Reply #40: 600 missiles is nothing.

[sofa king]

Seriously, some of you will be angry that I said it, but it's true. Iran's best and newest missile probably carries a 700 kg warhead, or about the equivalent of three standard American World War II 500 lb bombs, with a (doubtful) CEP of 1000 meters--also about the same as a World War II B-17 if they're lucky.

A B-17 could carry nine bombs. So what we have here is the Iranians threatening to launch a single, nonrenewable 200-plane World War II equivalent bomb raid. Modern cities, like Tel Aviv, can't burn as easily as old ones. Many of those missiles will fail and are just as likely to fall on Israel's neighbors--especially on the West Bank. Religion dictates that the most populous and easiest to hit city, Jerusalem, will be avoided. Germany launched 1300 V2s (from which the Iranian Shahab-3 directly descends) at London and didn't even interrupt the train schedule.

But what those missiles will do is encourage Israel to dip into its trough of some 200 nuclear IRBMs, any one of which can release as much explosive energy as the entire U.S. Army Air Force could drop in a month. If it happens, I fucking guarantee that you will see George W. Bush justify such a nuclear strike against Iran and the subsequent deaths of tens of thousands on the basis of this worthless weapon and a few hundred Israeli casualties.

It's a stupid, stupid idea and I suspect that the Iranians are smart enough to use such a threat in the only way it can pay off for them--as an empty threat.