War between Israel -v- Iran & Co (merged threads)

[Rex Brynen]

So they had them after all. Who else have you shared this with?

They had an alternative to these HE warheads?

All you have to do is read the UNSCOM reports. By January 1991 Iraq had developed a number of BW missile warheads, and UN weapons inspectors themselves oversaw the destruction of 30 missile CW warheads, as well as 690 tons of CW agent.

Yes I would love to know exactly (not through idle speculation) what the US used to convince Israel to sit on its hands.

This is well documented, and I've discussed it with both Israeli and US officials. Have you?

This sounds interesting. You know this for sure or are you just guessing? You have some sources for this?

I realize that you are restricted to open sources, but even then it isn't terribly hard:

1) Look up the estimated size of Israeli nuclear arsenal.
2) Regarding those that may be based upon its Dolphin fleet, make the usual assumptions about the number at sea at any moment. Iranian ASW capability is negligible, so you can ignore that.
3) Make reasonable assumptions about the hardening of Jericho II missile silos (if you want to spend the time, you can even find them on Google Earth). Determine the likely psi overpressures require to destroy them. If you want to give the Iranians the benefit of the doubt, ignore BMD and missile fratricide. Make reasonable assumptions about the probable warhead yields and CEPs of future Iranian missile systems. Calculate the probable number of surviving Jericho missiles.
4) Do the same for Israeli F-16 and F15 bases, as well as the Dolphin sub base.
5) If you do the math and determine the number of surviving Israeli nukes, you'll see that if Iran were somehow to develop a handful of weapons in the next 10 years, it would not pose much of a counterforce challenge to Israel's second strike retaliatory capability.

Now what leads you to believe that Israel will wait to retaliate with a second strike?

You may have missed the fact that twice (1981 in Iraq and 2007 in Syria) Israel has carried out strikes on nuclear facilities. What leads you to believe that Israel will fail to respond this time?

Actually, I know quite a bit about those strikes. As Entropy pointed out, the first actually led Iraq to augment its nuclear program. The second was an easy, single target without any local SAM or AAA defences.

As for Israel striking Iran, I haven't said they won't do it. Indeed, I think there is a significant chance they will. I'm merely trying to shift some of the discussion from undisciplined armchair speculation to the facts (in as much as they are known and can be discussed here). There is a certain amount of intellectual rigour required for effective diplomatic and intelligence analysis--the "pray and spray" approach of throwing out provocative and unsupported statements and merely hoping for the best really isn't very productive.