I'm sure it's all fine, then. After all, everyone knows that Pearl Harbour is too shallow to be vulnerable to attack by torpedo planes.

Carry on, then.

You failed to take into account the learning curve. And the fact that a miscalculation would be irreversible and terminal.

I think its always wisest to assume you know everything. Particularly when all we hear about it how dispersed and secretive Iran's nuclear research facilities are.

I agree with the above 3 comments, but with slightly less sarcasm. The serious problem is that how do we prevent a false negative prediction (eg, Pakistan) with 100% certainty while minimizing the false positives (eg, Iraq)and hopefully not pissing off the Europeans too much. Yes, I agree that Bush has made this job much more difficult, but knowing who to blame doesn't make the problem easier to solve.

The Koran tells Moslems that it is okay to lie, cheat, steal and backstab a non-believer if it advances Islam.

Any non-Moslem who negotiates with a Moslem should understand that. And if one doesn't, or one chooses not to believe that, one deserves what one gets...

I do not hate Moslems. I just expect that they will follow their religion. And Mohammed told them to kill, convert, or enslave all non-Moslems...

I went and read the posting at armscontrolwonk.com and did not come away with a warm fuzzy happy happy joy joy.

Key line at end of Lewis' post:

Anyway, I don’t have any inside information, just a guess.

Even more disturbing was a rather well put together post further down by 'yale', including a very impressive table. Some nut paras:

All parties are working from flyspecks of data. In the past, engaging in augury by observing the roster and relative physical positions of Soviet officials on top of the Kremlin Wall on May Day was considered state-of-the-art. Now we are reduced to determining how soon Iran may have the Bomb by mass extrapolation of extracted partial sentences from IAEA officials.

It is useful to compare the current situation with the US Bomb program in April ‘44. Every necessary technology was in disaster-mode, with production almost non-existent. Yet, over the months everything fell into place, and by April ‘45, Japan was doomed.

Substitute Israel for Japan, if you will.

As my mom used to say, "It's all fun and games until one of you puts an eye/city out".

What i don't get is the criticism of employing "worst-case scenariors." If I can think of one uncertain problem where preparing for a worst-case scenario makes sense, it's the mullahs getting a nuke.

Examining worst-case scenarios is an important first step in any study of nuclear proliferation problems, but the all-important next step is assigning a reasonable probability of their occurrence.

The trouble with our impression driven thinking is that we do not take the final step of assigning a confidence interval that tells us how sure we are that we know what we know.

In the case of Iran, the worst-case scenario is a nuclear conflict in the Middle East with Israel. The probability of this occurring is quite low, perhaps only 5% over the next few years. But the confidence interval of this prediction is not high. We don't have a high degree of certainty with regard to our prediction.

So what should policy-makers do?

Looking at the proliferation issue from this standpoint seems to conflate the risk of Iran becoming a major nuclear power capable of producing enough bombs and rockets to threaten the region (or the rest of the world) militarily with the risk of the proliferation of nuclear material to terrorists. The latter risk does not require huge amounts of highly radioactive material. It does not even require a nuclear bomb. So, how much time do we really have? Why am I not relieved?

I always find it interesting that the crowd that says "we can't bomb Iran, we don't know where all their stuff is" then goes on to confidently make prdictions about timelines, production rates, etc.

jtb--
It's good to know you don't hate Muslims, but only believe they are a people who "lie, cheat, steal and backstab."

Let me remind you that when Saddam was separating uranium, he was doing it with a giant mass spectrometer or "Calutron", which is exactly how the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb was separated. If it worked for Saddam, why not Iran? This consumes massive amounts of electricity (leading to an ancient joke that we didn't drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we dropped the TVA), however I doubt that would bother them. Saddam hid his facilities quite easily. Somehow this never gets discussed with respect to Iran.