[quote]hedo wrote:
Why would a country, that has some of the world’s largest oil reserves, develop nuclear power for “peaceful” uses with it’s associated high infrastructure costs? Additionally the ability to build this capacity must be imported since the locals can’t. Why?[/quote]
Excellent point, heado. Why sell the shit for $$$$/barrel when you can just burn it yourself instead? It doesn’t make economic sense to build nuke plants for power and sell the oil for cash, does it?
[quote]mark57 wrote:
hedo wrote:
Why would a country, that has some of the world’s largest oil reserves, develop nuclear power for “peaceful” uses with it’s associated high infrastructure costs? Additionally the ability to build this capacity must be imported since the locals can’t. Why?
Excellent point, heado. Why sell the shit for $$$$/barrel when you can just burn it yourself instead? It doesn’t make economic sense to build nuke plants for power and sell the oil for cash, does it?[/quote]
Was that sarcasm, mark? I hope not, because hedo’s right. It would be retarded of the Iranianis to spend umpteen millions (even billions?) of dollars to develop nuclear power, pissing off all of their neighboring countries, pissing off the world’s most dangerous nation (us) when they have ready and enormous oil reserves they could use for their paltry (compared to the US) energy needs. This is a no-brainer, people. Iran wants nuclear weapons. Duh.
The vast sum of money it costs to develop nuclear power more than offsets the tiny production loss they would suffer by not selling every little drop of their oil and using some for themselves. Common sense is on “price rollback” at Wal-Mart this week… if you’re interested.
[quote]doogie wrote:
For good or bad, might makes right in the real world. [/quote]
It’s too bad that more people don’t understand this simple and elegant concept.
Force, or the threat of it, is the one true motivator in this world. Also, don’t forget that there are different kinds of force besides military… economic for example. You wanna get something accomplished? Get a gun or get some money.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
doogie wrote:
For good or bad, might makes right in the real world.
It’s too bad that more people don’t understand this simple and elegant concept.
Force, or the threat of it, is the one true motivator in this world. Also, don’t forget that there are different kinds of force besides military… economic for example. You wanna get something accomplished? Get a gun or get some money.
[/quote]
Very well said my friend!
[quote]iscariot wrote:
hedo wrote:
Why would a country, that has some of the world’s largest oil reserves, develop nuclear power for “peaceful” uses with it’s associated high infrastructure costs? Additionally the ability to build this capacity must be imported since the locals can’t. Why?
Frankly, if you had massive oil feilds and there were other countries with nukes etc, who wanted to take them off you, what would your first action be? I mean, is that why countries like the US have nukes, solely in a defensive capacity? [/sarc]
The US, being an open society, creates doubt about our position. This emboldens our enemies. What Bush is trying to make clear is that our position is firm. No nukes. We prefer that you give them up but you’ll give them up one way or the other.
Who is the US to determine who has the big toys and who doesn’t?
…and don’t answer this in terms of ‘you’re attacking the US etc’ b/s - simple question. Similarly dn’t bring the UN into this, or the AEC, along the lines of the US enforcing their will, because the US ignores international bodies whenever it wants…so…under what legislative framework does the US have the right to tell a sovereign country what it can or can’t develop…
[/quote]
Are you serious? The US acts in it’s own interest first then those of it’s allies.
Do you really think Iran could be trusted with a nuclear aresenal or are you just trying to be funny?
Who wants to take Iran’s oil?
If Western Europe would actually take the difficult steps necessary then the US wouldn’t have to. Somebody has to lead and it certainly isn’t the EU, The Russians (rmember them?) or China.
They can’t be trusted. In hindsight Stalin and Hitler couldn’t be trusted. What if both had been stopped in the 30’s or at least exposed. Think about it.
Hedo,
I think you are confusing “right” with the ability to accomplish something.
Might doesn’t make right, but it does allow you to do things you may feel are right, whether or not someone else wants them or agrees that they are right.
Only a moral relativist would agree that might equates with right. Right and wrong are not changed by who has the ability to enforce their viewpoint, are they?
–
Edit: Oops, looks like I attributed the comment to the wrong person!
[quote]vroom wrote:
Hedo,
I think you are confusing “right” with the ability to accomplish something.
Might doesn’t make right, but it does allow you to do things you may feel are right, whether or not someone else wants them or agrees that they are right.
Only a moral relativist would agree that might equates with right. Right and wrong are not changed by who has the ability to enforce their viewpoint, are they?[/quote]
All nations act in self interest. Might may not make you right but it does make it a lot easier to accomplish the right things.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the world would be safer with a nuclear armed Iran that believes it is OK to kill non-believers, especially those in Israel and the US.
The difference is the US has the ability to do something about it.
