darkcalling

It's just 576 but with some black-boxing to reduce it down to 568 in this case a loss of 4 pixels on both top and bottom. So it's an aspect-ratio thing.

Now obviously this would not result in a nuclear weapon, assuming the country is fractured and unstable. But whoever ends up controlling the fordow site now just needs to do a bit of excavation and we are looking at material to make dozens of dirty bombs, potentially falling into the hands of a group as extreme as ISIS. How is burying half a ton of nuclear material and destabilizing the country at all going to lead to safety for the world?

Others gave good reasons but I'll underline most extremist groups are western proxies and even if they made a dirty bomb out of this stuff the damage to the west would be minimal and would be a welcomed excuse for an even more intrusive police state and powers for the nat-sec state as well as control of people and rollbacks of limited freedoms.

Besides that though, the west couldn't invade and hold Iran. But in your hypothetical scenario where it devolves into civil war, they could do one of two things IF somehow they decided such a buried stockpile was a problem. They could 1) hang back and sponsor various groups, maneuver pliant leaders into place for the various factions so no matter who comes out on top controlling that part of Iran they'll have access to move in machinery to excavate and remove it. 2) Just monitor the site and air strike anyone who tries to move in heavy equipment to excavate. They could also heavily mine it, potentially from the air or via special forces or proxies thus acting as a further deterrent.

For the west controlling Iran or at least removing it as an anti-imperialist power is worth an awful lot of risk, far more than would be incurred by such a scenario you outline. Most likely if they did overthrow Iran and a Syria situation developed, one of the resulting factions would agree to sell access to the material and/or the ability to remove it in exchange for things like food aid, weapons, aid, etc.

DPRK. They should get them from the DPRK. Russia has a defense pact with the DPRK who has been sending them tons of shells for their war. The DPRK should be able to purchase s-400 systems at least and re-ship them to Iran if Russia doesn't raise a big stink about it.

s-400 are already sold to various countries. Russia already has deployed s-500 systems themselves against Ukraine and s-600 has been developed and is being fine-tuned. So it's not top of the line and no defense secrets are leaked most likely.

Their number two goal needs to be rooting out all the mossad spies and traitors embedded throughout the country, confiscating all of their stashed weaponry and explosives and setting up networks of checkpoints to inspect trucks.

I have a doubt this will ever be possible to a meaningful degree. They have a contradiction, a very disagreeable one between hardline religious fundamentalists that most ethnic-religious minorities and a huge number of Shia dislike as too conservative, reactionary, and repressive and the liberal reformers whose domestic policy reforms of maybe allow women to show some hair and don't sick the religious morality police on young people dancing to music are very popular BUT who are naive and gullible towards the west and keep getting owned in foreign policy decisions. The liberals get in power and disgruntled hardliners may leak to make them look weak to get back their religious fundamentalist power over their people. Hardliners in power = disgruntled liberals, young people, minorities, etc. Besides that they killed communists, atheists are blackmailable because those are illegal, gay people are blackmailable, etc.

Reminder John Oliver in 1000% onboard with NATO imperialism. Always toes the NATO line, was a huge booster of the Hong Kong attempted color revolution, spews Zenz lies on China, etc, etc. AND is married to a Republican party operative (I don't think it's just for hate-sex).

John Oliver is best seen as CIA. Most media are but him especially because he's very savvy about it and appears progressive on the surface compared to a lot of the "journalist" ghouls.

Iran's problem is the liberal reformers. They gained power for a real reason. That being forcing women to cover their hair and having morality police who religiously police all kinds of small sins and infractions is not what the people want. Unfortunately they had no understanding of imperialism, no understanding of how compromised their neighbors are and how hemmed in they are, no understanding of the west's overarching strategic goals and strategy for their region and a false belief they could negotiate and compromise with them to something mutually beneficial.

I will once again recommend a skim of "The Grand Chessboard" by Brzezinski, it's not just about the oil though that's definitely a nice bonus and pretty important for dollar hegemony and sanctions power. It's really about controlling this crossroads of land power. By occupying and destabilizing this one little strategic region you can block Asia (China), Russia, Africa, and Europe from ever uniting and locking the US out an ocean away via trade, defense, etc. It has been the great fear of the US to see this kind of integration and before them it was the fear of Britain who existed across a channel and separate from Europe and who like the US had a massive naval advantage that was totally undercut by the idea of land-power and overland trade, cooperation, military connections, and transport. It harkens back to the old British strategy used on India which is keep your enemies divided, play them off each other, and in the chaos you exert control and you have absolute power. This is true on both a micro and macro scale. The west seeks to do this in the middle east by sewing terrorists such as ISIS and other "moderate rebel" groups to keep certain areas in chaos (they also do this in Africa) but on a larger scale they seek to keep those aforementioned parts of the world Asia (China), Russia, Africa, Europe divided from one another, the chaos in this region preventing them from uniting.

It is a US hegemonic imperative to control the middle east/west Asia. It will be the last place they'll let go IMO as they're still running on old British empire playbook which says secure the oil but also secure this region to divide your enemies. Only once climate change sets in and makes the region unlivable and therefore denied to their enemies may they begin to fall back to some sort of climate fortress model.

Beware with HP business laptops back in the day they had serious security and you could not reset the BIOS if the password was lost without contacting HP for a special unlock code and going through this whole thing. They shut down providing those (and if you bought it used you almost certainly couldn't provide the documentation to get them to help anyways) so probably models made in the past few years are okay but if you get anything older make sure right away you can access the bios and it's not PW protected before the return period is up or that could cause problems.

They should have stolen better tech then or had some sort of a plan. You can't let the enemy control your skies. You have nothing then. All those missiles are useless because they can suppress your launch abilities. Perhaps not entirely their fault but I just don't think their leadership is competent.

