Scary Nuke Stories From The A.P.

By Steve Hynd

Aaaaaargh. Is it too much to ask war hypers like George Jahn of Associated Press to at least inform their readers of the basics. His first two graphs today read like a 2002 scary story on Iraq's WMD programs. Under the headline "Iran moves closer to nuke warhead capacity" he writes:

Iran moved closer to being able to produce nuclear warheads Monday with formal notification that it will enrich uranium to higher levels, even while insisting that the move was meant only to provide fuel for its research reactor.

Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh told The Associated Press that he informed the International Atomic Energy Agency of the decision to enrich at least some of its low-enriched uranium stockpile to 20 percent, considered the threshold value for highly enriched uranium.

I'll quote from "URANIUM ENRICHMENT: Just Plain Facts to Fuel an Informed Debate on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Power" (PDF) by the Insitute for Environmental and Energy Research and the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. It's on page one if you Google "minimum enrichment for a uranium bomb".

Uranium must have a minimum of 20 percent U-235 in it in order to be useful in making a nuclear bomb. However, a bomb made with uranium at this minimum level of enrichment would be too huge to deliver, requiring huge amounts of uranium and even larger amounts of conventional explosives in order to compress it into a supercritical mass. In practice, uranium containing at least 90 percent U-235 has been used to make nuclear weapons.

The Hiroshima bomb had a core which was enriched to 97% which weighed 60kg. Modern missile-deliverable weapons enrich to 99% because that's the only way to keep the core's weight down to weights a missile can throw any distance.

Jahn gets there, but only halfway down his piece.

Although material for the fissile core of a nuclear warhead must be enriched to a level of 90 percent or more, just getting its stockpile to the 20 percent mark would be a major step for the country's nuclear program. While enriching to 20 percent would take about one year, using up to 2,000 centrifuges at Tehran's underground Natanz facility, any next step � moving from 20 to 90 percent � would take only half a year and between 500-1,000 centrifuges.

Achieving the 20-percent level "would be going most of the rest of the way to weapon-grade uranium," said David Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security tracks suspected proliferators.

Aha! So it all still depends on a political decision to kick out the IAEA's inspectors and do that further enrichment, build a viable nuke, then mate that viable warhead design to a viable missile delivery system - all while the rest of the world knows there's only one reason for kicking out the IAEA's inspectors.

Well why didn't you say so, Mr Jahn? I'll refer you to the US' latest Annual Threat Assessment:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

And to the many, many intelligence community statements that say Iran has not yet made that fateful decision and is showing no signs of wanting to do so.

In fact, some analysts describe Iran's currently known and definite plans to be "laughably ambitious", never mind building a nuke within 6 months without getting attacked themselves.

I tell you, it's starting to feel more and more like Iraq 2002 all over again as the Western media and hawkish politicos go to town on the Iran scare.

The echoes of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq are unmistakable. Just as in 2002-3, we are told that a dictatorial Middle Eastern state is secretly �developing weapons of mass destruction, defying UN resolutions, obstructing inspections, threatening its neighbours and supporting terrorism.

As in the case of Iraq, no evidence has been produced to back up the WMD claims, though bogus leaks about secret programmes are regularly reproduced in the mainstream press. Most recently, a former CIA official reported that US intelligence believed documents, published in the Times, purporting to show Iran planning to experiment on a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, had been forged. Shades of Iraq's non-existent attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

In case anyone missed the parallels, Tony Blair hammered them home at the Iraq inquiry last Friday. Far from showing remorse about the bloodshed he helped unleash on the Iraqi people, the former prime minister was allowed to turn what was supposed to be a grilling into a platform for war against Iran.

In a timely demonstration that �neoconservatism is alive and well and living in London, Blair attempted to use the fact that Iraq had no �WMD as part of a case for �taking the same approach against Iran. Perceived intention and potential �capability were enough to justify war, it turned out. Mentioning Iran 58 times, he explained that the need to "deal" with Iran raised "very similar issues to the ones we are discussing".

You might think that the views of a man that 37% of British people now believe should be put on trial for war crimes would be treated with contempt. But Blair remains the Middle East envoy of the Quartet � the US, UN, EU and Russia � even as he pockets �1m a year from a UAE investment fund currently negotiating a slice of the profits from the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves.

The bi-partisan "Real Men go to Tehran" crowd have been lusting after war with Iran since 1979 and they're showing no signs of giving up.