North Korea agreed to IAEA inspections, too- until they became inconvenient by discovering that North Kroea was re-processing fuel. Then they were booted out of the country. On the current path, Iran will have the bomb within five years, probably less. This isn't a matter of "just believing" anything, this is a matter of the Iranians having the capability to re-process fuel, which is really the only tough part of making a bomb.
> Face it: after the fuckup with the claims of WMD in Iraq nobody is
> going to 'just believe' anybody who claims that WMD are being
> developed by Iran. And even if somebody believes them, Iran has
> beforehand agreed to any inspections the IAEA deems necessary and
> everybody will point at Iraq as an example that inspections work and
> make it impossible for a country to develop WMD.
On the subject of who has used the bomb, the U.S. is the only country who has used the bomb in military situations against human targets, but hardly the only country to have exploded nuclear weapons. in the old USSR, they had a program where they used small nuclear weapons as a civil engineering tool. Need to dam a river? Just bury a nuke in the mountain beside it, and BOOM!, instant dam. That is not conjecture, it is a program I was told about first hand from the former energy advisor to the Soviet Central Committee.
Moreover, the history behind Truman's decision to use the bomb is well documented. It was a terrible decision to have to make and it cos the lives of a million or more Japanese citizens, but it probably saved the lives of millions more on both sides who would have been killed had the U.S. had to invade Japan to end the war.
My real fear is that in the future if we ever end up in a planetary scale war again, the U.S., China, and Russia have all developed small "tactical" nukes that could in theory be used in battlefield situations. In those countries, the civilian political authority has the ultimate say over the military. I don't know if that's the case in Iran, and that's what is so scary. Same with North Korea.
>I do not consider that risk any greater than with all the fissible
>material available in many places for those who are willing to send in a
>dozen armed men to take it.
The trick in that case is not so much acquiring the material as it is getting away. Agents from several countries have foiled many such attempts since the USSR fell apart.
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