08-21-2010, 09:55 AM
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#45 (permalink)
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... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.
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Welp, here we are. Iran is loading 3-5% enriched uranium into its first nuclear reactor with the help of Russia and the permission of the IAEA, demonstrating that they were not lying about pursuing nuclear power. Will this finally put to rest the baseless accusations about nuclear weapons? It's hard to say. The publication of President Obama's birth certificate should have silenced the Birther movement, the revelation that President Obama's father was an atheist should have silenced the critics that insist the president is Muslim by birth, and the complete lack of WMDs in Iraq should have ended the argument for going to war...
Quote:
Fears May Be Overblown as Iran Reactor Comes Online
Despite the media hysteria over a supposed drumbeat for war with Iran, the White House is not unduly worried by the news that Russia will, on Saturday, begin loading enriched uranium into Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. While former Bush Ambassador to the UN and Fox News favorite John Bolton breathlessly warned Monday that Israel has just five days within which to bomb the reactor — after which an air strike would risk killing many thousands of civilians from a radiation leak — the Obama Administration has been more sanguine on the Bushehr news.
To Administration critics, the move to bring Iran's atomic energy plant online makes clear that Iran is not nearly as isolated by sanctions as Washington would like. But that misses the point, since Bushehr is actually exempt from those sanctions because it represents no nuclear weapons threat. And the Administration is moving to tamp down the hysteria being fomented by the likes of Bolton, reportedly making clear to the Israelis that the minimum time frame Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon, after declaring their intent by kicking out inspectors, is one year — plenty of time in which to take dramatic action.
Instead of prompting confrontation, the move to bring Bushehr online will be used by the Administration to argue that it demonstrates Western readiness to accept a Iranian nuclear energy program without uranium enrichment. The uranium that will power the Bushehr reactor is imported from Russia, while the reactor's spent fuel — from which Iran could hypothetically extract plutonium if it had the technology to do so, and if it weren't under the scrutiny of IAEA inspectors — will be removed from Iran by the Russians. And the fact that Bushehr will produce electricity with Russian-supplied uranium, says White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, "underscores that Iran does not need its own enrichment capability if its intentions, as it states, are for a peaceful nuclear program."
In other words, the U.S. believes that Iran's determination to enrich its own uranium calls into question its stated motives; like other Western powers, Washington fears that the enrichment activities, some of them initially conducted in secret, could service a clandestine bomb program. But that's not how the Iranians see it. For them, the fact that Russia says it will finally fuel the reactor after some 14 years of dragging its feet on the project is only proof that, as Mohammad Ahmadian, head of Iran's Nuclear Power Plants Production and Development Company, indelicately put it, "Western countries cannot be trusted." Tehran believes the Russians used Bushehr for political leverage to press Iran to comply with Western demands, and see the project as an object lesson in why they can't allow their nuclear program to be dependent for reactor fuel on the kindness of strangers.
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Source (Time Magazine) |
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