A Different Set of Conversations

[kirisutogomen]

"We want Iran not to have nuclear weapons precisely because we can't bank on the nature of the regime changing. That's exactly why we don't want to have nuclear weapons. If suddenly Iran transformed itself to Germany or Sweden or France then there would be a different set of conversations about their nuclear infrastructure."
I'm pretty sure that if

Comments

[psychohist]

Yeah. I don't think we want Sweden to have nuclear weapons either, but there's no argument since they don't want them.

What I want to know is, who was this addressing? Who was arguing that we can bank on Iran turning into a Germany or Sweden or France?

[kirisutogomen]

I think he was indirectly responding to Netanyahu's push to require Iran to recognize the state of Israel as part of the nuclear deal. I think the President was saying that there was no way the current government of Iran would do that, so making that demand would be effectively just killing the whole deal.

I don't think Netanyahu is actually so detached from reality as to think that Iran is going to magically transform into Sweden, unless he's had some sort of massive psychotic break that has otherwise gone completely unnoticed.

[dpolicar]

...and quite likely would break down around questions of translation.

[kirisutogomen]

What kind of translation? Language translation? It's not that hard to find good English-Swedish or Swedish-English interpreters. Spatial translation? I think the idea is that Iran would become Sweden, rather than that Sweden would move to Iran. I am not sure if there would then be two Swedens, or if something else would occupy the geographic area now occupied by Sweden. I suppose one could argue that an essential part of being Sweden is to be located in Europe, and that therefore if Iran turns into Sweden it would have to be relocated to Europe....

Genetic translation? I really don't see how that applies. Bodily-ascent-to-Heaven-without-death translation? That does raise the interesting question of what happens to the people when a country of 81 million people suddenly turns into a country of 10 million. Do they vanish? Did they ever exist? Are they assumed bodily into some sort of existence outside this physical universe? What about conservation of mass-energy?

[dpolicar]

I'd meant language translation... what I was actually thinking was that there Sweden would be, with all of their records in Persian. But I suppose the records would become Swedish records at the same time.

As for the population question, I don't see the problem. Nobody vanishes, groups of 8 (on average) simply become one person. Sure, it's not a 1:1 mapping, but so what?