Thank you, come again.

So if there's a nuclear war, do I still have to go to work?

Do you work here?

good. morning. professor.

would. you. like. to. play. a. game?

Who is going to shoot the nukes off in this scenario?

Answer the question or I am going to daisy cutter Tehran!

Iran, Israel, Pakistan, India, anybody else with a few hundred pounds of weapons grade uranium lying around. The North Koreans would probably sit it out, but we might just decide to turn them into a parking lot to eliminate any uncertainty.

Sad thing is, suppose this was true? Events would just trundle onwards with some sort of retrospective historical inevitability to the survivors.

About a decade ago, I decided that the definitive event in modern history was WWI. It just keeps happening...

India?
Not the U.S.?

"I thought," he said, "that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something."

"If you like, yes," said Ford.

"That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky.

"Will that help?" asked the barman.

"No,"

Right, No I mean I know who is generally thought to be nuked up, but I'm pretty sure that Iran is not set up the bomb yet (although I am out of the loop). Israel wouldn't nuke first because that wouldn't do them any good. I guess Pakistan might do it ( if Pervy can't keep their intelligence service/al quaeda branch office in check) and then India might nuke them on general principles. Can Pakistan reach Israel with a nuke missile? I don't know if I believe this would set off a nuclear "spasm war" although if Isreal did nukes Iran off the bat then sure, Pervez gets a hydrashock in the noodle when he's at the urinal and the fanatics in the Pakistani intelligence services take over, nuke Israel, we nuke everybody, and yay no more going to work.

As the man says "gotta nuke something", these weapons are the ultimate gun on the wall in the first act, but when I try to game this out I just don't see it going that way. Once again I am out of the loop however.

Don't we get these dire anonymous warnings about twice a year?

One of them is going to be right, but I don't smell rain on this one.

I don't see any particular reason why any of the superpowers would regard this sort of a scuffle as an existential threat, but considering the low class of morons in power in the US and Russia, maybe that's just wishfull thinking.

Something along the lines of Israel decides to "neutralize" Iraq's nuke potential with a tacit nod from the US. You may recall that they did this to Iraq some years ago. Iran pulls a nuke hole card out of its ass (see, we told you so!) and slags Tel Aviv.

If you've got weapons grade uranium, a sewer pipe, some black powder and a neutron source, you've got a bomb. Not an arsenal, but a bomb. If you want an arsenal, you'll need Plute.

Israel hits Tehran -- and Damascus for good measure. Pakistan goes bonkers and takes a poke at New Delhi, which results in Islamabad getting vaporized. Game, set and match. Non-proliferation in less than a week.

Pakistan goes bonkers and takes a poke at New Delhi, which results in Islamabad getting vaporized.

Interesting.

Well the anon intern from the state department says the Israeli airforce is gonna whack 'em, which sounds more like missle runs or whatever (plus our special forces all setting off flares and smoke, "Nuke on my position! Popping smoke"), although your scenario is the one that probably makes it happen, but why in the wooly hell would Israel want to nuke anyone? Except as the classic last act of futile defiance evidenced in the t-shirt of the scuda diver flipping the approaching great white the Bird, they ain't got shit kind of tatical nuke options, they're right in the middle.

If you've got weapons grade uranium, a sewer pipe, some black powder and a neutron source, you've got a bomb.

Isn't that more a dirty bomb? (the neutron source might be what steps it up from there) once again, I'm out of the loop but for real super duper nuker don't you need the fairly precise implosion around the
plutonium? Or is that from the old days?

Dirty Bombs seem more in the Negro Teaheads want to impregnate your daughters and get em to join a union level of paranoia than an actual threat, I thought it was much better to spend the time and effort on conventional explosives and planning and so on...

Israel doesn't want to nuke anybody, anymore than the Kaiser wanted a war. So they will launch a "preventive" strike to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. But since the plans AQ Khan has been peddling in third-world bazzars have included really crude U-bombs (like Hiroshima's Little Boy was a crude bomb, compared to the Skorpion test which was a sophisticated bomb), anybody who's got fuel uranium could make a "deterrent" bomb to protect their program to build up a plutonium-based arsenal.

See The Curve of Binding Energy to learn how sickeningly simple it is to make a U-bomb. And I mean mushroom cloud, not fizzle, not dirty bomb, but KA-BOOM!

I used to work with a bunch of Manhattan Project alumni and though implosion can be hard, gun-type bombs are only dependent on clean fissionable uranium. The rest of the stuff is available at your local hardware store.

You want a dirty bomb? Try Hanford, Washington. It's still leaking stuff.

I don't fear Pakistan and India because they can sort out their differences on the cricket pitch in good old colonial fashion, chaps, but the rest of them I'm not so sure about. Personally, I think both the Israelis and the Iranians are way too smart to start anything. I doubt the Israelis would start anything even if their internal politics did descend into Zionist-dominated chaos, but really I don't see that happening. Iran, similarly, is on a slow but steady (assuming the US doesn't attack them) path towards liberalism. I think non-state actors are the bigger threat, and there ain't nothing you can do to predict that.

Thanks warbaby, that's horror/fascinating.

and I hear ya Jimbob.