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Iran Nuclear Watch: Israel – Iran Could Have Nukes by 2009
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2nd L) visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, 350 km (217 miles) south of Tehran, April 8, 2008
Israel now believes that Iran with its uranium enrichment centrifuges spinning at Natanz will be able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year.
The new assessment moves up Israel’s forecasts on Teheran’s nuclear program by almost a full year – from 2009 to the end of 2008. According to the new timeline, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year.
Iran, a senior defense official said on Tuesday, had encountered numerous technical obstacles on its way to enriching uranium but was now on track to master the technology needed to enrich uranium within six months.
Israel is also concerned that Teheran is developing a cruise missile that can evade interception by the Arrow, the IDF’s anti-ballistic missile defense system. Iran is suspected of having smuggled Ukrainian X-55 cruise missiles and using them as models for an independent, domestic project. A cruise missile, which flies at low altitudes to dodge radar detection and interception, could be used to carry a nuclear warhead.
In the meantime, the United States sits idly by as Iran exports extremists to kill American soldiers in Iraq.
Flap agrees with John Bolton on this one.
So, will the United States continue its emphasis on economic and political sanctions while Iran develops BREAKOUT CAPABILITY?
Stay tuned…….
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Demands Azerbaijan Deliver Russian Nuclear Shipment
Shocker: Iran Threatens To Eliminate Israel
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Shocker: Iran Threatens To Eliminate Israel
Michael Ramirez on Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
New Item: Iran Threatens to Eliminate Israel
Iran will eliminate Israel if it attacks the Islamic Republic, Iran’s deputy army chief warned Tuesday in words conjuring up Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats to wipe Israel off the map.
“Should Israel take any action against Iran, we will eliminate Israel from the scene of the universe,” Gen. Muhammad Reza Ashtiani said in Teheran on Tuesday.
Ashtiani’s statement followed Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer’s comment last week warning Iran that any attack on Israel would result in the “destruction of the Iranian nation.”
Ashtiani claimed Israel was “very vulnerable” and dismissed allegations that Iran was worried about Israeli maneuvers.
And, let’s see Iran President Ahmadinejad says Britain, Israel and the United States are to disappear as the Pharaohs. Yet, the United Nations writes meaningless sanction resolutions and the uranium enrichment centrifuges continually spin at Natanz.
One of these days, someone in the world will take Iranian threats seriously.
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Shocker: Secret Launch Site for Iranian Long Range Missiles
Missile Defense Watch: Bush Wins NATO Endorsement of European Missile Defense Shield
Iran Nuclear Watch: 6000 Uranium Enrichment Centrifuges
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Iran Nuclear Watch: 6000 Uranium Enrichment Centrifuges
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks with photographers while waiting for a meeting at the presidential palace in Tehran. Iran is starting work to install 6,000 new uranium-enriching centrifuges at its nuclear plant in Natanz, Ahmadinejad announced on Tuesday, according to state media.
Years of negotiations with Iran and three sets of United Nations Security Council sanctions later, Iran President Ahmadinejad announced today that Iran will be installing 6,000 new uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz.
Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Tuesday.
Iran already has about 3,000 centrifuges operating in Natanz, and the new announcement is seen as a show of defiance of international demands to halt a nuclear program the United States and its allies say is aimed at building nuclear weapons.
“The president announced the start of the phase of installing 6,000 new centrifuges in Natanz,” state television reported.
Centrifuges are machines that can enrich uranium to a low level to produce nuclear fuel or a high level for use in a weapon. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and solely focused on the production of energy.
Ahmadinejad made Tuesday’s announcement as he toured the Natanz facility in central Iran. State television also quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that “other activities have been carried out” in Natanz that he would announce later Tuesday.
The president’s trip was scheduled to coincide with Iran’s National Day of Nuclear Technology, marking the second anniversary of Iran’s first enrichment of uranium.
Ahmadinejad is widely expected to confirm for the first time that Iran has installed hundreds of more sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium faster.
The workhorse of Iran’s enrichment program is the P-1 centrifuge, which is run in cascades of 164 machines. But Iranian officials confirmed in February that they had started using the IR-2 centrifuge that can churn out enriched uranium at more than double the rate.
