"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon," Mitt Romney declared in a foreign policy debate in South Carolina sponsored by CBS News and National Journal. "If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."
Too late jackass.
Look, for those who are ignorant of the facts, here they are:
- Anyone with a basic understanding of physics, some ordinary explosives, a smooth-bore barrel-like thing (e.g. an old cannon barrel will do) and a quantity of highly-enriched Uranium can make a crude nuclear bomb. If you get the physics wrong you have a decent shot at scoring an "own goal" while trying to assemble it (not a "boom" but a runaway criticality that will kill everyone in the vicinity and make a hell of a radioactive mess) or getting a "zero" when you set it off, but the actual process of building a crude nuclear weapon has exactly one gating factor: Acquisition of enriched uranium (or plutonium.) Anyone telling you otherwise is a damned liar.
- Iran has had the ability to make highly-enriched Uranium since they set up their centrifuges. Don't believe for a second they can't do so if they want to do so. The process is well-understood and the fact that their plant exists is known. Plutonium is tougher; you need a running reactor to make that, basically, or someone has to sell or give it to you since it is not naturally-occurring in any meaningful quantity.
- It is considerably more difficult to make a small and light nuclear bomb. Like, for instance, if you want to put one on top of a missile. There's a serious weight problem doing that and constructing one that will fit and can be lifted by your missile is quite a bit more of a challenge.
The question is not whether Iran can acquire a nuclear weapon. They most-certainly can if they really want to. We have little or nothing we can do to stop it should they be determined to succeed, other than bombing the hell out of the nation on a pretty-much continual basis, occupying it, or otherwise installing a puppet government that does what we want.
We've tried all of those options before in the general sense, haven't we? How has it worked out, may I ask?
Is this a real issue? Well, maybe, but not as Mitt framed it and definitely not as he's trying to sell it.
This much I'll tell you right now: Mitt's projectile vomiting on this subject is exactly the same sort of crap that was run with the "Daisy" ad. You know, this one.
I can see we're not beyond this sort of crap.
But we should be.
