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| For newer Rantburgians: Wretchard's "The three conjectures" |
| 2006-09-02 |
| Written in 2003, this is considered seminal for blogger commentary. Wretchard makes a stunningly logical case that Islam having WMD would necessarily lead to the extermination of Islam. THE THREE CONJECTURES A Pew poll finds 40% of Americans worry that an US city will be destroyed by a terrorist nuclear attack . James Lileks thinks the annihilation of a city is a dead certainty and will only mark the start of a long, wearying struggle against Islamists armed with nuclear car bombs. The imminence of the threat is open to debate. Despite the perception that technological diffusion has put weapons of mass destruction within easy reach of Islamic terrorists -- the cliché of a mullah brewing anthrax in a cave -- terrorist weapons remain at the 1970s level. The Al-Qaeda attack on the September 11 was the most sophisticated terrorist assault in history. Yet it did not employ any new technological elements, just the creative use of old techniques like the airline hijacking. High explosives, small arms, and poison gas still comprise the terrorist arsenal. The limiting factor is the lack of terrorist engineering resources to make sophisticated weaponry. The principles of ballistics, explosive chemistry and aeronautics needed to make combat aircraft are well known; but groups like Al Qaeda don't have the personnel, facilities and secure environment to turn the concepts into a working object and so have no combat aircraft. Making a uranium A-bomb of the simplest kind is comparable in complexity to manufacturing a Douglas DC-3, even given the fissile materials. But the SAFF (Safing, Arming, Fuzing, and Firing) issues alone pretty much ensure that it cannot be developed from a mullah's cave. US weapons are one point safe -- with less than a one in a million chance of detonating accidentally if their explosive primers were improperly activated. Unless the Islamists engineer similar precautions, their weapons would be unusable. The safety record of terrorist bomb factories and the history of prematurely detonating car bombs would see Islamabad vaporized before Manhattan. Analogous problems exist for biological weaponry. There are no Biosafety Level 4 facilities in tribal areas or tents in North Africa and an accidental plague that wiped out the population of the Middle East would hardly help the Islamist cause. Only a state in the near term -- Pakistan, Iran or North Korea -- will have the manufacturing resources and secure territory to make the weapon that Lileks and the Pew respondents fear. |
| Posted by:Yehud of Soddiland |
| #5 Things will become clearer after the November elections. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-09-02 17:13 |
| #4 "So when are we going to end this or are we going to play this game until the nation state of Iran aquires the weapons and the mullas use it on us?" There's times when I wonder, "What the fuck are we doing? Why are we continuing to screw around with Iran and the EU and the UN in this pointless, stupid dance which will NEVER accomplish anything?" And there's also times when I'm convinced that Bush is NOT going to prevent the MMs from going nuclear (in part because he's hemmed in politically here at home). But there are also times when I remind myself that Bush has said, absolutely and positively, that the MMs will NOT be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons, PERIOD. And the safest bet, I figure, is that he means it. Faster, please... |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2006-09-02 12:35 |
| #3 He understood at that moment that mankind's moral capacity would have to expand to match its technical prowess or it would perish. Iran is the epitomy of technical prowess outstripping moral capacity. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-09-02 02:23 |
| #2 Well said. So when are we going to end this or are we going to play this game until the nation state of Iran aquires the weapons and the mullas use it on us? It is only a matter of time before they get the capability, build or steal, and when they do they will use it. If there was ever an arguement for a preemptive strike this is it. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2006-09-02 02:11 |
| #1 Required reading for anyone who wants to know how the War on Terrorism will end. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-09-02 01:14 |