bil

I loved theis excerpt frm the quoted article.

One senior Whitehall official said Iran had proved "surprisingly resilient" in the face of sanctions, and sophisticated attempts by the west to cripple its nuclear enrichment programme had been less successful than first thought.

He said Iran appeared to be "newly aggressive, and we are not quite sure why",


I think the answer to the question in the second paragraph lies firmly in the first one, don't you?

cricketman

I dont understand why the US, UK and France (for example) are allowed to enrich uranium, but Iran is not. Especially as we have seen that the US, UK do not adhere to UN regulations anyway

If I were Iran I would be p*ssed off. Playground bullying again

Rotor

The US is unlikely to answer to anyone in our lifetimes ,as for uranium the western world is comparatively rational and its never been misused by us yet but I would not trust Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a shotgun let alone wmd`s

bil

Pakistan and Israel have WMDs too. plus N Korea

Personally, I think Iran could legitimately claim that they need WMDs to keep the US from trashing their country as they did Iraq.

cricketman

Those atomic drombs dropped on Japan when the war was just about over?

One of the most disgusting acts of inhumanity ever commited

cricketman

Exactly, thats a great reason if there ever was one

bil

It depends how you look at it. I don't know all the facts concerning this, and I suspect that few people do. The Japanese, like the Germans, started a war in which they were prepared to, (and did) act in ways that showed their complete didregard for human life.

To me, this simply means that neither side had any grounds to compain about anything we did to them. I have heard it said that the atom bomb was needed to shock the Japanese into immediate, total surrender in the whole of the war arena. It has always been put forward that this was necessary to protect our soldiers from having to mop up pockets of resistance determined to die rather than surrender.

Anti nuke types (I'm not saying you are necessarily one) are very quick to denounce the dropping the bomb while seemingly forgetting the many inhuman acts like the vivisection the Japanese are said to have practised on prisoners).

I am always disgusted when they have a ceremony to remember the dead from the atom bomb by floating a white paper boat down a river for each of the dead. i'd like to see someone setting off one black boat for all the victims of vivisection, torture, all the dead in the POW camps, and so on.

bil

It is completely understandable.

jackytoo

If anyone is going to have a pop at Iran to take out the nuclear sites it will be Israel as Iran is dedicated to it's destruction. They did it with Syria.

bil

Wouldn't surprise me, but if they did, that would be a huge can of worms they opened.

Mind you, since the yanks support anything the Israelis do, no problem.

Rotor

I believe it saved more lives than it taken ,It taken 2 A bombs to shock them into surrender otherwise tens of thousands more allied troops would have died.

Dick Dasterdly

"The US is unlikely to answer to anyone in our lifetimes"

Maybe, maybe not.
We've already seen them suddenly go deathly quiet when Putin gave them a friendly reminder that he still had nuclear weapons at his disposal whilst making his own incursions outside his borders and their extremely diplomatic approach to some of Chinas hostile activities knows no bounds.

They may at best consider themselves to be the bullyboys of the present World we live in, but as history has repeatedly shown such situations don't last for ever and the broader picture of future world power in the not too distant future is a much more important consideration in my view, though to a large extent still widely ignored.

You are quite right about M.A.in Iran, and the sort of world he would no doubt like to create doesn't even bear thinking about in comparison to what we have at present while the US still grimly hangs on to the balance of power.

There are numerous other countries who make no major waves in the broader scheme of world affairs with their ppl. living in abject poverty, and they will no doubt merrily continue killing thousands in their own petty disputes and tribal warfares till the cows come home.

However whilst we all continually play the never ending US,OIL,WAR LP monotonously over and over again to little effect, apart from cheering up the lives of all those who despise our Western ways, the stronger ones amongst them, especially the Chinese IMO are rubbing their hands with great glee and looking forward to giving us a taste of their own particularly unpleasant type of medicine when their turn comes around possibly in the not so distant future as maybe many amongst us think.

Whilst I agree with most opinions expressed regarding the U S, I would say that the only likely future alternatives in sight at the moment tend to make our present World look like a Sunday school tea party.

Gotta be very careful just what you wish for out there.

cricketman

The Japanese emperor had already surrendered when the US dropped the bombs!

Obviously the allies didnt say this at the time and spurted out all the propaganda you guys are repeating back at me, mantra style

There are plenty of history books that will say this nowadays

They were negotiating on the terms of surrender. The sticking point was the Emperor wanted Japan to remain to be governed by the Japanese and didnt want to give the Allies free reign in the country. However, the Jap army and navy were defeated already, there was no resistence. The US tried out the bombs because they wanted to test their new technology with no regard for human life.

Another case of "the history books are written by the winners"

The Allies are as much to blame for causing WWII as the others - and acted just as bad during the war. The real heros were the Russians who were really only defending their homeland. No wonder they created the Communist block afterwards. I would if I had 10s of millions of my soldiers and citizens die in someone elses war

Rotor

The Allies had every right to demand unconditional surrender and Yes Im sure the women of Berlin agree with this

cricketman

By dropping nuclear bombs on civilians during negotiations?