From shock to shame: Israeli strikes expose Iran's crumbling defenses, internal divides https://www.al-monitor.com/original...ose-irans-crumbling-defenses-internal-divides
Lol. No... it doesn't quite work that way. These missiles are precision engineered from tip to tail. You can't just unscrew the warhead at the top and put something else there unless you want the thing to flip over in flight and blow up wherever it just came from. You make it sound like it's as easy as changing an attachment at the end of a vacuum cleaner hose. Uhhh... no.
Oooooh yeah, here we go again with @gwb-trading troll, the most prolific et troll who doesn't trade.... Al-Monitor’s money wasted on Zionist myths 6 November 2013 I’m not the first and I won’t be the last person to observe that wealthy Palestinians and Arabs in the West have made no effort to organise or marshall their resources to influence Western opinion equivalent to that done by Jewish elites. So when we have a rare example of an Arab investing in such a project, one might have assumed he or she would consider very carefully how to use their money to best effect. Not so, it seems. Jamal Daniel, a Syrian businessman based in the US, has invested part of his vast wealth in creating a website called al-Monitor. Since its inception, I’ve struggled to understand the point of the publication, especially in its Israel-Palestine sections. Regarding Israel, al-Monitor did little more than poach a group of mainstream Israeli journalists from their Israeli publications, where many of them were already being translated into English. What new perspective on Israel did we get from this move? Even worse, al-Monior reproduced the most misleading aspects of the existing mainstream coverage on Israel-Palestine by creating two entirely separate sections – the so-called Israel and Palestine Pulses. Senior Israeli journalists get yet another platform to promote the kind of journalism we already have a wealth of, while – in a rather more welcome move – Palestinians in the occupied territories get to write, mostly in translation, about the occupation. But this clumsy structuring means that an important part of the Israeli-Palestinian story is overlooked: that of Israel’s large Palestinian minority. Their voices go almost completely unheard in Al-Monitor, as do their issues – some of them vital for understanding developments in the conflict. Strangely, one rare exception was an article about Acre, a “mixed” Jewish-Palestinian city in Israel (disclosure: the report concerned a march I participated in). But even then it was written by a Palestinian living in the West Bank. This was such an exceptional event, it seems, that it required a very prominent, long and outraged response from Ben Caspit, a veteran Israeli reporter. Caspit’s reply illustrates in detail what is wrong with al-Monitor. It regurgitates a mythical Israeli narrative of victimhood that was discredited by historians more than 20 years ago. No one who has seriously studied the conflict believes this stuff anymore. There are far too many falsehoods to expend the energy on rebutting them here (that has been done many times before on my website and elsewhere). But one of Caspit’s arguments stands out – not because it is factually incorrect (though it is), but because any person holding this thought in their head should be considered certifiably stupid, were they clearly not suffering from a delusion called Zionism: One day after Israel declared its independence, seven regular Arab armies invaded the land where some 600,000 practically defenseless Jews were living. The military force of the fledgling Israel was negligible. It had neither weapons nor soldiers. It didn’t have world powers to provide assistance. But Israel nevertheless was able to vanquish its enemies and even expand the areas under its control. So how did this miracle take place, Ben? Was it because God intervened on your behalf, defeating those seven armies even though you had no arms to defend yourselves? This sort of puerile “Chosen people” nonsense familiar from the 1950s and 1960s shouldn’t be being peddled in the Israeli media any longer, let alone paid for by a wealthy American Arab. Daniel, please get a grip and put your money to better use than recycling worn-out Zionist myths that got us into the Middle East mess in the first place.
Israel strikes on Iran are long overdue. As I wrote on another thread, they should have done it when Hamas and Hezbollah were linked to the Ayatollah regime decades ago. International law is abysmally weak sanctioning proxy militaries to their source of funding/arming/training. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would exist as militaries without Iran. Shia Islam is the scourge of the Middle East Sunni nations, most of which would gladly sign peace deals and finance economic development of the region with Israel. Persian Iran has always used the Sunni Arab nations as buffer to Israeli attacks, but no more. It is finally time to address decades of Iranian obsession against Israel as their way to expand their religious reach deep inside the Middle East. Israel is Iran's Boogeyman and it must stop, for Arab Muslims are the ones suffering the consequences of this rivalry. So many decades of anti Israeli discourse have shaped the dynamics in the Middle East where all those with a modicum of education know that Jews have always had their place there. But fundamentalism simply cannot accept that Islam doesn't rule over all of the Middle East.
Isis,Al Qaeda,Bin Laden,Taliban..Sunni Muslims. Saudi Arabia is Sunni Muslim.Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia which teaches the extremist Wahhabism Sunni Islam.
Vanny doesn’t understand what he is talking about. Nearly every long-range missile in Iran’s arsenal reaches hypersonic speeds during re-entry, but they’re ballistic, not fancy agile ones. Precision isn’t the point here. A dirty bomb doesn’t need pinpoint accuracy to be effective; it just needs to detonate over a major population center. Iran's missiles currently carry conventional high-explosive warheads. Warheads that can vary. Swapping that for a radiological payload, essentially the same explosives with radioactive material added, wouldn’t require redesigning the missile, just preserving mass and balance. The idea that it would somersault and blow itself up is cartoon logic. Like nuclear weapons, dirty bombs are about deterrence and psychological effect, not battlefield utility. As Israel leans on its Samson Option, a veiled threat of regional annihilation if its existence is threatened, Iran doesn’t need to launch anything. It just needs to show it can escalate unconventionally with "radiological dispersal devices" (RDDs) to put it in Pentagon speak. And uranium isn’t even ideal for a dirty bomb. Iran simply reveals it has access to Cesium-137, Cobalt-60, Strontium-90, Americium-241, Iridium-192, Polonium-210, or Radium-226, Israel would have to think twice.
Funny thing, one of the strongest reasons Iran likely hasn’t built a nuke, just saber rattled, is religious. In the early 1990s, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring the development and use of nuclear weapons un-Islamic. Iran’s leadership has cited this ruling repeatedly, even at the UN, as binding religious doctrine. There’s no public record of the original fatwa from the ’90s, but it’s been reaffirmed many times since, and Iran treats it as official policy. Some see it as sincere theological constraint, others as political messaging, but either way, it’s a key part of why they haven’t crossed the weaponization line despite mastering most of the steps. Only Sunni Pakistan has nukes, Shia Iran has therefore had to take a longer route being the wrong kind of Muslim.
Thats what I was thinking, I'm no expert on the subject though. Im guessing if Iran wants to use a dirty bomb against Israel they would be able to do so.
Quite easily. Even Colombia operated a research reactor for decades in Bogotá that produced highly radioactive isotopes used in medical imaging, industrial applications, and even things like lightning preventer rods (repels strikes). It’s one of those quietly acknowledged facts among engineers, not widely talked about, but well understood. Same way most pilots always knew a commercial airliner could be turned into a weapon, long before 9/11 made that obvious.