I suggest to study history of the 1936-1940 period, with special emphasis on May-June 1940, if you want to understand the French thinking on nuclear weapons.Ibrahim wrote:India needed nuclear arms to offset China and Pakistan, France really only built them as a status thing, which was very French of them.
The space between Northern France and Poland is good tank land. Always have been. Always will be.
Moreover, at the nuclear age, any country can be brought to its knees within less than one hour, with a few well-targeted nukes.
Remembering American and British help in liberating us is one thing. Believing that US help would always be forthcoming, even at the risk of destruction of US mainland, is another matter entirely.
Israel chose for political reasons to keep its nuclear arsenal an open secret. Yet they probably tested at least one nuclear weapon in South Indian Ocean 1979.But in all cases the point of the weaponry is letting people know you have it. So I don't think Iran would have held a nuclear test in North Korea and made it a secret. Nor are the scientists they have working on the project North Korean (as far as we know).
Iran may have chosen to not yet openly divulge its nuclear status (e.g. waiting for a sufficient number of weapons to be produced, or for another reason). Which doesn't diminish the interest of a real test to validate and refine engineering assumptions, and validate the capability.
The only nuclear-armed country which never perfomed a test was South Africa. They were using a very inefficient gun-barrel design for their uranium bomb, needing over 50 kg of enriched uranium per weapon, because that design was simple enough that they could be absolutely sure it would work even without testing. But then, South Africans built only six bombs, and they had ample supply of uranium.
All other nuclear-armed countries performed at least one test.
Iran, just like them, is probably aiming at more than a 6-bombs arsenal, and is constrained by availability of fissile material. So a test makes a lot of engineering sense.
A lot of stupid things indeed are said for domestic consumption.Do you preemptively attack a country that says threatening things for domestic consumption?
The point is that these things are said in a quite specific context (program for accession to nuclear status), and are quite extraordinary by themselves. Some Arab governments have said such things in the 1950s / 1960s, but then that was precisely a time of wars between Israel and coalitions of its Arab neighbours... and the latter had no nuclear weapon.
It's not my family and my children who are at risk in Israel. Nor I suppose are yours. I think it probable that Iranian government outbursts at Israel will end up being seen as no more than outburts... But then, it's quite easy for me to think that way.
An Israeli may well be worried by the chance that a somewhat "demented" and unstable Iranian leadership, if pressed by difficult circumstances (and such circumstances can always happen), might react less rationally than say US and Soviet leaderships at the time of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis.
I've never heard much serious talk of Iranian territorial expansion from anybody but Azari. I don't think this is a real issue, given the difficulties Iran would have controlling anything they tried to take.
Such attempts would probably be self-defeating in the end. The issue is the time between a national leadership indulging in expansionist illusions and the "in the end": room for much disorder & much damage.
of that be for the Iberian Peninsula and Europe? 
Such tests however are delicate times, because they put stress in a compromise that is part of the basis of civilized life between nations on this planet, and because they create fears.
) and Iran (Nuke war with Israel, ME and maybe more likely effectively uninhabitable..... 