Horrors! Run! Hide! Iran Has Material for a Bomb!

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on CNN's Sunday morning discussion program "State of the Union" talked about Iran's nuclear enrichment program and some news sources have worked up his words and others into great fear and gnashing of teeth though every reasonable news report I've read has also explained that the Low Enriched Uranium that Iran does have cannot make a bomb unless they are able to get the material up to Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU).  

This is not the first time we've been faced with the terrormongering over nuclear war.  Remember North Korea?

I learned as much as I could of this while John Bolton was leading the Bush administration charge against North Korea.  The secret to NK's rapid development from a potential nuclear power to an actual one (most world leaders laughed at the NK bomb that had less punch than many conventional weapons, but their little dud served the purposes of the Bush saber rattlers) was the fact that they had plutononium from a heavy water reactor that the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations allowed them to run.  They didn't need to enrich any uranium for their bomb, but simply extracted what they wanted (plutonium) from spent rods after they threw the IAEA out due to the Bush administration's inept negotiating style.  

The CIA still doubts that NK actually had a second nuclear program and said so during the Bush administration to their credit, but was drowned out by BS from the higher pay grades and lower brain capacities. 

But on the current subject, please don't take my word for it.  Try a Reuters Global News Blog analysis written a few days ago, but still actually the best one as actually nothing has changed no matter what Adm. Mullen said this morning.  (More on that later).  A Reuters report from this morning "Iran "not close" to nuclear weapon: Gates" relates what Adm Mullen said, what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said and other information from past interviews.  The entire effect is to throw the carbon bars in a reactor that had been pumped up to overheating by talk shows and right wing leaning news sources.

But they also mention DNI Blair's testimony worry that Iran might be importing some material (HEU? Plutonium? they don't say) that could be used for weapons, but they have no indication of that at this time.  This sounds like something squeezed out of the director by a right wing Congress member like Leon Panetta was dangled by Senator Kitt Bond about rendition until misleading words came out of the now CIA Director's mouth.  

And why was this such a big deal right now?  Because tomorrow (March 2, 2009) the IAEA will be discussing Director General ElBaradei's report on developments regarding nuclear safeguards on Iran's avowed peaceful program since November 2008.  IAEA reports tend to toss more graphite and concrete on fear meltdowns so some mainstream sources will try to make a big deal now and get the people scared (it sells more news) before this possibly becomes a non issue again for many months.

The New York Times' "U.S. Says Iran Has Material for Nuclear Bomb" mirrors the Reuter assessment that LEU fissile material isn't bomb ready pretty clearly:

In its study, the agency [(IAEA)] declared for the first time that the amount of low-enriched uranium that Tehran had stockpiled, estimated at more than a ton, was sufficient to make an atomic bomb, but only with added purification... 

Both Reuters and the NY Times note that the decline of the price of oil and the global economy could make negotiations with Iran much more effective than in the past.   

I mentioned the NYTimes article along with the Reuters piece to show a building concensus by the news sources that are still trying to maintain some impartiality standards.

Now I can show how the LA Times plays the fear mongering card in "Iran has the materials to make a nuclear bomb, top U.S. official says".

The first problem I see is that the writer repeats the tale of the missing LEU  without the explanation that the IAEA and Reuters recorded.  I hope he's carrying a passport because he just crossed the line into the territory of Greater Fearistan.  

LAT:

A recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran had built up its supplies of enriched uranium to slightly more than a ton, about 33% more than Tehran had previously stated it had stockpiled. It takes about a ton of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. 

I don't know about you, but (and this was the first report I opened on the subject of what was said on the Sunday morning shows) coming right after the opening paragraphs, that makes it seem like the threat is much more severe than what Mullens, and Gates, and the IAEA have been indicating in actuality.  

Then the writer, indentified as Julian E. Barnes , repeats a theory that only Sam Zell's LA Time Deep Throat man, Greg Miller, has developed outside of Fox News, Limbaugh, and other rw sources.

Although a November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had stopped developing a nuclear weapon, senior U.S. officials now discount that conclusion. Since taking office, President Obama and other top administration officials have said repeatedly that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons. 

The Greg Miller report is here "U.S. now sees Iran as pursuing nuclear bomb".  

And is firmly debunked by Robert Dreyfus here "Don't Let the Iran Headlines Scare You"  You can skip the Miller report if you read the Dreyfus piece.  And Mr. D also shows why taking Leon Panetta's words in his confirmation hearing before he saw the secret stuff and when he mispoke, is wrong.  Those who took Panetta's words on rendition that were verbally beaten from him by Senator Kitt Bond should note this.  Many reports indicate that he misspoke under that verbal abuse as well.  So don't worry about the Obama administration being almost like the Pinochet group as some progressives have wailed.  Those liberals are being worse to our new leader than they were to Bush.  I guess it brings in the donations, but it's pretty scuzzy.  

BTW, I  did read other reports as I was searching for information today which said, as Dreyfuss does, that in order to proceed to HEU Iran would have to do so in front of the IAEA or throw them out.  Either way we would know with plenty of time to spare that they were working on the weapons quality stuff. 

Checking for more information I found a powerpoint program here  (don't try to open that if you don't have Power point or other reader or you are trying to save those Power Point trials that Office installs on nearly every PC) that asserted that LEU in a reactor turns to plutonium with even more power than HEU.  (But it's harder to cause ignition of Pu, and that's possibly why NK's plutonium bomb was pretty pathetic.)

But a report from 1999 shows that the US is working with Russians to help them keep their LEU from creating plutonium so apparently it is possible to have a LEU reactor without producing Pu.  Heavy water vs light water maybe?

Apologies: 

Wonderful and major bloggers are very wary of changing their posts after publishing and I am trying to hew to that line lately, but tonight I had a minor family emergency in which daughters were going to have to shower with icycles hanging from their nose if I couldn't get the heater to work.  

I thought I had saved the post as a draft, but when I came back, I saw that my 'definitely not ready for prime time' work had been published.  Yikes!

If you were one of the first 6 people to see it, you know what I mean.  I hurriedly tried to make it presentable ( I hadn't deleted some statements in the first paragraph that upon reading the reports I knew had to go and to that much of the first paragraph read as if written by a chimp) but I also have been making some language changes since.  I find that throwing a report back into draft after it is published plays really poorly with people still seeing a link in  the RSS feed that for the time being does not work.  So I made many small changes and saved them.  I apologize to those who were the first readers, and for anyone looking for what the chimp wrote who can't find it again.  (That's it. I'll blame that whole horrible first paragraph on some imaginary chimpanzee.  Bwahahahaha!)

tags: iran  nuclear power  nuclear wapons  iaea  elbaradei  

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