No country or politician ever rules out the possible use of force in a crisis...but some use such rhetoric to deliberately incite public paranioa and public support for their own plans of future aggression, while others don't use it that way.

So the tone of the rhetoric and the timing and the context are very important.

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If Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons, then they are doing nothing different than what Israel (and South Africa) already did a long time ago. No great powers have threatened to obliterate Israel or South Africa for so doing. The U.N. has not gone after them for doing it. If Iran is enriching uranium, they already have a legal right to do so...so why wouldn't they? They need the enriched uranium for their electrical power projects regardless of whether or not they are planning to build any nuclear bombs. If they did build some nuclear bombs, they would do it, I should think, so as to have a credible deterrent against outside attack by the USA and Israel...both of which keep threatening repeatedly to attack Iran.

Given the fact that Israel and the USA have enough nuclear bombs right now to easily obliterate every significant target in Iran and the entire Middle East....why the heck would the Iranians fire one off first???????? They are tremendously outgunned. They're not stupid, and I doubt that they are intent on committing national suicide.

The only people who fire off nuclear bombs first are those who imagine that they can get away with it and not be targeted in return. So far in history that has been the USA. Period. No one is going to use such weapons when they know that a similar counterstrike by the other side would destroy them, because wars of aggression are launched with one thing in mind: victory...and victory at an acceptable cost. If victory at an acceptable cost is clearly not possible, then the first attack will not be not made.

The people who dearly wish to make a first attack (meaning Israel and the USA) will seek justification for it by saying, "We had to prevent Iran (or whoeve else) from someday attacking us."

This is logic akin to me murdering my estranged neighbour or relative with a shotgun one day and burning his house down, and then telling the police and the general community, "I had to do it. He hated me. He was out to get me. His whole family was out to get me. And I knew he was insane, so it was imperative for me to strike before he struck first and killed me and my family."

That is a defense that would not last 5 minutes in a court of law, because it is evidence of the criminal insanity of the defendant himself!

However, there are no police and no higher authority in the world to whom Iran can appeal in such a situation...because the world is in fact lawless. The only law that truly applies in the world is this one: he who has the most money and the most firepower does exactly what he wishes to do...and he does it to those who have less firepower and money, and no one can stop him or arrest him for so doing, because no one has the means to!