In January of 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they had moved the "Doomsday Clock" forward form 7 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight.
2007: The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.
Over the weekend, in a story that has found surprisingly little resonance in the media or the blogosphere (not even listed at memeorandum) the New York Times reported that the A Q Khan network had in its possession, computer files detailing how to construct a more sophisticated and compact nuclear bomb than had been hitherto expected:
Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design
American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.
The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.
In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.
But the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation. [Emphasis mine-SW]
The implications of this story are profound, effecting everything for the price of oil to the possibility of a true catastrophe occurring in the near future. As per Amir Taheri, in all likelihood, Iran will soon have the bomb (if they do not already have one or several.)
BOMBS AWAY
WHY THE US POLICY ISN'T WORKING - AND IRAN WILL GET NUCLEAR WEAPONS"Hit us and we shall hit you ten times harder!" This is how General Muhammad-Ali Jaafari, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has responded to speculation about a possible attack by the United States and/or Israel on Iran's nuclear installations.
Jaafari replaced General Yahya Safavi last year after the latter made a speech in which he implicitly warned the mullahs that Iran's military was not ready for war against far more powerful enemies.
Those familiar with Iranian military capabilities know that it is Safavi's sober assessment, and not Jaafari's bluster, that reflects the true situation.
The problem is that Jaafari can make his claim because he, and his political masters in Tehran, are convinced there would be no military action against their regime.
In 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the then newly-minted President of the Islamic Republic and darling of the IRGC, unveiled a strategy based on the assumption that once George W. Bush is out of the White House, the United States would bite the bullet and accept a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic as "regional superpower" in the Middle East.
Two events convinced Ahmadinejad that his strategy was correct:
The first came in May 2006 when the Bush administration, then at the nadir of its unpopularity because of the situation in Iraq, joined the line of supplicant Europeans begging Tehran to negotiate a deal.
That unexpected shift in Washington's policy produced the opposite effect.
Far from persuading Ahamdinejad that this was a good time to defuse the situation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's attempt at nuance and multilateral diplomacy convinced Tehran that the Americans had blinked.
The second event that confirmed Ahmadinejad's belief that "America cannot do a damn thing" came with last year's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Using a language of obfuscation, the NIE claimed that Tehran had abandoned key aspect of its nuclear programm in 2003. The NIE undermined the whole case brought by the International Atomic Energy Agency against the Islamic Republic.
Whatever one might say about Ahmadinejad, one thing is certain: he plays an open hand. He is convinced that the US does not have the stomach for a fight and that Bush is the last American president to even dream of pre-emptive war.
He thinks the dominant mood in the US, and the West in general, is one of pre-emptive surrender.
Iran is a complicated country in which competing interest groups struggle for the reins of power. Ahmadinejad is allied with the most radical of the groups and his stewardship of the Iranian polity has been marked by a mismanaged economy and full bore efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. His goal is to support, revitalize, and spread the Iranian Shia revolution. While Iran has had setbacks in Iraq, it has also succeeded in establishing a beach head in Gaza and to further entrench its client, Hezbollah, in the center of Lebanese politics. Iran's revolutionary Islam is, as with most revolutionary ideologies, more suited to insurgency and terrorism than governance. While there are interest groups in Iran that desire greater integration with the global economy and the aggrandizement of wealth and power (desires which are typical of rational regimes around the world) it remains unclear whether the pragmatists or the ideologues will ultimately carry the day. The problem for interested observers, such as Israel and the United States, is that the revolutionaries have an explicitly genocidal and apocalyptic bent and such people would be extremely problematic stewards of nuclear weapons.
I suspect some of the (relative) silence about these developments, ie the likelihood that Iran already has the A Q Khan plans, relates to the lack of any good options for dealing with a nuclear armed Iran.
Ed Morrissey notes that all that is missing for the production of nuclear weapons is the fissionable material:
The AQ Khan network had advanced nuclear-weapons designs that could fit on ballistic missiles, the Washington Post reported yesterday. The intelligence community has an analysis that determined that Iran, North Korea, and other clients of Khan could have everything they need besides fissile material to build nuclear warheads, a much graver situation than originally thought when the Khan network got exposed.
He discusses today's story about the EU and UK joining the US in increasing the sanctions on Iran in response to Iran refusing to even discuss their enrichment program.
UK, EU announce Iran sanctions
Has Europe given up on the UN? Both the UK and EU today announced new sanctions on Iran after their outright refusal of a new incentive package offered by Europe to stop Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program. The mullahcracy apparently didn’t want to talk about it this time ... and Europe apparently doesn’t want to wait for the UN Security Council to act, either
Unfortunately, though the UK, EU, and US may all agree that the current situation is untenable, it is unlikely that these sanctions, or any sanctions for that matter, will deter Iran. They see nuclear weapons as a way to safeguard their revolution, prevent the United States (or Israel) from attacking and fostering "regime change", and in a pinch, the ideal tool to precipitate the return of the 12th Imam and the global caliphate (which remains the goal of most of the various Islamist terror groups.)
I suspect this news is responsible for a significant part of the recent rise in gas prices, which are failing to respond to the usual market mechanisms and for which speculators (hidden and nefarious) have been blamed. If Iran already has a bomb, or the conclusion has become inescapable that they cannot be deterred, and they have communicated to us that any attack against their revolution will eventuate in a radioactive Strait of Hormuz or Ghawar oil fields, our diffidence and the ever rising price of oil become more understandable.
Most unfortunate for all, the logic of an Iranian bomb remains: Once Iran has nuclear weapons, the likelihood of them using such weapons becomes impermissibly high. If Iran is emboldened by their successes, the appeal of using such a weapon to remove once and for all the gravest threats to their religion, the existence of Israel, followed by the neutering of America, becomes difficult to resist.
If, as may be more likely, a nuclear armed Iran finds that their failing economy leads to unrest serious enough to threaten their rule, the temptation to go "all in" on their religious and political ideology, may become insurmountable.
At this point, no one can feel sanguine that Iran will obtain nuclear weapons and hold them responsibly. The clock has just moved closer to midnight.
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