Come on my friend. You think the country that is too afraid to attack oil tankers or PGCC ports would ever use nukes in a conflict?
What do you think they're afraid of?
The thing about Israel-Iran conflict is that Iran has some God given advantages against Israel. The most important one of them is strategic depth and size. Israel would never get involved in a nuclear conflict with Iran if Iran is armed with strategic nuclear weapons.
Nuclear deterrence is for mad men like North Korea, Israel, and America. Not for liberal countries like Iran.
I think the regime in Iran is pretty mad. Only mad people would pick a war with the United States and Israel over Palestine. Do you see any sane country around us that its leaders organize Friday prayers to chant death to Israel because of Palestine? Does Pakistan do that? Does Turkey do that? Does Saudi Arabia do that?
Everyone knows nukes in the hands of Iran would be borderline useless at this point. The cat is out of the bag. Even if Tehran was about to fall tomm these chickens wouldn’t use nukes. Look at Russia, largest nuclear supply in the world and yet Putin showed the world he is too afraid to ever even think about it.
I don't know. I do think that a couple of tactical nukes with a handful of strategic nukes could be extremely game changing in this war.
We may not be able to hit the US Navy with ballistic missiles due to lack of real-time tracking and poor accuracy, but tactical nukes would completely change that.
The only reason Iran even had a nuclear program was because they were afraid of Saddam going nuclear by early 2000s. Saddam was an existential threat to Iran at one point.
Saudi Arabia is going nuclear by bribing the right people in the US. Turkey might be working towards that as well.
I remember you guys laughed at me when I said Turkey would surpass us in defense industry by 2025 and Saudi Arabia would surpass us in science production by 2025. Both of them happened. Saudi Arabia is working fast towards nuclear deterrence and China is arming them with ICBMs as well.
We hit Haifa oil refinery (the largest in Israel) twice and central Tel Aviv several times (damaging entire neighbourhoods and the financial district) and most Israeli air bases. What more could we hit considering severe limitations in the accuracy of our missiles, launcher numbers (due to Israeli air superiority and US intelligence assistance), and the peerless US-Israeli missile defence shield?
I think we agree that IRI's boasts are not reflected in its military abilities. But still, we were on track to have a massive military arsenal, and that's why Israel first acted to prevent that. So either we double down on trying to survive for now then build a conventional missile shield (as Trump said), or try to dash for a nuclear weapon while most of our nuclear facilities are destroyed, inoperable, and under 24/7 satellite surveillance.
Yes, we did but only for propaganda, not for actually disabling Israeli war machine or its civilian infrastructure, while some of the Israeli attacks were meant to actually shut down our industrial capabilities and they did it.
Israel has only two major refineries. Why are they still operating now without any issues? Our attack on Haifa oil refinery couldn't disable it for more than a month. We couldn't effectively cripple the logistics of the IAF long-range operations against us.
I don't think Iran has the necessary infrastructure go nuclear now but I hope I'm wrong.