Posted on 02/11/2006 6:57:43 PM PST by FairOpinion
Iran has drawn up designs for a deep underground tunnel with remote-controlled heat and pressure sensors as part of what Western intelligence officials believe are preparations for a secret atomic test.
The plans, which American and British intelligence conclude are genuine after studying them on a laptop computer smuggled out of Iran by a defector, appear to be the latest evidence that Teheran is conducting a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.
The Natanz enrichment facility The existence of the sophisticated sketches for a 400-metre long subterranean test shaft was made public last week in The Washington Post. The welter of documents and disclosures provides what Western governments believe is an overwhelming circumstantial case that Iran is seeking an "Islamic bomb".
Washington and London won International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) support last weekend for Iran to be reported to the United Nations Security Council, after the clerical regime resumed banned centrifuge research work at its Natanz uranium-enrichment plant.
Publicly, even American hawks such as Vice-President Dick Cheney are backing the diplomatic track to resolve the showdown over Iran's nuclear programme, which Teheran claims is for peaceful energy purposes. But the Sunday Telegraph has learnt from a senior Pentagon adviser that, as the crisis deepened in recent months, military strategists have been updating plans for "last-resort" military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. The raids would be ordered if President George W Bush is advised that they are the only remaining option to prevent the Islamic republic from acquiring atomic weapons.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has consistently made clear that Britain opposes a military solution. He fears that even the threat of bombing will sabotage any hope of securing a united international diplomatic front against Teheran - as well as again splitting the Labour Party. British diplomats highlight the chaos that Iran, if attacked, could unleash in the region through its Shia surrogates in Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
A high-powered British diplomatic delegation visited Washington last week to discuss tactics with Nicholas Burns, the State Department's number three. They want to increase co-operation with Iranian exiles and make better use of satellite television channels and the internet to spread the message inside Iran that the West's opposition to Teheran's nuclear programme is not an imperialist anti-Islamic plot, as the mullahs claim.
Britain is hoping that the threat of action by the Security Council, including possible financial sanctions, will expose differences within the regime on how far to push its game of nuclear brinkmanship. But there is a growing belief in Washington that it will be impossible to win the required Chinese and Russian support at the UN for any significant measures that might inhibit Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The review of the Pentagon's contingency plans follows the stream of recent discoveries of Iran's secret nuclear operations and the virulent rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since he was elected last year. Iran is still thought to be anywhere between three and 10 years away from physically producing a nuclear weapon. But the West and Israel believe the "point of no return" - when Iran's scientists acquire the technological know-how and experience to make an atomic bomb - could be reached much sooner.
The Pentagon adviser told the this newspaper: "We will have reached the point of no return in the next couple of years. If diplomacy hasn't worked by then, Iran will be a long way down the line to acquiring a nuclear weapon. We're talking about choosing the least bad of a series of bad options. President Bush will also be nearing the end of his term and have to decide if he trusts this issue to another administration or wants to use the B2s." In a separate interview, Richard Perle, a senior defence official at the time of the Iraq war and who maintains close links to the military, said that 12 B2 bombers, each carrying dozens of precision-guided weapons, could deliver a serious blow to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
"If the President were faced with the choice between Iran crossing the line to become a nuclear weapon state and using force to destroy or significantly delay that prospect, then I believe he would use force," Mr Perle said. "That decision will be made at the last moment but there is certainly strong contingency planning for that. I think the decision-making elite in Washington would back Mr Bush if that was seen to be his only choice."
Iran has been preparing by strengthening air defence systems and building tunnels intended to hide atomic material and facilities from a bombing campaign, Jane's Defence Weekly reported this month.
The regime has spread its nuclear programme across several sites, some of them underground, after drawing lessons from the 1981 Israeli air strike that wiped out Saddam Hussein's efforts to produce an Iraqi plutonium bomb at Osirak. But United States military strategists believe that by targeting certain key "bottleneck" facilities - probably the Natanz uranium-enrichment site, the Isfahan conversion plant and the Arak heavy water reactor - they could hobble the whole programme for years.
"There may well be secret sites out there but a nuclear programme is not that easy to hide," said Dan Goure, a Pentagon consultant and vice-president of the Lexington Institute defence think-tank. "You need large sites for uranium enrichment and manufacturing plutonium. It's not like a biological or chemical warfare programme: you cannot conduct research in a Petri dish."
