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Report Claims Iran Has Data To Build a Nuclear Bomb
reporter writes "According to a startling report just covered by the New York Times, 'senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable atom bomb.' In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing a nuclear bomb. This conclusion was contradicted by German, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London also concluded that the American assessment is incorrect. So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is apparently able to create the components (e.g. enriched uranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is communicating with the Kremlin about a list of Russian scientists it believes are assisting Iran's efforts to develop the bomb."
More proof that the overt cold war ended, but the covert battle continues.
Should we really be so shocked? Haven't nuclear weapons been present in the middle east for over 3 decades now, in Israel?
Doesn't that just proof that they have Internet access?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Wiki nukes - The nuke building resource that anyone can edit.
Kim_Jong_il (Reverted edits by Ali Khamenei (talk) to last version by Sadr-e-Mumlikat)
How reliable is US intelligence today? I mean, they were wrong (or lied) about Iraq, and now they are seemingly wrong about Iran.
I cannot make up my mind which is worse, them being wrong or them lieing...
Lies, thats worse...
But them being (apparently) wrong on this makes me wonder how often they are wrong with intel regarding the The War On Terror (TM)
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
that the Iranians are trying so hard to get access to discoveries primarily made by American Jews?
As a member of the NPT Iran is well within its rights to posses the outlined technologies. The article clearly omits the fact that such capabilities can also lead to better yeilds from civilian/peaceful uses of nuclear technology.
I believe the adage of "it takes one to know one" can be attributed to people claiming Iran intends to use such technologies for aggressive non-peaceful purposes.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Almost anyone could make an A-bomb if they had sufficient amount of weapons grade uranium 235, or plutonium. The real challenge is extracting the uranium 235 isotope from uranium ore.
Even Wikipedia has enough detail on both purification and bomb building to give you a good head start. I don't think the challenge is the lack of theoretical knowledge or the process, but technology to do so. Those centrifuges are not easy to make (they spin up to 90,000 RPM) and something as a fingerprint on one of them will make it shatter when it's spinning that fast.
But these days, almost any country that really wants to (and does not care about political or economic repercussions) could develop nuclear technology.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
One thing about being part of the "Axis of Evil" is that it tends to make one feel insecure. Sometimes other countries threaten to invade and/or talk about bombing back to the stone age... and then one notices that they don't talk that way about countries with nukes...
just sayin..
The Genie is out of the bottle.
Further, it is the height of arrogance that we sit on an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons and sit on high and tell the rest of the world, "No, you cannot have nuclear weapons."
I thought "Do as I say, not as I do" was stupid when I was a child, and I still do as an adult.
If I were in charge of a nation and any nation with nuclear weapons tried to tell me I could not have them I would tell them to come back when they have no nuclear weapons themselves.
But, given the nature of American diplomacy today, where we will invade anyone without the bomb in the name of "democracy and freedom", if I were in charge of a nation without the bomb I would make it my nation's highest priority to obtain it so that I would not be the next nation who has American "democracy and freedom" brought to me on the tip of a sword.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
as soon as dimona is opened up for inspection, the isralis can whine all they want, until they sign off on the ntp and all ow inspections, they need the seiously stfu.
-.no
I DID stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Because natural gas & oil are limited resources, so they need to start thinking now about how to replace those resources. Additionally, with oil reaching $100+ a barrel last year it's only natural that they will try to conserve as much as possible by investing in other energy resources.
A ploy not to go to war? That's funny!
Just look around today-- the very same tactics that were used to get us to support invading Iraq have been rolled out to manufacture support for attacking Iran: The drumbeat of ever-more-dire media reports, claims of the "greatest threat to the world today," making outrageous demands of the target so that they look evil when they do not comply (because they cannot comply), reporting provable falsehoods and failing to retract them, et cetera. Most of the very same people who wanted a U.S. invasion of Iraq are still in high positions of influence and power, and now they want an invasion of Iran. Never mind that these people were utterly wrong (at best) or liars (at worst) about Iraq-- no nuclear weapons, no biological weapons, no yellowcake from Niger, no fleets of unmanned drones, no al-Qaeda connection whatsoever. It doesn't matter. The media still holds them up as the only credible voices, the people with realistic foreign policy "gravitas" and experience. The people who were right about Iraq are still dismissed as naive, not credible on foreign policy, or fruitcakes.
No, the United States is not "extremely pacifistic about war" now! It's definitely on course to get involved in a third major war.
The sad part, to me, is that Americans are falling for it again. We just lived through the propaganda 8 years ago, and our troops are still occupying Iraq. Yet, here we are again, cowering under our beds in fear of a nation with less than 1/4 our population and about 0.6% of our military budget. Worried sick about a country half-way around the globe that doesn't have the motive nor the means to launch at us a weapon that they don't even have, can't yet build, and may or may not even want!