If diplomacy works great.
[quote]hedo wrote:
Are you serious? The US acts in it’s own interest first then those of it’s allies.
[/quote]
Exactly; and from their perspective, fair enough too, but you would have to concede that it’s therefore wildly hypocritial to use rhetoric that implies they are working for the ‘greater good’ - what amuses me is not only the precise definition of ‘the greater good’ but who gets to define it.
Who me? Funny?
I trust Iran no more, no less than anyone else with the bigfun missiles be it France, the USA, Brain, China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel etc…frankly, anyone who retains a nuclear arsenal shouldn’t be trusted.
[Not that I’m paranoid]
Seriously, I don’t think you can argue that any country is entirely made up of moderate, responsible people, wherever you go there are going to be militaristic/ whacko nutbags
The US is no more trustworthy, especially if you take some of its past foreign policy initiatives into consideration. Now, this makes the US no better and no worse than anyone else, it simply means, as you noted before, they are looking out for their interests, and as such, why shouldn’t anyone else.
[quote]doogie wrote:
For good or bad, might makes right in the real world. [/quote]
True enough - but that being the case, people shouldn’t try and pass it off as a moral imperative 
[quote]iscariot wrote:
Seriously, I don’t think you can argue that any country is entirely made up of moderate, responsible people, wherever you go there are going to be militaristic/ whacko nutbags[/quote]
Agreed. But in Iran, those whacko nutbags run the country. Quite different in the US. Nobody around here can say “Okay, let’s blow up Israel tomorrow with a nuke”.
[quote]The US is no more trustworthy, especially if you take some of its past foreign policy initiatives into consideration. Now, this makes the US no better and no worse than anyone else, it simply means, as you noted before, they are looking out for their interests, and as such, why shouldn’t anyone else.
[/quote]
This is where you are dead wrong. The US is no more trustworthy than Iran? Fuck you, sir. You forget who the good guys are around here, just like so many others in these forums whenever we get into a “military force” thread. The US has a history of standing the moral high ground and having the best interests of the majority at heart. That comment will be sure to draw some guffaws from some folks, but it’s true.
Quite simply, we are not so selfish as so many other nations and their respective peacenik hippies try to paint us. We can go back and forth about this, because there are so many examples which would support a selfish US or an unselfish US, but let me just ask you if you remember what happened when there was the last devastating natural disaster.
Remember the tsunami?
Even though we were stretched a little from our Iraq intervention, who took care of business? Who were the Malaysians calling for? Hint: it wasn’t the Ghostbusters.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
iscariot wrote:
Seriously, I don’t think you can argue that any country is entirely made up of moderate, responsible people, wherever you go there are going to be militaristic/ whacko nutbags
Agreed. But in Iran, those whacko nutbags run the country. Quite different in the US. Nobody around here can say “Okay, let’s blow up Israel tomorrow with a nuke”.
The US is no more trustworthy, especially if you take some of its past foreign policy initiatives into consideration. Now, this makes the US no better and no worse than anyone else, it simply means, as you noted before, they are looking out for their interests, and as such, why shouldn’t anyone else.
This is where you are dead wrong. The US is no more trustworthy than Iran? Fuck you, sir. You forget who the good guys are around here, just like so many others in these forums whenever we get into a “military force” thread. The US has a history of standing the moral high ground and having the best interests of the majority at heart. That comment will be sure to draw some guffaws from some folks, but it’s true.
Quite simply, we are not so selfish as so many other nations and their respective peacenik hippies try to paint us. We can go back and forth about this, because there are so many examples which would support a selfish US or an unselfish US, but let me just ask you if you remember what happened when there was the last devastating natural disaster.
Remember the tsunami?
Even though we were stretched a little from our Iraq intervention, who took care of business? Who were the Malaysians calling for? Hint: it wasn’t the Ghostbusters.[/quote]
You remind me of a child who even well into adulthood sees his parent as a superhero without ever realizing that his parent was just a regular human like everyone else struggling to find a way in this world.
I related at one time to your incessent cheerleading and idol worship of America while watching John Wayne in the Green Berets, true I was ten years old.
[quote]Elkhntr1 wrote:
I related at one time to your incessent cheerleading and idol worship of America while watching John Wayne in the Green Berets, true I was ten years old. [/quote]
I am truly sorry if my patriotism offends your “post-post-ironic phase” sensibilities… oh waitaminute… no I’m not.
Plain and simple, elk: when it comes to hating on something, you gotta choose your battles. I don’t think of the bogeyman when I think of my country. Call me “cheesetastic”, “cheerleader”, an “idol worshipper”, whatever. The fact that I can see the good and bad of my country, and I choose to applaud our good louder than naysay our bad just means that I see the glass as half full rather than half empty. Why be an Eeyore about things when I can be Pooh?