So, you have many more Iran nuclear centrifuges and more sophisticated ones that enrich uranium faster despite the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
Here are the United Nations Security Council resolutions that Iran has defied (in pdf format):
It looks to Flap that the Bush administration, woefully unsuccessful in convincing China, and Russia to stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons has decided to punt the issue to the next President while bolstering missile defense to protect America from ICBM’s launched from Iran. A Cold War containment strategy is the holding pattern for now.
Is this why Europe is now interested in an American deployed anti-missile defense, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic?
You bet……
Previous:
Iran Nuclear Watch: United Nations Security Council Sanctions Round 3
Iran Nuclear Watch: Ahmadinejad – Iran is Number One
Iran Nuclear Watch: IAEA’s ElBaradei’s Agenda Criticized
Iran Nuclear Watch: IAEA Report – Iran Continues Uranium Enrichment
Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Pursuing a Secret Nuclear Program
Iran Nuclear Watch: Cancerous Israel to Vanish Soon
Iran Nuclear Watch: U.S. Intel – Iran Directly Engaged in Manufacture of a Nuclear Weapon
Iran Nuclear Watch: Uranium Gas Goes Into Iran’s Centrifuges
Iran Nuclear Watch: Israel – Iran Moving Forward with Nuclear Weapons
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Iran Watch: Student Jailed Over Ahmadinejad Protest
Babak Zamanian, a student at Amir Kabir, in Tehran, is on crutches because of a beating earlier by supporters of President Ahmadinejad.
Remember the December 2006 Iranian student protests against Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Iranian students have disrupted a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a prestigious Tehran university, setting fire to his picture and heckling him.
“Some students chanted radical slogans and inflamed the atmosphere of the meeting†at the Amir Kabir University, said the semi-official Fars news agency on Monday, which is close to Ahmadinejad.
Well, Iran and Ahmadinejad strikes back today with the sentencing of one of the protesting students to one year in jail.
Guess that will l’arn ya……..
Babak Zamanian “was given the maximum sentence for acting against national security by propaganda against the system, which is punishable by three months to one year in jail,” lawyer Behnam Daraiezadeh said.
He said he would appeal the verdict against Zamanian, who was arrested in April 2007 and released on a 500-million rial (53,000 dollars) bail.
Zamanian was a student in Amir Kabir university, one of the most political hotbeds in the capital, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was heckled during a 2006 speech to students.
Three other Amir Kabir students have been sentenced to jail terms of up to three years on charges of publishing anti-Islamic images in four reformist student newspapers.
Ahmad Ghassaban, Ehsan Mansouri and Majid Tavakoli denied the charges, accusing political foes of planting the images in the newspapers to discredit them. They are still being held despite expectations they would be released on bail.
Guess you better take your protests off-shore if you want to protest in the land of brotherly love – Iran.
A student shouts slogans to disrupt a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Amirkabir university in Tehran December 11, 2006. Dozens of Iranian students burned pictures of President Ahmadinejad and threw firecrackers in an effort to disrupt his speech at a university on Monday, a presidential office spokesman said. It was first time the president, elected in a landslide in June 2005, had faced such open hostility at a public event.
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Ahmadinejad – Iran is Number One
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Iraq War Watch: Iran’s Ahmadinejad Says America Should Leave Iraq
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, and his Iraqi counterpart Jalal, Talabani, right, sit as their ministers sign bilateral agreements in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 3, 2008. Ahmadinejad on Monday dismissed U.S. accusations that his country is training extremists and demanded that the Americans withdraw from Iraq.
Iran’s President Mahmound Ahmadinejad launched a barrage of criticism against the United States and the Iraq War.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday dismissed U.S. accusations that his country is training extremists and demanded that the Americans withdraw from Iraq.
Speaking in a nearly hour-long news conference at the end of an unprecedented visit to Iraq, Ahmadinejad said the U.S. allegations — that Iran is training Shiite militants who target American troops and Muslim rivals — don’t matter to the Iranians.
“Of course American officials make such remarks and such statements, and we do not care … because they make statements on the basis of erroneous information,” said the hard-line Iranian leader, who smiled through much of the session. “We cannot count on what they say.”
He said the foreign presence in Iraq was an “insult to the regional nations and a humiliation.”
Of course, Iran wants to be the BIG DOG and exert HEGEMONY in the region. But, most Iraqis are not Persians and have fought Iran for decades.
So, why does Iraq allow Ahmadinejad a platform to attack America?
It is obvious. They are playing both sides against the middle.
The United States will long have a presence in Iraq no matter which political party wins the Presidency in November – to fight Iran’s hegemony and its goal to dominate the Middle East.
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Ahmadinejad – Iran is Number One
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seen here in January 2008, has declared that Iran is the world’s “number one” power. Ahmadinejad made the statement as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy.
Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran is the “number one world power.”
“Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
“Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place,” he added in the address broadcast live on state television.
Ahmadinejad’s comments come amid renewed Western efforts on the UN Security Council to agree a third package of sanctions against Tehran over its refusal to suspend sensitive nuclear activities.
When the world understands that Iran should NOT possess nuclear weapons because of their “unbalanced” leaders” the safer the world will be.
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Iran Nuclear Watch: IAEA’s ElBaradei’s Agenda Criticized
Iran Nuclear Watch: IAEA Report – Iran Continues Uranium Enrichment
Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Pursuing a Secret Nuclear Program
Iran Nuclear Watch: Cancerous Israel to Vanish Soon
Iran Nuclear Watch: U.S. Intel – Iran Directly Engaged in Manufacture of a Nuclear Weapon
Iran Nuclear Watch: Uranium Gas Goes Into Iran’s Centrifuges
Iran Nuclear Watch: Israel – Iran Moving Forward with Nuclear Weapons
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Pursuing a Secret Nuclear Program
Alireza Jafarzadeh, a member of the foreign affairs committee of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), shows a map at a news conference in Brussels, February 20, 2008, of what NCRI says is a clandestine nuclear site in Iran.
An exiled Iranian opposition group today claimed that Iran is accelerating its nuclear weapons program, despite what the United States National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has said.
“The Iran regime entered a new phase in its nuclear project,” said Mohammad Mohaddessin, a representative of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.
He claimed that, for the first time, Tehran had established a command and control center to work on a nuclear bomb and that southeast of the capital it was also setting up a center to produce warheads.
Iran has steadfastly denied it is working to obtain a nuclear bomb, arguing that its nuclear program is purely civilian. In December, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran halted a nuclear weapons development program in 2003 because of international pressure.
Mohaddessin told a news conference that Iran had closed down one center only to open another later with the same purpose. He called the U.S. report “not accurate.”
In the meantime, on the eve of a new report of the IAEA, Iran President Ahmadinejad ups the rhetoric about its nuclear soverign rights and Israel.
Key graphs from Ahmadinejad:
- On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad defiantly vowed that Iran has no intention of ceding to the main demand of the UN Security Council that it suspends uranium enrichment operations and proclaimed the country had defeated world powers.“With the help of God, the Iranian nation with its unity, faith and determination stood and defeated the world powers and brought them to their knees,” he told cheering crowds in the speech.”World powers should know the Iranian nation considers nuclear energy its undeniable and definite right and will not accept any imposition or any additional cruel rules.”
- “World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region,” Ahmadinejad told a rally in the southern city of Bandar Abbas broadcast on state television.The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari, on Monday had predicted Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah would destroy Israel in the near future.
Look for more rhetoric and spin by the Iranians to provide cover for their friends and economic partners China and Russia in the United Nations Security Council. The prospect for ANY meaningful sanctions coming from the UNSC is doubtful.
But, will the United States and EU decide upon their own course of action? Finally?
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Cancerous Israel to Vanish Soon
Iran Nuclear Watch: U.S. Intel – Iran Directly Engaged in Manufacture of a Nuclear Weapon
Iran Nuclear Watch: Uranium Gas Goes Into Iran’s Centrifuges
Iran Nuclear Watch: Israel – Iran Moving Forward with Nuclear Weapons
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Ahmadinejad Boasts of 3,000 Uranium Enrichment Centrifuges
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech during a visit the Natanz uranium enrichment facility some 300 kms, south of the capital Tehran, in April. Iran has built a landmark 3,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment, Ahmadinejad announced 07 November 2007, despite international pressure to halt its atomic work.
