And what good do you imagine that is, exactly, if the U.S. lacks the resolve to back it up with the threat of military force? The sanctions the League of Nations imposed against Italy in 1935 explicitly prohibited exports of a long list of strategic materials to that country, too, purportedly to prevent Mussolini from invading what is now known as Ethiopia. The sanctions didn't mean a damned thing, however, because the British government was unwilling to use naval force, or the threat of it, to turn back the invasion fleet. Seeing that lack of resolve, Mussolini ignored the sanctions and went ahead with the invasion. Hitler watched all this, and Britain's flabby acquiescence did a lot to encourage him to risk war by re-occupying the Rhineland less than a year later.
No doubt the lying jihadist vermin dismantled--or appeared to--obsolescent models they were already replacing with newer and more efficient ones.
What fantastic nonsense. No serious person who has studied the problem of disarming Iran has ever suggested using a ground invasion to do it. It is, however, routinely trotted out as a lurid, apolcalyptic prospect in an attempt to scare the witless and the gullible. And invoking the specter of a nuclear confrontation is just more lurid melodrama--neither Russia nor China cares a damn about the Tehran regime, except as a potential arms customer.
Academic studies have been published which conclude that destruction of the five main facilities in Iran's nuclear weapons program--the nuclear research center and uranium hexafluoride conversion plant at Esfahan; the nuclear reactor as Bushehr; the underground uranium enrichment centrifuge galleries at Natanz and Fordow; and the heavy water and future plutonium production reactors at Arak--would thoroughly cripple that program.
A small fraction of this country's air forces, with about ten B-2's doing the bulk of the job, could turn all those facilities into junk in short order, without any great risk to the aircraft or crews. All these sites are vulnerable, and no vast tonnage of weapons would be needed. Photo analysis of the one at Arak, for example, shows that as few as four 2,000 bombs, placed just so, would make it useless. The U.S. documented the construction of the huge underground galleries at Natanz with reconnaissance satellites, so it knows very well how much concrete and earth is shielding them. Not enough. A single 30,000 lb. penetrating bomb on each gallery would wreck the centrifuges in it, and even several 5,000-lb. bombs, very accurately placed over each gallery, would do the job. The gallery at Fordow is the toughest nut to crack, but tests show the 30,000-lb. bomb is powerful enough to destroy it, too.
