Good Luck! At this point I would hope they would get innovative and try different options for their electricity or defense needs. Why are they getting so stuck on enriching uranium ? Why not try something else ?
60% U-235 is far more than what is necessary for commercial power generation, and yet less than what it is necessary for a nuclear weapon (> 90%). This is a threat to make a bomb without actually crossing the line to actually making a bomb.
It seems that commercial reactors use 3% to 5% enriched Uranium. [1] Is there any practical reason to enrich Uranium to 60%? For example, is it cheaper to enrich the Uranium to 60%, and then use that as fuel for ~12 commercial reactors by diluting it down to ~5%?
This appears to be spending a lot of effort to concentrate uranium into a tidy, enriched package in order to provoke Israel into transforming that package into a significantly less concentrated and much less usable form.
Well, using more highly enriched uranium means you can make reactors lighter and more compact which is very important if you want to send them to outer space. I don't think Iran has any immediate interest in that but it's very much on NASA's radar.
> Is there any practical reason to enrich Uranium to 60%?
Yes.
Going from 2% -> 90% first requires you to go from 2% -> 60% both in the mathematical sense (2->60->90) and in the process sense (it's a lot less work to from 60% -> 90% than it is from 2% -> 90%) and also in the sense that you to first develop the technology to enrich uranium to various levels, then develop the technology to enrich it to that level at scale, enriching to 2% isn't that hard, enriching to 60% is hard, enriching to 90% is harder but the leap from 2->60 is a lot harder than the leap from 60->90.
In short, no, I don't think there is any practical reason to enrich to 60% unless your intention is to either enrich to weapons grade or as a threat to do so.
Which describes radioisotope thermoelectric generators in spacecraft, prototype small sealed reactors, and nuclear submarines. The last is obviously military use.
FWIW this attack is more commonly being attributed to Israel, partly because it endangers the deal (sanction relief for enrichment limits/inspections) the US is trying to reestablish.
Because it blows the cover of diplomacy. Sovereign nations not at war aren’t supposed to conduct hostile ops against each other.
Diplomacy and international relations are sort of their own universe with their protocols, traditions etc. Admitting to the attack would mean that the US appears as the blatant aggressor, and may have to make concessions. Plausible deniability is often safe and has no consequences.
Says international law, including the United Nations charter (reciting the Westphalian doctrine), which every member state signs onto.
Of course, there are large grey areas in international relations, and nobody can reasonably expect perfect compliance, anyhow. But beyond any specific practical, tactical, or strategic reasons for maintaining plausible deniability, refusing to openly admit to a violation still reflects a degree of obeyance to the law. When large nations start openly flouting norms w/ a giant "F-U", that's when you know the international order and world peace is in trouble.
Plausible deniability of military ops is the nation-state equivalent of the polite fiction in cultural anthropology--an important, useful tool providing resilience to the normative system.
Not who, but what--self-interest, the natural human predisposition to obey cultural norms, biologically innate concept of "fairness", etc.
A cultural norm is also a mechanism for streamlining cooperation--whenever some person or entity breaks established norms, you don't need to convene and deliberate to decide whether it was wrong, it's just perse wrong and members can instantaneously begin acting accordingly. It keeps everybody aligned. Not perfectly, but to a much greater degree than when the particular invisible boundaries don't exist. And that's one reason why it's in everybody's self-interest to substantially promote obeyance to such norms, and avoid harming the norm.
Some norms are more important than others. In the context of international relations, sovereignty is perhaps still the most important one. Unless you're prepared to conquer the entire world, anything you do that harms the principle harms yourself as other nation-states are less likely to respect your own sovereignty. Balancing these interests (e.g. short-term gain vs long-term harm) is complex, but as I said upholding the principle of sovereignty is one of the most sacrosanct. And so when it's violated it's quite understandable why even super powers like the U.S. and China remain circumspect, invariably resorting to plausible deniability or pretense justifications that at least nominally avoid openly flouting the principle.
"The only peace humanity every knew was within the border of some empire. Otherwise it was constant war."
This is a bold claim on a very much debatable subject, where it would come down to what "war" is, if it is the same with armed conflict/incident (like opposing force against a robbery), and so on. There are many countries, even neighboring ones (like Serbia and Romania), that say that have never been in a war against each other.
As to the commendation of living within an empire, that is just helplessness against empire's overpowering forces, which is far from the general idea of "peace" as in Wikipedia-defined "societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence".
>This is a bold claim on a very much debatable subject, where it would come down to what "war" is, if it is the same with armed conflict/incident (like opposing force against a robbery), and so on.
No. It's not debatable. Show me an example of an extended peace between nations outside of the borders of an empire. This is almost a tautology to say that you need a central authority to have a monopoly of force. Otherwise you're in the 'tragedy of commons' scenario.
>There are many countries, even neighboring ones (like Serbia and Romania), that say that have never been in a war against each other.
Certainly they don't want to, but that's immaterial, they aren't allowed to. They are within the sphere of American order.
>As to the commendation of living within an empire, that is just helplessness against empire's overpowering forces, which is far from the general idea of "peace" as in Wikipedia-defined "societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence".
"Certainly they don't want to, but that's immaterial, they aren't allowed to. They are within the sphere of American order."
If we are referring to the Serbia-Romania example, the peace track record is way longer before what you call American order to be a thing (and even longer if we'd count peace between their people, before statehood), then afterwards it's safe to say that they kept their peace despite America's interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia