Posted on 06/19/2025 11:05:59 AM PDT by RandFan
The editorial director of Antiwar.com is challenging Israel’s claims that Iran was mere days away from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Scott Horton, who also is director of the Libertarian Institute, said those assertions haven’t been confirmed by other nations, including the United States.
“What they had all along is a latent nuclear deterrent — it’s the same as Germany, Japan or Brazil, where they had shown they perfected the fuel cycle, they know how to make nuclear weapons fuel, but they’re not making it,” Horton told “On Balance” host Leland Vittert on Friday, a day after Israel launched military strikes against Iran.
“With this attack, they’re actually more likely to pursue nuclear weapons now, whereas before they actually were not pursuing them.”
Horton faulted President Trump for voiding a U.S.-Iran agreement in 2018 that would have restricted Tehran’s nuclear capabilities. It was brokered by the Obama administration.
“Trump could have just got back into the deal and called it the Trump Deal instead of the Obama Deal, and all of this would have been fine,” Horton said.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Iran a sitting on a sea of oil. Of all countries in the world they do not need nuclear power.
Of course, even leaving the IAEA completely out of it, Iran had the option of permitting inspectors to actually inspect the facilities in question to confirm that they were not producing weapons-grade fuel. We basically begged them to let inspectors in there, and they refused.
Well, okay. This is the result.
.....Iran wasn’t developing nuclear weapons......
And the moon is made of green cheese!
You should win a prize as the most outspoken idiot on FR.
We should care what "other countries" can confirm when *NOBODY* has the intelligence assets in Iran that Israel has?
And you know what? I absolutely do not care about *ANYONE* telling me that Iran wasn't developing nukes. I have been studying these greasy, nasty, INSANE religious fanatics since 1979, and I *KNOW* beyond the slightest doubt that they were making bombs.
And anyone who thinks they weren't is either ignorant, or some form of idiot.
They are not pursuing a nuke (or were not) even though they could have they decided not to expressly and this is confirmed by the national security director and the intelligence services (Tulsi)
You gotta be some kind of stupid to believe that. You have to be completely unfamiliar with the kind of religious fanatic these people are to believe that.
your assertions mean nothing and i think a lot of people DO give a cr*p if they should go to war based on this
"Go to War" isn't what is being discussed here, at least not a formal declaration of war, but we *ABSOLUTELY* need to destroy every speck of any Iranian nuclear program.
Allowing Iran to play with nuclear technology is like putting a pedophile in charge of the girl scouts. If you know what sort of bastard he is, you know exactly what he will do when he gets the chance.
It’s your carefree/careless attitude to war that led to the disasters of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan especially Iraq it has a lot of similarities to that I suggest
Carefree? I have been pushing for this for the last 30 d@mn years! We are WAY overdo in destroying this dangerous and existential threat to *US*!
Iran has been like a large asteroid hurtling towards our planet, and we wait till the last few days before it hits to finally decide to blow it up, even though SANE, KNOWElEDGEABLE PEOPLE could see it was going to strike us if we did nothing.
What is wrong with you? Are you that ignorant about Iran? Do you know what kind of people have been running that nation since 1979? You act like someone who doesn't know the first thing about these religious *CULT* fanatics.
I *KNOW* what kind of people they are. They are the most dangerous sort of people on the planet.
They are religious fanatics that absolutely believe their God wants them to destroy all infidels, and he will *REWARD* them in heaven if they die in his cause.
These people are like the people running the Inquisition and burning people to death, or those running the Salem witch trials, except they are Muslim, and far more cruel than the Christian religious nuts.
The Iranian leadership are nuclear suicide bombers. That is literally what they are. They will gladly die in nuclear retaliation if they can drop a bomb on DC.
You need to understand the sort of people we are dealing with.
And the moolahs embrace ‘dei’.
He had nothing when asked about it and tried to change the subject. His government has been duplicitous and manipulative of the US from the USS Liberty to Epstein’s blackmail rings.
That is not the IAEA report. It is an interpretation of it.
