middle East” (meaning Palestine and surrounding areas) has seen a whirlwind of particularly savage fighting, uprisings, terror, and political conflict since…let’s see…probably since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire some time around 1918, depending on how you count it. But that isn’t really “the last 5,000 years.”
Until they hear the ticking . . .
Each of those Empires had constant war and internal strife, something endemic to the Middle east. For example the Parthian Empire per wiki “The earliest enemies of the Parthians were the Seleucids in the west and the Scythians in the east. However, as Parthia expanded westward, they came into conflict with the Kingdom of Armenia, and eventually the late Roman Republic. Rome and Parthia competed with each other to establish the kings of Armenia as their subordinate clients. The Parthians soundly defeated Marcus Licinius Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, and in 40–39 BC, Parthian forces captured the whole of the Levant, excepting Tyre, from the Romans. However, Mark Antony led a counterattack against Parthia and several Roman emperors invaded Mesopotamia during the Roman-Parthian Wars. The Romans captured the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon on multiple occasions during these conflicts, but were never able to hold onto them. Frequent civil war between Parthian contenders to the throne proved more dangerous than foreign invasion, and Parthian power evaporated when Ardashir I, ruler of Estakhr in Fars, revolted against the Arsacids and killed their last ruler, Artabanus IV, in 224 AD.”
I could go on. “The Middle East” (meaning Palestine and surrounding areas) has seen a whirlwind of particularly savage fighting, uprisings, terror, and political conflict since…let’s see… about the start of recorded history.