Hyperventilating About The Iran Nuclear "Threat"

By Steve Hynd

As Iran puts forward a new package of negotiation proposals, the US is at the IAEA hyperventilating about the Iranian nuclear "threat".

Iran "is now either very near or in possession" of enough low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday, offering some of toughest remarks uttered by an Obama administration official on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear weapons option," Glyn Davies, Washington's chief envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in his inaugural speech to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which is based in Vienna.

Davies said that Iran's ongoing enrichment activity -- in defiance of three U.N. Security Council resolutions -- "moves Iran closer to a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity.

Davies is following closely in Greg Schulte's footsteps and following the Obama administration's policy of ignoring the 2007 NIE - so much for change, again.

Let's restate it: Iran has enough LEU to hypothetically further enrich into HEU and build a bomb...but:

1) As soon as they begin doing so, the IAEA's inspection regimen will notice and raise the red flag.

2) Iran couldn't finish enriching that HEU for a bomb until 2013 at the earliest...even if it started tomorrow.

3) There's no indication Iran has a working design for a weapon to put that hypothetical HEU in.

4) There's no indication that the Iranians have the know-how to make that hypothetical bomb small enough to fit on a missile.

5) There's no indication the Iranians have a missile good enough to throw that hypothetical small-enough bomb even as far as Israel.

6) It would still be only one bomb. Israel has hundreds and the Iranian leadership are not suicidal.

7) DNI Blair has stated that Iran has shown no sign it wishes to do all this in any case and is probably looking for a "virtual capacity" to build a bomb as a deterrent factor against external aggressors rather than looking to own nukes in truth.

8) The next head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, has said that he sees no sign in IAEA official documents that Iran is trying to develop a bomb.

10) Mohammed El Baradei, the current IAEA head, has said:

Nobody is sitting in Iran today developing nuclear weapons. Tehran doesn�t have an ongoing nuclear weapons program. But somehow, everyone in the West is talking about how Iran�s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped.

11) All the documentation the U.S. has provided to the IAEA showing previous Iranian weaponization attempts is dodgy. Today, El Baradei said of that documentation:

If this information is real, there is a high probability that nuclear weaponization activities have taken place,' he said. 'But I should underline 'if' three times.'

12) The conclusion from this is that any Iranian pre-2003 experiments were all lab-scale or purely theoretical and designed to forward a strategy of possessing a "virtual deterrent" such as Japan's - the ability to build a bomb within a fairly short time frame if and only if they are attacked first. In that case, I'm simply not worried - let Iran keep its secrets.