AJ .................... I'm not convinced that Iran is without highly sophisticated weaponry.
Some many decades ago, Iran sent a lot of Bright and Up and Coming Youth to be educated in the West in all the Sciences.
I'm guessing that the World's Big Bang War Toys are there to scare the Plebs into submission.................. you know, we can't go to a Nuke War because it would be the End of the Planet.................. so we best Do What The Other Country Says We Should Do sort of thing.
Since a vast majority of the World has been controlled by a certain group for some several hundreds of years, tugging the forelock would appear to have been what the Big Bang War Toys are all about.
This is a bit Left-Field ................ but there has been talk for some time now about Break-Away Societies that have High Tech Weaponry.
Most seem to have grown out of Military Contractors that have been paid with Tax $$$ to develop Sophisticated Weaponry for a Government's Military ................ but surprise, surprise, surprise .......... have gone rogue.
Anyway only time will tell whether that situation is accurate or not............ however, in history we have seen this all before.
Letters of Marque were used to conduct a Clayton's Conflict...................... basically Pirates operated with sanction from Sovereign Nations that didn't want to be visibly in the actual conflict.
Pirates quite often went rogue and so it's little wonder that a Military Contractor might think:
"well I have this new wiz bang Military Tech and I can do what ever I bloody well like"...... and they probably can.Anyway, time reveals all.
***This is a lazy grab from the internet:
A letter of marque and reprisal (French: lettre de marque; lettre de course) wasa government license in the Age of Sail that authorized a private person, known as a privateer or corsair, to attack and capture vessels of a nation at war with the issuer, licensing international military operations against a specified enemy as reprisal for a previous attack or injury. Captured naval prizes were judged before the government's admiralty court for condemnation and transfer of ownership to the privateer.A common practiceamong Europeans from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century, cruising for enemy prizes with a letter of marque was considered an honorable calling that combined patriotism and profit. Such legally authorized privateering contrasted with unlicensed captures of random ships, known as piracy, which was universally condemned.[1] Inpractice, the differences between privateers and pirates were slight, or merelya matter of interpretation.[2][3]
The terms "letterof marque" and "privateer" were sometimes used to describe theships which typically operated under the marque-and-reprisal licences. In thiscontext, a letter of marque was a lumbering, square-rigged cargo carrier that might pick up a prize if the opportunity arose in its normal commerce. In contrast, the term privateer generally referred to a fighting vessel, fore-and-aft rigged, fast, and weatherly.[4]
Letters of marqueallowed governments to fight their wars using mercenary private captains and sailors in place of their own navies as a measure to save time and money. Instead of building, funding, and maintaining a navy in times of peace, governments would wait until the start of a war to issue letters of marque to privateers, who financed their own ships in expectation of prize money.[5]
Etymology and history ofnomenclature
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Marque derives fromthe Old English mearc, which is from the Germanic *mark-, which means boundary, or boundary marker. This is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *merǵ-, meaning boundary, or border. The French marque is from the Provençal language marca, which is from marcar, also Provençal, meaning to seize as a pledge.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "letters of marque and reprisal" was in an English statute in 1354 during the reign of King Edward III. The phrase referred to "a licen[c]e granted by a sovereign to a subject, authorizing him to make reprisals on the subjects of a hostile state for injuries alleged to have been done to him by the enemy's army".[6]
