Hitchens on Iran and the bomb

[Rum]

If you don't read it regularly I recommend you do. Hitchens' views on pretty much everything regularly at http://www.slate.com/id/2240460/?from=rss


Trigger MechanismIran inches closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Jan. 4, 2010, at 11:32 AM ET

Some distance into Sunday's New York Times report on the Obama administration's increasingly worried internal discussions about Iran, there came a couple of paragraphs that repaid closer scrutiny:

Mr. Obama's top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama's advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale. [Italics mine.]

Leaving to one side the alarming possibility that any of Obama's people ever did believe the preposterous arguments of that National Intelligence Estimate (denounced by your humble servant in this space on Dec. 10, 2007), one must wonder what sort of scale is implied by "smaller." That ostensibly reassuring usage might, in fact, be accurate. The new documents alluded to in the article were published in the Times of London in the second and third weeks of December and have been extensively reviewed by numerous authorities, none of whom have chosen to challenge their authenticity. And the documents do, in point of fact, throw light upon something "smaller scale." To be precise, they show the internal memoranda of the dictatorship as they bear on the crucial question of a "neutron initiator." Small as this device may be, it is the technical expression used for the "trigger" mechanism of a workable nuclear weapon. The critical element of the "trigger" is uranium deuteride or UD3. And uranium deuteride has no other purpose. To quote David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington: "Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application. This is a very strong indicator of weapons work."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad That would be to phrase it mildly. It has been only three months, after all, since the theocracy was compelled to admit that it had constructed a covert facility for the enrichment of uranium just outside the supposedly holy city of Qum. We have no assurance that this is the only such undisclosed site, and on past form that seems distinctly improbable. Remember the other long-concealed enrichment site at Natanz and also the heavy-water plant at Arak. And remember, too, that this is not information that derives from possibly self-interested defectors or bickering intelligence services—even the most cautious spokesmen from the International Atomic Energy Agency have been confident enough to make public criticisms of Iran's self-evident duplicity. The signature of the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei despotism on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as its supposed adherence to a whole thesaurus of agreements with the United Nations and the European Union, has long been shown to be as cynical and worthless as its claims to have held a free election. The regime's Revolutionary Guards, now engaged in still another bloody battle with unarmed Iranian civilians, are increasingly emerging as the proprietors of the secret nuclear arsenal. The enemy is in plain view.

[lofuji]

Scary stuff! I think that somewhere down the line the Israelis will take matters into their own hands. My worry is that they will use nukes to do so.

lofuji

[Trolldor]

The Israelis will only take matters in to their own hand when they no longer have a use for other people who might do it for them.
Iran is a dead country, it's people do not support it's leaders, it's leaders do not support the people, and the world cares not much for either. Either Iran will die, or the people of Iran will - with heavy cost - achieve a frail... "victory". A temporary rest from a dictatorship that will inevitably rise again.