… He’d watched Secretary Moniz help negotiate the deal that removed from Iran the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. There were only three paths to a nuclear weapon. The Iranians might produce enriched uranium—but that required using centrifuges. They might produce plutonium—but that required a reactor that the deal had dismantled and removed. Or they might simply go out and buy a weapon on the open market. The national labs played a big role in policing all three paths. “These labs are incredible national resources, and they are directly responsible for keeping us safe,” said MacWilliams. “It’s because of them that we can say with absolute certainty that Iran cannot surprise us with a nuclear weapon.” After the deal was done, U.S. Army officers had approached D.O.E. officials to thank them for saving American lives. The deal, they felt sure, had greatly lessened the chance of yet another war in the Middle East that the United States would inevitably be dragged into.
At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they say.
Trump doesn’t want an Iranian bomb, so he has staff ‘trump up’ reasons to kill the multi-country deal to prevent Iran (at least temporarily) from getting the bomb. So now they get the bomb.
Anyone remember when W and his boys rolled into town and threw out Clinton’s NK nukes deal, telling us they could get a better deal? Something perhaps a bit more hard line conservative? Gave NK 8 years of development time.
But HEY, Senator Corker and Tom Cotton and John McCain and every single fucking GOP Senator signed the letter to the Ayatollahs drafted by Bill Kristol at Sheldon Adelson’s behest, warning Iran that this was a mere executive branch agreement and that the next Republican asshole president would do this.
If this idiot-child goes through with this, why would any other country in the world enter into an agreement with US? Drumpf will prove that the United States cannot be trusted.
Ironically, this will be why Iran, No, Korea, and many other third-rate countries will start rushing to get nuclear weapons.
Naw. He’ll just cause Iran to fire up its centrifuges and build a bomb which, in turn, will cause Saudi Arabia to decide it needs either an overt military alliance with Israel or it’s own bomb and then, once everyone there has their own bomb, they’ll find that all they’ve done is make it harder for them to engage in conventional war with each other.
Not saying it will be a good thing. The more people have the bomb, and the more the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty becomes a joke, the more likely it is that there will be a failure of deterrence because a country with a bomb let’s an unstable, narcissistic moron or a deranged dotard become its leader. (A thing all three of those countries had some small experience with, one way or another, well before we did).
This is all assuming, of course, that Bibi doesn’t decide our narcissistic dotard hasn’t given him the green light to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, at which point all bets are off. But if it that happens, it will be Obama’s fault.
Among other things, it will show all the other parties (our allies) to the agreement, once and for all, that the United States can no longer be trusted as a guarantor of international order.
And, unless we as a nation demonstrate a renewed ability to select our leaders based on input from organs north of the belt buckle, I am sorry to say that they will be correct. We deserve to lose our leading role.
Frau Kanzlerin Merkel, welcome to your new leadership position.
Jennifer Rubin. Jennifer Fucking Rubin. Jennifer Rubin who I have, for years, derided as a worthless hack, as self-admitted shill, a second-rate player in the conservative nonsense mill game, is saying things that make sense and which I regularly agree with.
Jennifer Rubin. I am frequently agreeing with Jennifer Rubin. It’s come to this.
The unpleasant reality for Trump, of course, is that having neglected or attacked his own party he may find many of its members replaced by hostile Democrats who will seek to remove him. That is certainly reason for Republican pessimism.
How much longer? How much longer? How much more havoc are they going to allow this cognitively impaired baby man to wreak upon the country and our image in the world? Have all of the frogs been boiled yet?
DING! DING! DING! This is exactly what I thought, too.
No one will or should trust the US anymore because of Tramp. We’ve proven ourselves to be an unreliable ally, we’ve proven that our national position can change with each administration, we’ve proven that we’re a nation of idiots.
All because of that pig-eyed sack of shit MORON in the WH. Mission accomplish, Vlad.