Worse, getting into this war would harm us more than Iran ever could. We're already mired in an economic crisis in part brought on by the massive diversion of our resources to two on-going conflicts. An attack on Iran could very well be our economic coup de grace, finishing off the dollar as the international reserve currency and ending our ability to finance our astronomical debt. Goodbye military spending, goodbye overseas empire, and goodbye American Dream. Even if we could keep the current, unsustainable borrowing going despite an attack on Iran and more-enormous military spending, that spending will keep our economy weak.
It's ridiculous to the point of absurdity, but the U.S. government is not trying to avoid war now.
What's that bit about Jerusalem? Maybe Israel changed its capital to a city that is a point of discord with Palestine, without anyone but the poster noticing :)
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
The only way to use the A-bomb is to kill civilans en masse. Theres no military use of an A-bomb without 99% civil casualties.
That is not even close to being true, the B6Mod10 nuclear bomb has had the dial a yield feature since the 1960's alowing the yeilds to be set to 0.3, 5, 10 or 80 Kt and the Mod11 is designed for bunker busting. Variants of the W54 range from 10 tons (note not KiloTons) to 1KT. All of these have a sufficiently low yield to allow a carefully planed and executed Nuclear event to occur without excessive civilian casualties, unless you count civilian nuclear centrifuge technicians. Hell we could probably drop a dialed down B61Mod11 into a centrifuge facility and they'd never be able to prove they were even nuked.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Get real.
Let's not repeat it with nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable or theocratic regimes.
45 years ago, had the nuclear weapons states been regimes characterized by fanaticism and fundamentalism rather than ultimately by secular rationality, we might well be living, or not living, in a post-apocalyptic world. We almost were.
30 years ago Iran was overthrown by religious fanatics and angry, vehemently anti-Western mobs who established a theocratic regime that still rules unopposed today.
It's not about fairness or deserts. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." Iran having a nuclear weapon is simply not in our rational self interest. Is it worth a few billion in military hardware to Israel and giving them the greenlight to take out some nuclear sites like then did in 1981, in exchange for being damn sure there is one less nuclear weapons state? It sure seems that way.
"A lot of talk about "terrorism" is really a discussion designed to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israel's security."
Exactly. For some insight, people should research Israel's economy. Basically, they don't have one. They subsist primarily on the inflow of funds from around the world. The US government is probably the single largest source of funds, but money comes from everywhere. If the donations dried up, Israel would be hurting.
And, that may well happen soon if the recession isn't cured.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Some obvious things:
a) This story is not about "having data to build a nuclear bomb". Any accredited university engineering program has "the data to build a nuclear bomb", but it would be unwieldy to tactically deploy. The minor news is that Iran is close to the capability to produce a atomic bomb which is sufficiently compact to be mountable on a missile with decent range to threaten neighbors.
b) The major news should be that Iran is receiving assistance with deployment systems which can be used with a much wider array of conventional, chemical, biological and other categories of payloads which are much easier to deploy (politically and militarily). I would be very glad if this were a continuation of the Cold War as we knew it, since that would mean that enough of the MAD thinking is in place by both sides that sufficiently tight controls are in place to prevent the nuclear option from ever being deliberately deployed.
c) Remember that the first atomic bomb makers were working in and with what would be third-world technologies and systems were we to encounter them today. Why would it be remarkable to report that a country which does not follow our economic, social or value systems is capable of producing something now which was first demonstrated 60 years ago?
d) This has been a pretty poor "covert battle" since the belligerents manage to sneak it into international headlines on an almost weekly basis without any combat engagements. Perhaps the important message is that the proxy wars which pre-dated the Cold War, and which lasted through it, remain an important feature of the real world which cannot be simplified into alarmist and misleading headlines?
e) If we're worried about unauthorised use of nuclear material, the logical measures are to prevent everyone from having nuclear material (not possible due to the low barriers to entry), or to assist anyone who wants to work with nuclear material to do so in a secure way. There are vastly many more ways to proliferate nuclear materials from the hundreds of globally distributed nuclear stockpiles and waste bins of the former Cold War combatants than from a couple of tightly guarded and highly monitored bunkers on a mountain. The nuclear haves pretending that the nuclear have nots' nuclear ambitions represent a primary terrorist threat demonstrates a remarkably strong faith in current nuclear proliferation control systems (lost sources kill more people every year than all dirty bombs and terrorist-related nuclear incidents have in history), as well as an unassailable arrogance about LDCs.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Should we really be so shocked? Haven't nuclear weapons been present in the middle east for over 3 decades now, in Israel?
Israel hasn't pledged to push it's neighbors "into the sea". As soon as Israel was created (by the United Nations, backed by American Democratic politicians), Arab neighbor states began attacking immediately, and have regularly attempted invasions since then. Iran's top politician has made a promise to "smash the Jewish" state numerous times, promising to, in fact, wipe them off the map.