Me too, though they are not complete idiots. They just have some assumptions that are over exaggerated and they lack an understanding of human nature.
You don’t drive the centrifuges beyond 20% enrichment needed for fuel rods unless you have another plan for your nuclear program. Under Obama, the Iranians were already at 40%. They be working towards weapons for 4 decades. The reality is that Obama only gave them more money for terrorist support and centrifuges.
Like so many, I wish this problem wasn’t here. Lying about the reality of Iran makes about as much sense as encouraging illegal immigration.
Yeah, the book was fascinating in how all that was done. Now I read that Iran was producing plutonium which in itself is hard to have it go critical mass.
Iran will probably use a North Korean design I think. They have a history of working together.
“HOW FAR HAS IRAN GOT?
“The exact status of various Iranian nuclear facilities and material since Israel’s strikes is unclear.
“At least until Israel’s attacks, Iran was enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and had enough material at that level for nine nuclear weapons if enriched further, according to a theoretical IAEA yardstick.
“That means Iran’s so-called “breakout time” - the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb - was close to zero, likely a matter of days or little more than a week, analysts say.
“Iran had three operating enrichment facilities: an above-ground plant and a larger, underground one at its Natanz complex and another buried inside a mountain at Fordow.
“Only Fordow appears to have been spared damage, the IAEA has said. The above-ground plant has been destroyed and the underground one at Natanz has likely had its uranium-enriching centrifuges badly damaged or destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has said.
“That will have lengthened its breakout time at least somewhat because far fewer centrifuges if any are operating. The status of its stock of enriched uranium is also unclear.
“HOW FAST COULD IRAN SPRINT TO A BOMB?
“Aside from uranium enrichment, there is the question of how long it would take Iran to produce the rest of a nuclear weapon and possibly make it small enough to put in a delivery system like a ballistic missile, should it choose to. This is much harder to estimate as it is less clear how much knowledge Iran has.”
“Estimates of how long Iran would need for weaponisation generally vary between months and about a year.”
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/middle-east/explainer-how-close-is-iran-to-having-nuclear-weapons
“Was Iran separating out U235 from U238 or just enriching U238?”
Oh. Okay. Thanks for letting us know. NOW we need attack them even harder! Let's get those bombers back in the air, boys! The peaceniks just told us that we need to do more now!
What does our own government say whenever they can't talk about a subject? "Sources and Methods."
There are a *LOT* of ways that governments have of finding out information that they can't explain, because if they do, they would lose those sources and/or methods of obtaining that information.
Not speaking to questions of *HOW* someone knows something is normal for any government relying on intelligence gathering, which is exactly what sort of information is being discussed.
His government has been duplicitous and manipulative of the US from the USS Liberty to Epstein’s blackmail rings.
The USS Liberty? Are you one of those people who are still bitching about that?
The Liberty is not the first time one of our allies hit us with friendly fire. Why is this particular example so significant to you?
A lot of people I have spoken to over the years who tend to bring up the Liberty incident just hate Jews in general, and use that incident as just another excuse to bash them.
But it's not about the Liberty, it's about bashing Jews.
And so far as the Epstein blackmail rings go, I find the theory that it was a Mossad operation to be plausible, because Mossad is absolutely one of the most cold blooded intelligence agencies on the planet, and this is the sort of thing that I don't think they would hesitate to do.
However, i'm not so sure the US government wasn't involved in it too. We've had plenty of corruption and nastiness in our own intelligence agencies, and if they didn't know what was going on, they should have.
Operating under the assumption that *OUR* intelligence agencies weren't that incompetent, it leaves me with the conclusion that *OUR* people were in on it too.
That is beyond any dispute.
They were rushing to build and detonate a demo nuclear device to join North Korea in the Untouchable Nuclear Depot Club
you seem like the dumbest guy in any room you walk into
“The status of its stock of enriched uranium is also unclear.”
Don’t kill the Iranian specialists who would know.
“They are not pursuing a nuke (or were not) even though they could have they decided not to expressly and this is confirmed by the national security director and the intelligence services (Tulsi)”
Tulsi:
In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.
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