The fact that I have military experience that directly involved nuclear weapons means that I do think carefully when talking about the subject.
That doesn't change the fact that you didn't read my post properly. I said "one does not require the other", but you, only thinking of missiles do not need nukes, did not think that it also means nukes do not require missiles.
Whatever... You are too stubborn to accept a mistake. That is off topic anyway so there is no point arguing over it.
You still have not adequately explained this "logic", unless...
Iran is working on an indigenous ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs, and ruled by religious fanatics. Not hard to finger out the target is Tel Aviv.
... this is your "logic", in which case;
Iran is working on an indigenous ballistic missile
Which does not automatically mean those ballistic missiles are nuclear tipped. Iran has hundreds even thousands of ballistic missiles. If Iran is why does it have more missiles than even Russia or America? I'll tell you why, because they are all armed with conventional warheads of which a larger number are required to achieve militarily effective destruction. All ballistic missiles ever used have been conventionally armed.
Iran's ballistic missile program started because Iran was unable to respond to Iraqi Scud attacks with it's air force (due to lack of capability) or it's own foreign made missiles (due to lack of range). So Iran created the ballistic missile force to ensure it had an affordable long range strike capability, and eventually Iranian doctrine shifted to significantly include ballistic missiles partly because of it's animosity with Israel, but mostly because of it's deteriorated air force.
Sorry, but the CIA, Mossad and the IAEA all disagree with you - Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
and ruled by religious fanatics
Again, this is not a valid reason. Those same "religious fanatics" are the ones that denied the military leadership's proposal to develop WMDs,
including nukes, at a time when Iran was in the middle of a gruelling war started by an aggressor who was supported by both superpowers, Europe, and the Arab world. An aggressor that routinely used chemical weapons and
who had plans to develop nuclear weapons.
When the US endorsed the use of chemical weapons - David Morrison
“In its war with Iraq - when the United States, among others, was supporting Saddam Husayn in an eight-year war of aggression against the new Islamic Republic - Ayatollah Khomeini’s own military leaders came to him and said, ‘We inherited the ability to produce chemical weapons agent from the Shah. We need to do that and weaponize it so that we can respond in kind. We have tens of thousands of our people, soldiers and civilians, who are being killed in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks. We need to be able to respond in kind.’
And Imam Khomeini said, ‘No, because this would violate Islamic morality, because it is haram - it is forbidden by God - to do this, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will not do this.’”
When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes | Foreign Policy
"In an exclusive interview, a top Iranian official says that Khomeini personally stopped him from building Iran's WMD program."
"Rafighdoost prepared a report on all the specialized groups he had formed and went to discuss it with Khomeini, hoping to get his approval for work on chemical and nuclear weapons. The supreme leader met him accompanied only by his son, Ahmad, who served as chief of staff, according to Rafighdoost.
"When Khomeini read the report, he reacted to the chemical-biological-nuclear team by asking, ‘What is this?’" Rafighdoost recalled.
Khomeini ruled out development of chemical and biological weapons as inconsistent with Islam.
"Imam told me that, instead of producing chemical or biological weapons, we should produce defensive protection for our troops, like gas masks and atropine," Rafighdoost said.
Rafighdoost also told Khomeini that the group had "a plan to produce nuclear weapons." That could only have been a distant goal in 1984, given the rudimentary state of Iran’s nuclear program. At that point, Iranian nuclear specialists had no knowledge of how to enrich uranium and had no technology with which to do it. But in any case,
Khomeini closed the door to such a program. "We don’t want to produce nuclear weapons," Rafighdoost recalls the supreme leader telling him.
Khomeini instructed him instead to "send these scientists to the Atomic Energy Organization," referring to Iran’s civilian nuclear-power agency. That edict from Khomeini ended the idea of seeking nuclear weapons, according to Rafighdoost.
The chemical-warfare issue took a new turn in late June 1987, when Iraqi aircraft bombed four residential areas of Sardasht, an ethnically Kurdish city in Iran, with what was believed to be mustard gas. It was the first time Iran’s civilian population had been targeted by Iraqi forces with chemical weapons, and the population was completely unprotected. Of 12,000 inhabitants, 8,000 were exposed, and hundreds died.
As popular fears of chemical attacks on more Iranian cities grew quickly, Rafighdoost undertook a major initiative to prepare Iran’s retaliation. He worked with the Defense Ministry to create the capability to produce mustard gas weapons.
Rafighdoost was obviously hoping that the new circumstances of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks on Iranian civilians would cause Khomeini to have a different view of the issue.
He made it clear to me that Khomeini didn’t know about the production of the two chemicals for mustard gas weapons until it had taken place. "In the meeting, I told Imam we have high capability to produce chemical weapons," he recalled. Rafighdoost then asked Khomeini for his view on "this capability to retaliate."
Iran’s permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) disclosed the details of Rafighdoost’s chemical weapons program in a document provided to the U.S. delegation to the OPCW on May 17, 2004. It was later made public by WikiLeaks, which published a U.S. diplomatic cable reporting on its contents.
The document shows that the two ministries had procured the chemical precursors for mustard gas and in September 1987 began to manufacture the chemicals necessary to produce a weapon — sulfur mustard and nitrogen mustard. But the document also indicated that the two ministries did not "weaponize" the chemicals by putting them into artillery shells, aerial bombs, or rockets.
The supreme leader was unmoved by the new danger presented by the Iraqi gas attacks on civilians.
"It doesn’t matter whether it is on the battlefield or in cities; we are against this," he told Rafighdoost. "It is haram [forbidden] to produce such weapons. You are only allowed to produce protection."
Invoking the Islamic Republic’s claim to spiritual and moral superiority over the secular Iraqi regime,
Rafighdoost recalls Khomeini asking rhetorically, "If we produce chemical weapons, what is the difference between me and Saddam?"
Khomeini’s verdict spelled the end of the IRGC’s chemical weapons initiative. "Even after Sardasht, there was no way we could retaliate," Rafighdoost recalled.
The 2004 Iranian document confirms that production of two chemicals ceased, the buildings in which they were stored were sealed in 1988, and the production equipment was dismantled in 1992.
Khomeini also repeated his edict forbidding work on nuclear weapons, telling him, "Don’t talk about nuclear weapons at all."
Iran had the capability and legal (under the intl. laws at the time) justification to retaliate with WMDs and develop nukes. But it didn't. So much for those murderous religious fanatics.
