Nuclear weapons in Iran? How not to panic.

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Nuclear Iran

It's pretty important the cornered cats in Tehran don't get nuclear weapons. I'd say with the defeat and collapse of almost all their proxies around Israel, the Iranian regime is entering a most dangerous phase where you can see it might just use such fearful weapons if it has them.

Reasons It's not So Easy

First of all building nuclear weapons, even with instructions you can find on YouTube and watching Oppenheimer a few times, still isn't easy. You face some primary challenges:

• Getting hold of or making the fissile material, the nuclear stuff in the right form to actually start a chain reaction and go boom, is not easy.;
• Getting or making the specific devices which initiate the nuclear reaction: some complex chemistry and exotic materials need to be found;
• Engineering the bomb so criticality occurs as and when you want it and not before or after and making this engineering tough enough to survive being shot on the end of a non-human rated rocket (vibration, massive acceleration, vacuum in space, heating on re-entry);
• Building a reliable delivery system.

The first 3 of these challenges are immense. That's not to say Iran probably hasn't got most of the way there with most if not all of them, but but we hope not.

The Final Countdown

But I want to explain (drawing on the work of my friend @apshamilton) why even if Iran masters all of the above and produces at least one nuclear bomb and a missile to send it, they're still not clear of the way to shooting it at me successfully (I live 3km from one of the primary targets they almost hit last time).

Even if they manage all of the above and lets say they have miraculously, without testing the complete package, got one nuclear bomb and one missile to send it. Let's even say they manage to make three of these things.

Shell Game

Now we're playing a shell game: how many missiles can they shoot and which ones have a nuclear payload? In the previous rounds it would appear Israel knocked out between 80 and 95% of everything thrown at us. The question is can we tell a nuclear armed missile from a conventional one?

Even if we can't, unless the Iranians can shoot 30 or 40 of these things simultaneously, the odds are very much in our favor of being able to destroy a nuclear ballistic missile in space or on the way down. And nuclear weapons are fairly brittle: they don't just "go off". The engineering to make them explode is unbelievably precise (in many ways this was the hardest achievement of the Manhattan project without modern electronics) and they will not survive almost any interception. The actual radioactive material (if it were to even reach the ground and not burn up on re-entry) is not a big deal.

So unless Iran is like Russia or the USA and can quickly produce dozens of nuclear warheads and dozens of nuclear capable missiles to stick them on, I'm not being kept up at night by this prospect.

Non missile delivery?

Could they send a nuclear bomb by any other means? I'm pretty much going to rule this out. They haven't got planes that could do it without some kind of astonishing subterfuge like shipping something out of Iran, putting it in a commercial airliner and sending that over Israel. Sea shipment might be another method but very slow and with some complicated transit points like the Suez Canal to negotiate.

I'd like to think that the same methods by which someone knew how to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran would be able to detect and stop something as complex and hard to pull of as this.

But they must NOT be allowed to get them

None of this reduces the imperative to stop the fanatical Islamic terror regime in Iran getting these fearsome weapons in the first place. And judging by the performance of the leadership of Israel over the last few weeks and days in Syria, I have every confidence they won't get nuclear weapons.

Bonus points for a 100% comment upvote: tell me the name of the artist I used to prompt Grok for the images on this page.

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