Mr Perle and Dr Goure believe that America is better equipped to carry out the attacks than Israel, whose F15s and F16s would encounter refuelling problems. In a further signal that if strikes were required the US would prefer to carry them out, Mr Bush said last week that America would "rise to Israel's defence" if Iran threatened it.
Aren't our Stealth bombers there already?
I hope you don't place any bets on that
That is what my husband thinks it is: Fair Warning.
I was gonna say: Clinton! heck, what about Carter?
I'm thinking this is another Cuban Missle Crisis in the making and I still vividly remember #1.
My idea, of an ideal situation, is to find out when they are going to test, in advance, and time it so that we have a nice 20 megaton, ground busrt weapon strike within about 15 minutes of the scheduled test. Then after all the important Iranian scientists, and heads of state, who had assembled to watch the event, were taken by surprise, and wiped out by their accidental miscalculation of the bomb's size. Of course, it would be easy to deny this, especially with relevant satellite imagery, showing them getting ready for their test. This is an op, waiting to happen.
That's a good point. I believe one reason we finally agreed to go along with a test ban is because computer simulations had made actual tests unnecessary.
We should be tracking Iran's investment in supercomputing capacity.
Most people have no idea of the events which will transpire over the next six months.
Yep, but you need to 40 clip magazines to be hot stuff. :)
I'm convinced that people who blow themselves up in the midst of civilian crowds don't have a scruple of moral restraint.
They don't. But comparing that to a country causing its own suicide is something else. Tell me one terrorist leader who has committed a suicide bombing. Right now Iran is talking tough and I think a good part of it BS. But, you may be right. They may be so irrational as to cause their own extinction.
A few years? I think all this talk could spook them into going "nuclear" sooner than we think.
I believe that Iran already has a few nukes in storage; probably provided courtesy of North Korea.
Roosevelt is in the Persian Gulf.
I doubt these facilities can be destroyed by conventional bunker busters. to be honest, I don't think we are going to attack iran - too many consequences, it would be a huge conflagration, economic impact from the loss of gulf oil would be massive, iraq would get much worse right at the time when its getting better, we need 500K troops in the region at a minimum, etc.
now, if we could assist in an "accident" of some kind occurring here.....
Simply a lie.
There WAS another option. That was to get Russia to stop building the damn nuke facilities.
Bush did nothing serious to stop Russia. Clinton did nothing to stop Russia. Don't let anybody say we ran out of options. We were just to wimpish to get Russia to stop the develpment and construction of Iran's capability.
Its not necessary to have nuke reactors (from the Russians)to build an atomic bomb. All that's needed is uranium ore (which Iran has natively) and the ability to enrich this ore, to the point of about 20%. U-235 is needed, and is rather a rare portion of all the uranium found, and when it is being enrivhed, it also needs to be seperated from the other isotopes of uranium. The russians didn't give the iranians this technology, it appears that A.Q. Khan did, and the euroweenies sold the iranians all the advanced hardware they needed to build the centrifuges, and other necessary items, such that the iranians now have a native ability to build all the centrifuges they need. The Iranians have had a nice cover, all along, thanks to the RUssians, though, as enriched uranium is necessary to fuel the reactor the RUssians are building for them. All along, Iran has maintained they are only building enrighment facilities for their reactors, when anyone with half a brain knows thats a lie. The russians have enabled them, to have plausible deniability, however. The russians are also helping them build heavy water plants, a necessary step, for the iranians to build plutonium weapons, which are many times more powerful than the atomic weapons the iranians are close to having. The atomic bombs the iranians are preparing t build will look like pop guns compared to plutonium weapons. One plutonium based weapon will totally make israel uninhabitable for centuries, whereas, it will take many atomic weapons to achieve the same effect. The real problem is that the knowledge is out there, to build nukes. Anyone with the resources and time, is capable of fielding a small atomic weapon, its a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in, and it will probably be very tumultuous in the coming decades, as non-state actors become capable of fielding advanced bio-weapons, as well as small nukes. Heck, the Iranians probably have enough uranium to currently build dozens of dirty nukes at this point, which are quite nasty little items, if smuggled into major cities and detonated.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Russia and china and N.Korea who got the info from pakistan which leads back to russia.
A dangerous game these ruskies play.
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