By Steve Hynd
The London Times today runs a report from its bureau chief in Tel Aviv saying that:
Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb...
The sources said that Iran completed a research programme to create weaponised uranium in the summer of 2003 and that it could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader.
The Times sources its information to "Western intelligence sources". It should be noted here that in the past the Times has described both Israel's Mossad and the MeK's Paris-based political wing. A cynic might wonder why the reporting is coming from Tel Aviv, not Vienna (home of the IAEA).
But the important bit is this:
�The main thing (in 2003) was the lack of fissile material, so it was best to slow it down,� the sources said. �We think that the leader himself decided back then (to halt the programme), after the good results.�
Iran�s scientists have been trying to master a method of detonating a bomb known as the �multipoint initiation system� � wrapping highly enriched uranium in high explosives and then detonating it. The sources said that the Iranian Defence Ministry had used a secret internal agency called Amad (�Supply� in Farsi), led by Mohsin Fakhri Zadeh, a physics professor and senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council.
... British intelligence services are familiar with the secret information about Iran�s experiments, sources at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said. Although British agencies did not have their own �independent evidence� that Iran had successfully tested the explosive component of a nuclear warhead, they said there was no reason to doubt the assessment.
Worrying if true and not just some Mossad fantasy, but OLD NEWS.
In March of last year Jane's International Defense Review made the same claim under the byline of Mark Harrington, again sourced to anonymous Western intelligence informers. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nonproliferation program wrote at the time that "the development of multipoint detonation systems isn�t by itself proof that Iran is developing nuclear weapons...there are legitimate (largely military) reasons for developing explosive devices which involve multiple initiators."
Moreover, if the IAEA has ever received substantiated evidence of actual testing of such initiators, they haven't made much mention of such debate-changing information. They're still looking for Iranian feeback on a diagram of such an initiator rig contained on the infamous and dodgy Laptop of Death. America's 2007 NIE concluded that Iran had no current weapons program based largely on the testimony of an insider source which other nations did not have access to - and that source apparently didn't finger any multi-point detonation system as having been successfully tested otherwise the NIE's conclusions would have been substantially different.
But perhaps most embarassing for wingnut war-hypers is the realization that, if Iran has the technology to build a nuke inside a year and is only waiting for the Ayatollah's say so, but has had that technology for at least a year...then that could well mean that the Ayatollah isn't interested in building a nuke after all. Oh dear, their poor narrative.
But then again, the strength of their case is probably judgeable by the fact that they're recycling last year's scary stories as this year's scary stories.
Update: Outside The Beltway's Dave Schuler spots that there's no "there" there with the anti-Iran lobby's recycled fearmongering.
[It] reminds me of nothing so much as the old wisecrack �If I had some cheese, I could make a ham and cheese sandwich. If I had some ham.� Of course Iran could build a nuclear weapon if it had the material and the will to do it. So could Andorra if it comes to that.
...I think that any limited attack on the Iranians, either by the Israelis or by us, would be a great error, advancing what it presumably sought to retard and an unlimited attack, either by the Israelis or us, in the absence of significantly more information than anybody seems to have in hand would be both immoral and politically foolhardy.
As Joseph Fouch�ut it more than 200 years ago, it would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake.
Dave is someone who strongly believes that Iran does want a nuke, and we've debated the pros and cons of the issue many times over the years. But he recognises that an attack on Iran is a cure that's worse than what he believes is the disease. Perhaps it's time for Dennis Ross to do his "Nixon to China" thing. Spencer Ackerman:
the rational move on Israel's part is to co-sign for Obama's effort at reaching detente with the Iranians and moving Iran into a nonzero international order. No one seriously believes that an Israeli strike would do more than delay an Iranian nuclear program, and the costs -- an Iran united behind a bellicose leader at the moment when bellicosity has never come with greater domestic dangers -- outweigh the benefits.
That, of course, isn't to say that states won't act irrationally. They do, all the time. And here's the best argument for having Dennis Ross in the White House. Maybe Netanyahu's people are batshit enough to think that Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are self-hating Jews. No one is batshit enough to think that Dennis Ross doesn't have Israel's best interests at heart, even if he's not the inflexible Israeli proxy progressives (myself included) tend to see. Israeli panic over Iran is a fact. Someone's got to deal with it. Who better than Ross?
I find that a believable scenario as to Obama's plans for Ross.
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