Posted on 10/15/2004 2:13:18 PM PDT by gopwinsin04
" It is quite likely that the Iranians are hiding one of their warheads in the basement of a lonely house in Tel Aviv (or in New York). "
I recall reading somewhere that the USSR had actually placed nukes or some other nasty device in selected american cities...was this a dream or was there news to this effect in the 90's???
Iran sits on one of the largest puddles of oil in the world, they need nuclear power?
"Some idiot is always trying to channel Neville Chamberlain. "
Yep. Kerry will hand Iraq to Al Zarqawi, hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban, and promise us "Peace in our time."
As I recall, the Brits eventually woke up, kicked the intelligent and very nice Mr. Chamberlain out of office and voted in that awful, bad-tempered, drunken boor with the shaky military record- Sir Winston Churchill.
BTW, shall we compare Bush's casualties in the entire war on terror with Churchill's Gallipoli campaign in WWI?
That assumes Iran is trying to build a plutonium weapon. Iran's fastest route to a nuclear bomb is to build a uranium weapon. Iran's enrichment facility at Natanz has around 1200 machines (although no one's been permitted to inspect it recently)—enough to produce sufficient highly-enriched uranium for one bomb in 9 months. But that assumes the feedstock is natural uranium. If Iran started with reactor-grade uranium, that same facility can make a bomb in just 42 days, since over 80% of the enrichment cycles are involved in bringing the natural uranium up to reactor-grade level.
Iran's enrichment facility is less than 5% of what is necessary to keep the Bashehr reactor running. In other words, it is far too small to be of any use in commercial power generation. But at the same time it's far too big to be a research facility. Iran cannot be allowed to maintain a needlessly large enrichment facility and receive large quantities of reactor fuel at the same time. I definitely agree that even if Iran decommissions Natanz, the deal must also include safeguards on the spent cores to prevent plutonium reprocessing, but plutonium is just half the story.
The proper solution is regime-change in Iran, of course. As we saw in Iraq, sanctions hurt the people far more than their leaders, and are usually just winked at by the Europeans anyway. I doubt it's politically or militarily feasible to accomplish that within a year. In the meantime, we need to delay Iran's nuclear program, because it is very close to fruition now. As long as no one is shipping massive quantities of reactor-grade uranium to Iran, we have months to negotiate. If a deal were suddenly struck that lacked the proper safeguards, someone would have to act quickly.
Security Council does not secure a damn thing!!!
U.N. Security Council....sounds impressive...NOT!!!
..... I have read references to intelligence agencies believe iran may have 1 or 2 bombs (obviously from outside materials, not the current construction project) as a deterrent.....
That's cool!
Let these ragheads light off a nuc or two in their neighborhood, then ask the Iranian population to gather on the hillsides to watch the incoming fireworks- - before they hit the ground. Solve a lot of problems!
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