[Hemingway's Ghost]

To the true believers Mutually Assured Destruction means they win.

I respectfully disagree. The true believers might have the stones to fly planes into buildings, but lighting off a nuke is another matter, because lighting off a nuke guarantees a nuclear response---not in kind, but an all-out Holocaust-type nuclear response. There's just no "win" in it, even for the most deluded of thinkers. The one way for them to guarantee a non-Muslim future world is lighting off a nuke.

[Cheburashka]

True believers believe that nuclear war will cleanse the earth of the infidel. The deaths of the faithful are merely the price to be paid to achieve Allah's will.

How many true believers in Iran are there? You only need a few at the top to crash Iran into the United States, as it were. Are there any such true believers in Iran, and do they hold the positions that would allow them to do that? As I said, that is the question.

I admit, the Iranians are a good number of years away from having MAD capabilities vis-a-vis the U.S., even after they get the bomb. But the ability to destroy Israel is far closer. And if you are a true believer, what will prevent you from believing that Allah will temporarily modify the laws of physics, so that the nukes Israel launches in retaliation will fall harmlessly to the ground? And if it doesn't work out that way, well, see paragraph one above.

Expecting a crazy person to act sanely is itself insane.

And don't think the average Abbas(Joe) walking the streets of Tehran will have any say in this. He's just a passenger.