![nuke button small II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/nuke-button-small-II.png)
Learning to Love Iran’s Nuke … Or Not
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) tells his young daughter in the movie History of Violence. If only that were true. What a wonderful world it would be. But we realists know that it is not true and that monsters come in all shapes and sizes and that they can’t be reasoned with; only put down.
Another day, another ship taken. Skirmishing in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran behaving badly but, calculatingly, not so badly as to cause modern-day America or Britain to react militarily (disproportionately as they say). Extra sanctions maybe; expensive naval escorts. The monsters in this story, the mullahs, are not quaking in their boots.
And all the while the West is distracted by the inconvenience of Iranian piracy, the clock is ticking on the real threat. Soon enough the mullahs will get their nukes. Is there any doubt of that apart from among the starry-eyed? Only action of a disproportionate kind can stop them? Wishing and hoping and dodgy John Kerry…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins