Whether you like him or you don’t, whether you voted for him or you didn’t, one thing is crystal clear, which is this, we have president who is unafraid to act to save a whole population from nuclear devastation.
When it comes to dealing with what strongly appears to be a highly likely, rapidly oncoming, imminent nuclear threat by a renegade regime, do you wait for all the i’s to be dotted, the t’s to be crossed, for congressional hearings to be held, debates to occur, votes to be taken?
Or do you do something to stop it from happening? Do you act to prevent it? Do you act before a ruthless regime develops a weapon to kill thousands of innocent people nearby? Do you just ponder and talk? Or do you act?
When there’s a whole lot at stake and a regime known to be troublemaker in its region, known to act like an arsonist, behave at times as a terrorist, a documented thug, quick to fire missiles at people, and now heading rapidly toward creating a nuclear bomb, do you act?
Sure, the Islamic nation of Iran is also known for nobler things. There are decent people there as well as gung-ho lunatics and assassins as there are in so many countries in this heterogeneous, sometimes wacky world.
Iran is the birthplace of the Persian empire.
It’s one of the top oil producers globally, has tasty food, incredible carpets and hospitable citizens who for the most part have maintained a rich and distinctive cultural and social continuity dating back to the Archaemenian period, which began in 550 bce.
But do you act when you see there’s a clear and distinct turning point, when you hear leaders of a powerful country saying they’d love to annihilate a neighbor?
And when you have evidence that a regime that’s turned to wishing it could wipe a neighbor off the face of this earth is rapidly acquiring the nuclear capability to do so, is that not a reason to act?
If you do act as our president did, you have to act smartly, carefully causing the least mortality as did President Trump when he ordered the world’s most proficient military to do it in such a highly targeted way, causing the least human casualties, suffering or disruption.
We destroyed not people and their rich culture and heritage, but a buried facility in a remote area, a burgeoning factory of death expanding rapidly underground far from any population centers.
And you do it as our President did when it’s not occupied by people, but just machines rapidly assembling a supercritical mass of fissile (weapon grade) uranium or plutonium.
A supercritical mass is one in which the percentage of fission-produced neutrons captured by other neighboring fissile nuclei is large enough that each fission event, on average, causes more than one follow-on fission event. And on the process goes as the percentage of uranium enrichment that had reached 60 percent would now go faster.
So, thankfully we don’t have a Hamlet in The White House pondering whether to be or not to be, or in this case whether to act, or not to act, when the urgency was so paramount and clear, that a terrible weapon’s creation was so near.
So, was it better to act or not to act?