@usefewersyllables

that if Israel uses nukes then Pakistan will hit Israel with theirs and who knows what Russia will do since it has treaties with Iran. Could open up a whole kettle of fish.

Pretty sure that Russia gave Iran permission to hit Israel because it’s the only way to get Israel to stop its violence in the Middle East. They know that America is fully on board with the Lebanon invasion.

Kinda funny that Russia is being the adult when Biden said that he was.

I think everyone should take a deep breath and let’s call the wars off. Nuff killing has been done this century. It leads nowhere.

is that now everybody is getting a chance to see how my nightmares have generally started for the last 60-odd years. Just looking up at the sky and seeing white-hot reentry vehicles in the process of MIRVing... Briefly.

If the Iranians are smart, they'll hold back the *really* good toys until the third or fourth salvo, when all the defenses have been saturated and the Iron Dome/Patriot batteries have spent all the missiles from their ready stockpiles. Unless, of course, the insane Israelis decide that this would be a really good time for aboveground-testing their arsenal of nuclear devices. I wonder what they would nuke first?

The dog is being wagged.

Hold your loved ones close. I left work to go home for lunch, just so that I could kiss my wife one more time.

@Pluto's Republic

Regarding nuclear weapons:
The purpose of nuclear weapons is not to use them. It is to prevent others from using them. Using them is an act of suicide and suicidal people are not put in charge of nuclear weapons. These are simple and straghtforward facts. Surprisingly, most people don't get them.

I think this is simplistic thinking. There is nothing straightforward about states like Israel and North Korea possessing nuclear weapons. It's easiest to use them as examples because of their extreme respective experiences at least in their respective currently indoctrinated perceptions of those "experiences." I have learned enough that to assume that nuclear weapons policies and plans aren't or can't be irrational or suicidal is simply wishful thinking.

Something to keep in mind.
But Iran does have Hypersonic missiles.

I took notes the last time Iran retaliated against Israel. I found the following comment from Dmitry Orlov very useful. Knowing the details of the incident really smooths out the apprehension.

April 16, 2024 — It's Tuesday after the Sabbath on which the Iranians launched their big air attack on Israel, in response to Israel's unspeakably rude destruction of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, and the world is still waiting for Israel to counter the counterattack. Counterattacking Iran would be a smart thing for Israel to not do and Jews do have a reputation for being intelligent... but not so much the Israeli Jews — because just how intelligent is it to want to live some place where all the neighbors hate you and want to kill you?

The Americans pretty much spelled it out that they consider the Iran's retaliatory attack to have satisfactorily concluded the incident. (Lots of Iranian drones and rockets were successfully shot down with US and allied help.) The US isn't looking for another round of retaliations because the exercise cost them an arm and a leg, and depleted their missile inventories. The Israelis are claiming some preposterously high intercept rate — unachievable using any conceivable technology. That's good enough for the Israeli public, I suppose, but certainly not good enough for Israeli military planners, whose job is to handle reality, not propaganda and military fiction.

The Iranians are claiming that what they wanted to get through did get through — which is probably true — making their attack a valid demonstration project: Iran can launch such attacks on every day that ends in 'y' for the next several years without any economic strain and without asking Russia or China for help.

The Iranian response-attack included a large number of Shahed drones. These carry around 50kg of explosives and enough gas to fly 1500km. They are very cheaply made, most of the expensive bits being the electronics. The airframe is cast out of styrofoam, the gas tank is a plastic bottle and the engine is a cheap little Chinese two-stroke with a service life of just a few hours. They are rather slow-flying (under 200km/h), don't fly very high, and tend to bob and weave rather than follow a straight path, especially if the wind is a bit gusty.

Ironically, this makes the wobbling Shahed drones very hard to shoot down with air defense systems. The first thing an air defense rocket does when launched is soar to some reasonably high altitude — a few thousand meters — and then try to find and lock onto its target. At that point the target is a minuscule dot creeping slowly against the background terrain. Its radar signature and thermal signal is obscured by moving cars and buildings below. The rocket then aims down and accelerates toward the drone as it weaves about in its uncertain path. The rocket tries to explode close enough to the drone to hit it.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's hard to determine which it was because the final act of the Shahed is rather similar to it being shot down: it cuts its engine and drops out of the sky like a rock, detonating its payload on impact. (Incidentally, the Russians launch continuous swarms of identical drones over the former Ukraine, to deplete the Ukrainian inventories of defensive Patriot missiles.)

Iran also fired some old-fashioned ballistic rockets, which can be shot down with more certainty. They are powered during just the initial portion of their flight, after which point they follow a predictable ballistic trajectory, determined by gravity, inertia, and air resistance, making them easy to target. The Iranians have some ridiculously huge number of such rockets stowed in caves here and there. They are not that useful for accurately hitting targets but they are effective for depleting Israel's supply of air defense rockets, which are very expensive and in short supply.

Lastly, Iran fired just seven of their new Hypersonic rockets, of which zero were shot down, and all hit their targets. There are only four countries in the world that have succeeded in mastering Hypersonic missile technology: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Only one country in the world has the ability to shoot down Hypersonic rockets: that is Russia, using its S-500 missile defense system. Neither Israel, nor the US, nor their allies, could have shot down any of these rockets; they are simply too fast.

And now the key point: if Iran'a seven Hypersonic rockets had carried nuclear payloads, Israel would suddenly wink out of existence. Iran, however, has a long-standing fatwa against the development or use of nuclear weapons.

By staging this demonstration for NATO and Western war puppeteers , Iran was of major service to its ally Russia: it depleted the supply of air defense rockets available to their Western enemies. Since these rockets are very expensive, in short supply, it is the economics of Iran's operation that is the most significant factor.

Military experts have estimated that the entire operation cost Iran on the order of $50 million; on the other hand, US military types have made it known that their air defense mission cost them on the order of $1 billion while overall (including the rockets expended by Israel) the price tag is likely to be somewhere over $2 billion. This makes the expense ratio 1:40 in Iran's favor. Considering that Iran's economy was 15 times larger than Israel's prior to the military action that commenced on October 7, 2023, and is 20 times larger now that Israel's has shrunk by at least a quarter, we come to the inevitable conclusion that Israel can't possibly keep this up.

You might think that the US economy is infinitely huge and could make up the shortfall, but then there's the debt death spiral to keep in mind: a pile of debt the size of a third of the US economy needs to be rolled over during the coming year and the entire US defense budget is about to be eaten by the interest on the national debt. Anybody who thinks that the US can still be a reliable ally to anyone ... is not intelligent.

Israel now knows that it can't afford to continue to counter the responses to its provocations .... and neither can its increasingly financially distressed, politically erratic and generally unreliable ally across the Atlantic. Unless Israel is committing suicide by Iran.

Regarding nuclear weapons:
The purpose of nuclear weapons is not to use them. It is to prevent others from using them. Using them is an act of suicide and suicidal people are not put in charge of nuclear weapons. These are simple and straghtforward facts. Surprisingly, most people don't get them.

.
— https://boosty.to/cluborlov