The fact is that Israel has used their supply of nukes as a deterrent... indeed, no other state has attacked since they've had them. Surrounding hostile states have relied on funding and equipping terrorists to do their dirty work for them instead. But no one will send an army against Israel anymore.
Iran, on the other hand, has openly made statements to the effect that any new military technologies they develop... nukes included... will be used to eliminate Israel. They've threatened in effect that their nukes will have offensive purposes. These weapons will be in the hands of a leadership that believes they can bring about the end of days... and thus the coming of the 12th Imam... by launching a cataclysmic attack on Israel, and perhaps on her allies.
It matters who has these weapons, and who doesn't.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
could someone furnish us with a link?
The Nth Country Experiment in the mid-1960s was three people, one of whom left fairly early, all physics post-docs but none with weapons experience. None were given access to classified information. The conclusions were redacted when the original report was declassified, but most experts seem to believe that the group produced a workable design for an implosion-type device.
"Israel deserves more trust than Iran? Are you serious?"
I don't know about him, but I am, absolutely.
"Iran has not, in recent military history, conducted a single war of aggression against its neighbours
No, they've been smart enough to let terrorist proxy groups like Hezbollah do it for them, groups funded, trained, and equipped by Iran. And taking over an embassy is considered an act of war. And I was in the area when they unilaterally tried to cut off traffic in the Persian Gulf, and one of their mines almost sank the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts. No, no aggression against other states there.
For all of its history, most of Israel's neighbors have denied its right to exist, and sworn to push them into the sea. They've attacked them literally since the day the Jewish state was founded. After several failed invasions, Jordan and Egypt now have peace treaties with Israel that recognize her right to exist. There's been no wars with those countries since then. Syria, however, tired of losing to Israel in conventional warfare, conquered Lebanon and made it a vassal state... which it has stayed, from one degree to another ever since... and continues to launch attacks on Israel from that territory, using its terrorist proxies to do the dirty work. Want to keep Israel out of Lebanon? Keep Syria out of Lebanon.
Israel, on the other hand, have no such doctrine, and history demonstrates they have adopted a first strike policy.
Considering that in every major war, Israel was invaded by surrounding states, you honestly think this is bad? Are you going to seriously make the argument that taking out Saddam Hussein's nuclear facilities (which were going to produce weapons-grade material) wasn't a smart thing to do?
Iran has been co-operating with the IAEA - not flawlessly, and there are problems, but they have been co-operating.
Yeah, they've been cooperating so closely that they built a second uranium enrichment facility that stayed secret until now.
Iran does not deny the holocaust took place
Wow
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/israel/israel_economy.html
GDP (purchasing power parity):
$200.7 billion (2008 est.)
$193.2 billion (2007)
$183.3 billion (2006)
note: data are in 2008 US dollars
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/world/middleeast/17israel.html
Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.
This is a better breakdown, year by year:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/114bill.html
This estimate of total U.S. direct aid to Israel updates the estimate given in the July 2006 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is an estimate because arriving at an exact figure is not possible, since parts of U.S. aid to Israel are a) buried in the budgets of various U.S. agencies, mostly that of the Defense Department (DOD), or b) in a form not easily quantifiable, such as the early disbursement of aid, giving Israel a direct benefit in interest income and the U.S. Treasury a corresponding loss. Given these caveats, our current estimate of cumulative total direct aid to Israel is $113.8554 billion.
It must be emphasized that this analysis is a conservative, defensible accounting of U.S. direct aid to Israel, NOT of Israel's cost to the U.S. or the American taxpayer, nor of the benefits to Israel of U.S. aid.
One or two percent of GDP? Hmmmmm - how many nations are donating that much to MY country? I can't recall any headlines proclaiming the generosity of foreign nations giving aid to the United States.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A little clarification: the previous comment referred to the fact that you quoted "Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.", omitting the word decade. Very nice way to prove a point.
We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
To quote Arundhati Roy, "Why then, any nuclear power is justified in launching a preemptive strike against another."
Let me go ahead and write what I expect at least one person will respond: "But.. Iran is different. They're *evil*!" Well, that's what a lot people think about us, too, so that's a reversible argument.
As for Vietnam, they don't have an arch-enemy with 100-400 nuclear weapon-tipped missiles aimed at them.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
Gosh, you would think anyone with survival instinct would make some pre-emptive war preventing strikes. Sounds harsh, but then you think. If some hoodlums, we'll just call them O.G.Korea and D.J. Iran were standing outside your home with weapons threatening to fire inside would you: ,your family, neighbors and anyone else who would have encountered these hoodlums. ,life or death, choose and be quick about it.
