Back from the brink

Iran has drawn back from its ambition to build a nuclear weapon Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, said but added thatthe respite is only temporary and Tehran will still have to be confronted.  Iran chose to use over a third of its medium-enriched uranium for civilian purposes. Tehran has amassed 189kg of uranium enriched to 20 per cent purity, a vital step towards weapons-grade material. In August, the country’s experts took 38 per cent of this stockpile and converted it into fuel rods for a civilian research reactor, thus putting off the moment when they would be able to make uranium of sufficient purity for a nuclear bomb.






Mr Barak insisted that Iran was still resolved to build nuclear weapons, predicting that success would trigger an arms race in the Middle East and “make any non-proliferation regime impossible.Saudi Arabia will turn nuclear within weeks – according to them. Turkey will turn nuclear in several years. The new Egypt will have to follow”

bolton wants war

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and war monger, John Bolton, told Israel Radio today that there are only three days left for Israel to attack Iran if it wants to stop the Islamic Republic from manufacturing nuclear weapons. Earlier in the week, Bolton said, "If Israel wants to do something against the reactor in Bushehr, it must do so in the following eight days." Bolton has repeatedly stated that everything must be done to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, including a military attack.

However, the uranium that will power the Bushehr reactor is imported from Russia, while the reactor's spent fuel - from which Iran could hypothetically extract plutonium if it had the technology to do so, and if it weren't under the scrutiny of IAEA inspectors - will be removed from Iran by the Russians.Paul Brannan, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security said the Bushehr site is not a proliferation threat since Iran does not have the ability to reprocess the spent fuel into nuclear weapons-grade material.

Whereas Netanyahu likes to tell Western audiences that Iran is led by an irrational "messianic cult", that view is not shared by Israeli military and intelligence analysts, according to Yossi Alpher, a Mossad veteran and former adviser to Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Alpher argues that in light of the potentially catastrophic consequences, Israel would only take military action if Iran was in a position to launch a nuclear attack on the Jewish State in an "extremely short" time frame - and that a strike could set back the Iranian program for a significant period of time. The fact is Iran is nowhere close to the ability to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders tend to accept that even an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is unlikely to initiate a nuclear exchange that would be suicidal for Tehran given the size of Israel's own nuclear deterrent.Instead, they warn that an Iranian bomb's primary impact would be to end Israel's strategic dominance in the regional balance of power.

The U.S. intelligence consensus holds that while Iran is developing the infrastructure necessary to create a bomb and also doing theoretical research on bomb design, it is not currently developing nuclear weapons nor has it made the decision to do so. Its goal is generally viewed as "breakout" capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb relatively quickly if it chose to do so - and even that capacity still appears to be some way off.

The War Mongers

Israel's ambassador to the U.S. called for "immediate and serious action" Friday after a United Nations report showed Iran has enough uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
"It's an extremely worrisome report. ... It emphasizes that with every day passing, Iran is getting closer to a nuclear military capacity," he said. "The world must take immediate and serious action in order to prevent this nightmare from happening."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Iran represented "urgent problem that has to be addressed...we can't delay addressing it."

Alas , this is the same unfactual rhetoric that we suffered in the build up to the Iraq war . Reports taken out of context and important caveats omitted

It was reported this week, based on a new IAEA report, that Iran has produced “enough low-enriched, reactor-grade uranium to make a bomb.”
This, as former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Cheryl Rofer has carefully documented, is scientific nonsense: Yes, that uranium contains enough U-235 to make a bomb. To get it out, you would need to kick all the inspectors out of the country, reconfigure thousands of closely watched centrifuges and engage in years of enrichment.

“As long as we are monitoring their facilities,” IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei said recently, “they cannot develop nuclear weapons. And they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight.”
It is re-iterated here
Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said.
The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile.
“If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, agency’s inspectors will find out,” he said. The expert added that “so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications”.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has said that Iran has slowed down its uranium enrichment programme. He made this observation while submitting a report to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday. Iran has reportedly added only 164 centrifuges (which are used for enrichment) since December last, a comparatively slower rate than in the past.

The war mongers declare that the latest report by Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei "said it had discovered an additional 460 pounds of low-enriched uranium, a third more than Iran had previously disclosed." but actually it said it has now "finalized" its assessment of Iran's physical inventory, carried out back on 24-26 November 2008 and "has concluded that the physical inventory as declared by Iran was consistent" with the IAEA verification.
Far from claiming that Iran had actually produced a third more than it had estimated it had produced, the IAEA has now verified that Iran's estimate was consistent with what they found.
The IAEA then notes that Iran has "estimated" it has produced, since the IAEA did that verification back in November, an additional 171 kg of low enriched UF6.

ElBaradei reports, once again, that Iran is in complete compliance with its NPT-associated Safeguards Agreement, and is – therefore – in complete compliance with its NPT "obligations."

The war mongers claim that Iranian scientists have reached "nuclear weapons breakout capability,"

IS IRAN ON THE VERGE OF BOMB STATUS?
No, at least from what can be surmised. Iran would face a series of technical hurdles, though none as difficult as producing quality nuclear fuel in industrial quantities.
These include:
* reconfiguring its existing centrifuge enrichment plant at Natanz to reprocess LEU into weapons-grade HEU, or building clandestine facilities without the knowledge of U.N. inspectors
converting HEU into metal and compressing it small enough to fit into the cone of a missile or other delivery vehicle
* designing a nuclear trigger mechanism
* mastering how to create a sustained nuclear chain reaction with an extra source of neutrons
* assembling the actual warhead
All this could take 2-5 years, depending on Iran's technical prowess, but probably much less time than the 20 years it took Iran to acquire enrichment equipment and knowledge from the nuclear black market and make it work.
It would be very hard for Iran to "weaponize" the enrichment process at Natanz without the IAEA noticing and sounding the alarm, since the plant is under regular surveillance by inspectors.If Iran chose to weaponize enrichment at Natanz, it would probably kick out the IAEA and quit the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran says it will not refine uranium for anything else but electricity. Being able to enrich at industrial scale is not tantamount to seeking a nuclear weapon and is the sovereign right of NPT members as long as the work remains strictly for peaceful applications.

NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR
NO WAR BETWEEN PEOPLES , NO PEACE BETWEEN CLASSES

Doomsday bombs by the thousands

The UK has built up a stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium - enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs, according to the country's national academy of science , the Royal Society .

Report working group chairman Professor Geoffrey Boulton said: "The stockpile has grown whilst international nuclear proliferation and terrorist threats have increased... We must take measures to ensure that this very dangerous material does not fall into the wrong hands."