If any of their intellectual elite remain alive and unincarcerated, I'm sure they are as embarrassed as I was when Bush hired all those Christian college graduates. I blush to think of it.

I'll take option 3. This kind of talk keeps a certain part of the Iranian population relatively happy/ quiet. That this is also the part most likely to start blowing shit up/ assassinating politicians if they are unhappy also probably contributes.

A common mistake some commit is to assume that Iran is some monolithic political entity, where decision-making goes entirely top-down, emanating from a single source. Often, that source is taken to be A-Jad. Hence, they reason, if Mahmud and a few of his cronies are demonstrably insane, they can put the entire country at risk without concern for the consequences. Both presumptions are false. The bestubbled president, whose close-set eyes eerily remind one of G-Dubs, is only number three in the hierarchy. Even if Iran gets a working nuke, I doubt he'll be the one who gets to hold the atomic football. Second, the Revolutionary Guards and the military elites are less bent on messianic hellfire; decades of plum jobs running corrupt state enterprises makes one fat, lazy, and prone to maintaining the status quo.

Looks like the Commies would have to nuke Houston, Brownsville, or perhaps Mexicali to have the cloud make it to Cuba.

Like a couple of others, I don't consider #1 to be quite as unlikely as you present it. The mention of Hitler is rather cogent. His plan was war – consolidate the conquest – rinse and repeat as necessary. Certainly a lot of pure-bred blonde aryan cannon-fodder would have been sacrificed along the way.

And it's not safe to assume that Iran's extremists are any more sane than ours, just because they have total control of the Gummint.

I don't know anything about the education and general knowledge level of the ruling powers in Iran. But if they are anything like the Taliban in Afhganistan, they don't know jack shit about anything, which could well include both fallout and wind.

By the way, #'s 1, 2, and 3 are not mutually exclusive propositions. The truth is probably a very ugly melange.

In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba….

Assumptions and dictators: not a good mix.