A: Get your face shot off trying diplomacy
B: Call the U.N. cops who would threaten them with "no beer" sanctions and leave, while hoods continued posturing.
C: Blow their brains to atoms and then hunt down all their homies for some of the same, ensuring the future safety of you
D: there is no none of the above
Makes you wonder just how we survived this long putting financial interests ahead of whats important.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You got modded up for this bullshit?
The same Israelis that have constantly warred with their neighbors
You mean the same Israelis that have warred with their neighbors after being invaded by those neighbors, right?
The same Israelis who now threaten to bomb Iran, despite Iran having been non-aggressive for more than 20 years
How is sponsoring terrorist organizations compatible with being "non-aggressive"?
The same Israelis who claim Iran hates the Jewish faith, despite Iran having a sizable number of citizens who are Jews that it has never bothered?
Yeah, except for the tens of thousands of Iranian Jews that got driven out of the country during the Iranian revolution and whom now primarily reside in Israel and the United States. I guess being forced into exile is your definition of "not being bothered".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Prior to the Iranian revolution the two countries had friendly relations.
You mean during their US-sponsored leadership, practically a puppet government, that overthrew their democratically-elected prime minster, Mohammed Mosaddeq? Led by Shah Reza Pahlevi, whose brutal secret police (SAVAK) were trained by the Mossad? And, again, who overthrew Mossadeq who, despite being secular, was distinctly no fan of Israel?
I don't know how you can possibly treat the Pahlevi regime as a *good* thing. They were despised by their own people so much that the people risked death to revolt en masse in conditions almost never seen in a revolution (none of the typical causes, rapid speed, immense popularity of the revolution, and the defeat of a lavishly financed and well trained domestic military apparatus). Our support of that government is a massive black eye for us in that region, and especially in Iran.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
Are you seriously trolling this?
Fear mongering? Where? Perhaps you're unfamiliar with relatively recent Earth history.
a) extrapolates from Iran's engineering capabilities known from Iran's own announcements as collaborated by external observation and analysis by Rand, Jane's, FAS, etc. and follows the common science/engineering advancement trajectory. Start reading around Iran's helicopter industry adventures in the 1970s.
b) missile test photos from last year show plausible progress; a delivery system that works for nuclear payloads will work for other easier payloads; detante worked out well enough that we can have this discussion.
c) USA, Russia and Germany all got to nuclear capabilities with almost no computers, inefficient power and instrumentation, and far less precise kit than we have today. South Africa, India and China also managed.
d) You are replying to a story about an ongoing series of political disagreements by the usual suspects about nuclear capabilities. "Covert" doesn't mean that your head has been in the sand since Gorby was in power.
e) What's the higher value target? Highly refined material manufactured by professionals intended for weapons use stored at hundreds of languishing sites around the world protected by bureaucratic accounting, or uncle Mahmoud's pile of prototype output where every gram is tracked by the site chief? Wikipedia has some starter links about IAEA's work around missing sources and unintended exposure.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
"I don't know how you can possibly treat the Pahlevi regime as a *good* thing. They were despised by their own people so much that the people risked death to revolt en masse in conditions almost never seen in a revolution (none of the typical causes, rapid speed, immense popularity of the revolution, and the defeat of a lavishly financed and well trained domestic military apparatus)."
So a little like the government that replaced them in recent years?
The difference is, the new government is even more brutal, has an even bigger more blindly faithful military and set of militia so that this time the citizens didn't manage a revolt.
Say what you will about that regime, but it speaks volumes that the citizens were free enough and the government was weak enough to be overthrown, in contrast to the current Iranian regime or that of say Burma, or North Korea.
I'm not defending the US' puppet regime of course, but I think sometimes it's blown out of proportion how bad it was- certainly it was no worse than what has followed, and no worse than that in many other nations.
Of course, I'm certainly not arguing with your fundamental point either- that US medalling in that way did them more harm than good in the region, in fact, with the likes of Iraq etc., one has to wonder if America ever even learnt it's lesson.
Actually, that is, shall we say, a "gross oversimplification". Briefly: the formation of modern Israel in '48 was at best a rather high-handed move by the UN, and even by the UN's standards, Israel has been a rogue state since it's 1967 land-grab. Beating up on Lebanon periodically has not done much to improve it's reputation, either. Few people have kind words to say for Hezbollah, but it's hard to get from there to a justification for Israel's recent actions in Gaza (e.g. using banned weaponry on civilian populations).
But even if the US wanted to reign in Israel, it could turn out to be difficult to do, because of all those nuclear weapons they don't have. (On the other hand, we could stop bank-rolling their military expenses... that much would be easy.)
That is, of course, the reason that governments like to have nuclear weapons. Why shouldn't Iran want nukes? If you look at US behavior in the last decade, we went ape-shit bombing two countries, but left North Korea alone. What lesson can we draw from this, class?