This is cause to be very very concerned for Israel. For the whole world, yes, but more so for the people that Iran’s President said “need to be wiped off the map.” If Israel does not strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, soon, it is very likely that the first nuke that comes off Iran’s manufacturing block has Israel’s name on it.
This would also launch the world into World War 3, unless Barack Obama decides that Israel is not worthy, as he seems to have already, of the US’ backing.
U.S. Says Iran Could Expedite Nuclear Bomb
By David E. Sanger
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008, touring Iran’s nuclear operations in Natanz, which Iran says are for electricity.
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded in recent months that Iran has created enough nuclear fuel to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon. But new intelligence reports delivered to the White House say that the country has deliberately stopped short of the critical last steps to make a bomb.
In the first public acknowledgment of the intelligence findings, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency declared on Wednesday that Iran now had what he called a “possible breakout capacity” if it decided to enrich its stockpile of uranium, converting it to bomb-grade material.
The statement by the ambassador, Glyn Davies, was intended to put pressure on American allies to move toward far more severe sanctions against Iran this month, perhaps including a cutoff of gasoline to the country, if it failed to take up President Obama’s invitation for serious negotiations. But it could also complicate the administration’s efforts to persuade an increasingly impatient Israeli government to give diplomacy more time to work, and hold off from a military strike against Iran’s facilities..
In interviews over the past two months, intelligence and military officials, and members of the Obama administration, have said they are convinced that Iran has made significant progress on uranium enrichment, especially over the past year.
Iran has maintained that its continuing enrichment program is for peaceful purposes, that the uranium is solely for electric power and that its scientists have never researched weapons design. But in a 2007 announcement, the United States said that it had found evidence that Iran had worked on designs for making a warhead, though it determined that the project was halted in late 2003. The new intelligence information collected by the Obama administration finds no convincing evidence that the design work has resumed.
It is unclear how many months — or even years — it would take Iran to complete that final design work, and then build a warhead that could fit atop its long-range missiles. That question has been the subject of a series of sharp, behind-the-scenes exchanges between the Israelis and top American intelligence and military officials, dating back nearly two years and increasing in intensity in recent months.
The American position is that the United States and its allies would probably have considerable warning time if Iran moved to convert its growing stockpile of low-enriched nuclear fuel to make it usable for weapons.
While there is little doubt inside the United States government that Iran’s ultimate goal is to create a weapons capability, there is some skepticism about whether an Iranian government that is distracted by the fallout from a disputed presidential election would take that risky step, and how quickly it could overcome the remaining technological hurdles.
But Israel draws more dire pictures from the same set of facts. In classified exchanges with the United States, it has cited evidence that the design effort secretly resumed in 2005, at the order of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. American officials say that the evidence is circumstantial, and point out that the Israelis have not produced a copy of the order they say Ayatollah Khamenei gave.
”We’re all looking at the same set of facts,” said one senior Israeli intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the intelligence-gathering. “We are interpreting them quite differently than the White House does.”
At the core of the dispute is the “breakout capacity” that Mr. Davies referred to on Wednesday in his first presentation as ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog. The phrase refers to a non-nuclear nation’s ability to acquire enough fuel and expertise to be able to complete building an actual weapon relatively quickly.
The Israelis have argued that there could be little or no warning time — especially if Iran has hidden facilities — and they contended that in the aftermath of Iraq, American intelligence agencies were being far too cautious in assessing Iran’s capability.
As American and Israeli officials expected, Iran turned over to European nations on Wednesday what it called a new set of “proposals” for negotiations over its nuclear program. American officials said they had not read them, but Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said the Iranian response must be “serious, substantive and constructive” to meet Mr. Obama’s test.
The White House has given Iran a late-September deadline to begin substantive negotiations, or face additional sanctions.
Administration officials are debating whether the Iranian leadership, struggling with violent protests, is effectively paralyzed when it comes to negotiating with the West — or for that matter in determining how aggressively to push ahead with its nuclear program. The White House is hoping its offer to negotiate has thrown Iran’s leadership off track, and built up credibility around the world if the president begins to press for tougher sanctions.
The intelligence updates for Mr. Obama follow the broad outlines of the conclusions delivered to President George W. Bush in 2007, as part of a 140-page National Intelligence Estimate. It was based on information gathered by American spy agencies that had pierced Iran’s military computer networks, coming up with surprising evidence that the country had halted its weapons-design effort four years earlier.
Critics said the public portion of the report understated the importance of Iran’s progress in enriching uranium, the hardest part of the bomb-making process.
Accurate intelligence about the progress of Iran’s weapons programs has been notoriously poor. Much of the country’s early activity was missed for nearly 18 years, until a dissident group revealed the existence of enrichment…Read the rest of the article here.