Russia and China both should have stopped cowering from US sanctions after Ukraine started. It's obvious they use selective pressure to prevent these big countries from assisting the smaller anti-imperialist nations and because neither wants to take a personal hit they just stick with the slow ratcheting up of US sanctions on their militaries. For one Russia should have after 1 year of Ukraine and harsh sanctions sold Iran the rights and know-how to build s400 equivalent systems in retaliation for western sanctions. If they had it would have taught the west a lesson about fucking with them and sanctioning them but instead what the west learned is you can sanction them all the way and they'll still be nervous to do anything.

If IRGC purged those people they'd also purge communists. They'd purge women's rights types who just want the freedom to not cover their hair. They would receive spectacular backlash among a young population that doesn't like these backwards reactionary rules and create the forces that would destroy Iran for the imperialists because it would be so unpopular. They need to give up the religious hardline stuff and then purge the people who remain who push for western style democracy. But even they are just ill informed and not necessarily bad people, they murdered the communists who might have educated them with class consciousness.

But that will face popular revolt. The people don't like their islamic hardline (assuming IRGC are hardliners) and want freedom for women not to have to wear headscarfs and deal with the morality police.

If they do that without reform many people will join up with the proxy groups the zionists and US are pouring in weapons to right now and will help plunge the country into civil war, Syria situation and collapse as a power.

The people want the domestic policies of liberal reformism vs the harsh religious rule. They also imagine because of propaganda that there is some way to mend ties with the west and integrate. They also want to not be humiliated and to be able to defend themselves. This is contradiction but this is also expected in a country that ruthlessly suppressed communists.

Exactly. All comes down to Iran having no control of its airspace. Once they lost that they lost the ability to launch missiles as they please as the zionists will obviously spot and bomb them to stop it. The US bombing allegedly used a number of radar-seeking missiles and opened up paths for deeper penetration into Iran by the zionist air force.

Biggest mistake they made was not getting a nuke. Second biggest mistake was not getting proper anti-air capabilities. Third biggest mistake was trusting the west in any way.

Iran has the problem of being run by a mixture of fundamentalists and liberal reformers. The liberals are hopelessly west-brained and always will be. The west keeps stabbing them in the back. The fundamentalists are out-gunned and pressured domestically by the liberal reformers because they offer the population what they want in terms of domestic policies which include the idea of easing their strict islamic rules on things like hair coverings.

They messed this up on so many levels and in so many ways. Their regional alliances are in shambles. They themselves have been shown to be a paper tiger (announcing strikes to the US before-hand so no one gets hurt, not able to maintain missile strikes because no control of air space, US waltzing in and bombing them) and will reap the penalties as the zionist entity and the US will return again and again to peck at them until they fall. They are certainly moving ahead with destabilization plans like Syria and Libya and when those start off in earnest the zionists will start attacking again.

This is humiliation, this is capitulation to the entity and allowing it to continue carrying out its genocide, not even extracting a ceasefire for Gaza out of this. But I suspect many more humiliations are yet to come.

Yeah there seems a good chance they just keep up this air war forever. Start an insurgency (reports of weapons flowing over their borders already), do the Syria thing but faster and harder with ethnic minorities, ISIS recruits from abroad, Ukrainian SBU, etc and start going around tearing apart the country. The zionists using their air power to support the proxy forces and take out and hamper Iranian counter-attacks and eventually maybe it takes a year, maybe it takes 5, maybe 8 but Iran is in disarray and no longer capable of projecting power, being relevant to BRICS+ or the belt and road (no control of its own infrastructure, they'll definitely blow up that Chinese rail link) and at that point it's total control of the region by the US and total encirclement of China and another dagger at Russia's belly. Likely they slate pushing their own extremists through the region up through the Iran/Caspian sea region (Azerbaijan is a NATO/zionist puppet) to start doing terrorism and destabilizing Russia sometime in the 2030s, they then kick off war with China, sanctions, embargo, decoupling all in one as they occupy Russia with a distraction internally giving them primacy to make their move against China alone and buying them a few months of time in which to operate. They may kick off the Russia thing later than that though but it too is slated for a pressure campaign and break-up so that the US may rule the world. PNAC is so obviously telegraphed in many ways.

Yet China seems to believe the trap is being drawn into conflict with the west now before they've set up all the pieces. I hope they see a lot more than I do because from where I sit it does seem like they are humming a song while the west builds its forces and sets up the chessboard in a perfect condition for their victory or at least maximum pain for China to win.

It does seem a real danger of the US and zionists salami-slicing their way up their own escalation ladder while leaving Iran's response muted.

Iran unfortunately doesn't have the deterrence and options that the US has. Their big escalation is their only escalation while the US has a lot of escalations it can choose from. If Iran fires off closing the straits and all that it will mean war and it will mean damage to vital allies like China economically while the west will be better able to absorb the shock (western proles being well trained will only change Republicans for Democrats in response in the mid-terms and only if the gas price hikes last for many months and close enough to the midterms themselves).

This leaves the US much more able to sell Iran on the idea that they don't want to do that so had better not pull that lever as it's not an even escalatory response to the US bombing them.

Iran is surrounded by US vassals who have combined significant armies as well as US bases and air fields.

Frankly I think Iran is slated for a Syria/Libya style civil war/insurgency pushed by the west (at a much faster tempo most likely especially if they can keep Russia distracted in Ukraine they won't be able to help much like in Syria) and these moves are perhaps just to ensure when they collapse they won't have nuclear material angry Iranian loyalists can use for revenge attacks on the zionist entity, its regional pawns or the west itself.