Quote:Being hit with a nuclear weapon is hardly ideal for anyone, but to suggest that it would cripple Israel seems like a stretch to me. They'd have ten more nukes stamped "From Israel with Love" on their way to Tehran in minutes. The Iranian government is not stupid. They can posture against Israel all they want, but they will not start a war that they have no chance at all of winning.

 

If Iran fires an ICBM at us, it would be shot down. That's really all there is to it. Iran might be able to build a long-range delivery platform--might--but making it stealthy enough to slip past the US' missile defenses is all but impossible for a country that still relies on F-14A-model Tomcats and reverse-engineered F-5's as its front line of defense. If Iran did fire at us, we would blast the government to pieces with conventional weapons, and as long as we didn't go nuclear, I doubt that Russia or China would be willing to engage on Iran's behalf. It's pretty hard to justify defending someone because they were dumb enough to fire a nuke at the biggest military powerhouse in the world.