Hehe I just called myself Pooh.
[quote]iscariot wrote:
True. But not the point. If everyone was OK with simple enrichment to 3-5% then the US would limit it’s rhetoric simply to ‘OK, prove your point’; but they haven’t; US rhetoric has been, you cannot develop nuclear power because you might also develop a nuclear weapons programme. [/quote]
I think the point is that if they simply want nuclear power, they could by ready-made nuclear reactors from other countries.
Canada sells (or sold) it’s very own “CanDU” (DU stands for Deuterium-Uranium) reactors which, if I recall correctly, cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.
They are also more recent designs of reactors which produce no weapon grade material and are also “meltdown” safe. Pellet-bed designs and such.
Building your own design from scratch when more advanced nations already have better designs ready to sell you is highly suspicious.
[quote]mark57 wrote:
Excellent point, heado. Why sell the shit for $$$$/barrel when you can just burn it yourself instead? It doesn’t make economic sense to build nuke plants for power and sell the oil for cash, does it?[/quote]
No?
Let’s say it costs you 10$ a barrel to extract the oil and you sell it for 60$ a barrel. Each barrel gets you 50$.
If you can sell a billion barrel a year, then you get 50$BN.
Let’s say you need 10% of that production for yourself, that’s 5$BN you won’t be able to sell.
If you can get nuclear power to cover that need for less than 5$BN, it economically makes sense.
I’m pretty sure that as oil prices keep climbing and energy needs keep increasing, we’ll see more and more nuclear reactors filling that need.
[quote]pookie wrote:
I’m pretty sure that as oil prices keep climbing and energy needs keep increasing, we’ll see more and more nuclear reactors filling that need.[/quote]
Good points, pookie. It is true that nuclear reactors create more usable electricity than it costs to build them (unlike windmills, which actually cost more to make than they will ever produce in their lifetimes), and the only drawbacks are meltdown/waste issues. The only thing better than nuclear power that I can think of would be fusion power. Too bad there’s no such thing… yet?
What I was saying earlier though about Iran’s power needs still rings true though. It would be oodles cheaper for them to just use their own oil (they don’t pay $50/barrel for their own stuff) than to develop a nuclear reactor from scratch. It is a farce.
I think all of us can agree that this is simply a “make a nuke” program we’re seeing in Iran. And if you think about it, they must be pretty close or already done if they are thumbing their noses at us the way they are right now. Can we afford to take that chance?
“white man’s burden” eh?
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
It is sheer fantasy to think we ever could negotiate with Iran on this issue.
[/quote]
I’m not sure why you say so. Suppose relations were normalized following a partial resolution of the Palestinian question. Suppose we provide other security guarantees? We are in effect asking for nuclear disarmament, before the fact. We should approach it in that fashion, and the Israelis should be at the table.
We could do a lot that we haven’t done, and I’m not sure why not. They support Hamas, and for this they get labeled terrorist. But they are not the terrorists of greatest concern to us. We don’t approve of their form of government, but we have had much closer relations with much more reprehensible regimes.
We could always do the unthinkable and apologize to them for our interference in their history.
[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
We could always do the unthinkable and apologize to them for our interference in their history.
[/quote]
LOL I know you mean well, endgamer, but damn!
What are we supposed to say? “Hey guys we’re sorry you’ve been trying to wipe each other out for centuries. I guess we should have just picked one side a long time ago and killed everybody else. Sorry… Our bad.”
And before anybody says “it’s all our fault because of their oil” just stop right there, dammit. They CHOSE to sell that stuff to us. Their rulers CHOSE to get rich as fuck from doing that. They can take the blame for their own actions, just like everybody else. Nobody forced them to gouge prices, or interfere with global economics to make more money for themselves. Which they have.
I’m not apologizing for shit to any rich oil sheik. But I’m glad we’re trying to make things better over there for the little guy.
HAHAHA… they CHOSE to sell oil to you, dude get a clue things aren’t that simple.
The last man who tried to STOP Irans oil from being given away (Dr Mossadegh) “was removed from power by the Shah of Iran, in a complex plot, supported by British and US intelligence agencies.”
I hope your government and the majority of your voting population does a little more research than you before they decide to make pretty fireworks on other people’s doorsteps.
"I’m not apologizing for shit to any rich oil sheik. But I’m glad we’re trying to make things better over there for the little guy. "
I think you are confusing arabs with iranians but thats just because they are both muslems and live in the middle east right?? Hey they have dark skin and talk all funny too, I bet they think you’re a funny cowboy that yells yeeehaa and rides a horse to wallmart too.