If Ahmadinejad is to be believed, Iran NOW possesses the capability of producing a nuclear weapon within a year.
Will the United States continue to fiddle around with economic sanctions? Or will Israel ACT?
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Iran and North Korea Targeted by American Nuclear Weapons
Iran Nuclear Watch: Are the Latest U.S. Sanctions the Last Stop Before Military Action?
Technorati Tags: Iran
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Cheney Warns Iran as Larijani Resigns
US Vice President Dick Cheney speaks to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy annual Weinberg Founders Conference in Lansdowne, Virginia. Cheney said the United States and its allies would not permit Iran to get nuclear weapons and warned of “serious consequences” if it continues to enrich uranium.
Cheney: US will not let Iran go nuclear
The United States and other nations will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.
“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions,” Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies.
He said Iran’s efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that “the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time.”
If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are prepared to take action. The vice president made no specific reference to military action.
“We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Previously, Iran played its hand by the resignation of its nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani.
Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani speaks with journalists at a news conference in Tehran in this September 12, 2007 file photo. Larijani, who quit as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, and his replacement will go to talks with the European Union’s Javier Solana to try to defuse a row with the West, the Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.
Iran’s nuclear negotiator resigns
Iran’s chief negotiator with the West over Tehran’s nuclear programme, Ali Larijani, has resigned.
A government spokesman said Mr Larijani had repeatedly offered his resignation and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had finally accepted it.
Mr Larijani had differences with the president over how to proceed with the negotiations, correspondents say.
The spokesman, Gholam Hossein Elham, said a deputy foreign minister, Saeed Jalili, would replace Mr Larijani in time for a meeting on Tuesday with the European Union’s foreign policy head Javier Solana.
The BBC’s Jon Leyne, in Tehran, says Mr Larijani has had differences with President Ahmadinejad over how to proceed with negotiations over the country’s nuclear programme.
Obviously there was a difference as to proceed with Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the European Union and the United Nations over uranium enrichment. Also, obvious is that Iran’s Mullahs prefer confrontation rather then negotiations. But, this is NO great news.
The new nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is a hard line supporter of President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Mullah leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister Saeed Jalili attends a meeting in Tehran, February 2007. Iran insisted its policy in the nuclear crisis with the West would not change after the sudden resignation of chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, amid fears it would take an even tougher line.
So, was Larijani’s resignation a result of the refusal of Vladimir Putin’s latest offer?
Probably, or it could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Iran and the Mullahs do NOT want to negotiate. They COVET nuclear weapons and will do anything to posses one.
Vice President Cheney again restates American policy that Iran will not obtain nuclear weapon capability.
But, will President Bush “PUSH” the issue or allow Iran to continue to stall?
Stay tuned…….
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Russia’s Putin Visits Iran
Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Sanctions Delayed AGAIN
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Technorati Tags: IranAhmadinejadVladimir Putin, Russia
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Iran Nuclear Watch: Russia’s Putin Visits Iran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands upon Putin’s arrival in Tehran. Putin backed Iran’s right to nuclear energy and argued against military action, during the first visit to the country by a Kremlin chief since World War II.
Putin Visits Iran, Sends Warnings to US
Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said nations shouldn’t pursue oil pipeline projects in the area if they weren’t backed by regional powers.
At a summit of the five nations that border the inland Caspian Sea, Putin said none of the nations’ territory should be used by any outside countries for use of military force against any nation in the region. It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.
“We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state,” Putin said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also underlined the need to keep outsiders away from the Caspian.
No surprise that Putin is snuggling up to Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Mullahs. Putin wants control and to recreate the Soviet empire of the Cold War era. Iran wants an oil-exporting partner with military hardware to exert hegemony over the Middle East.
So, what should the United States do?- Pursue Missile defense, increase operational capability
- Kick Russia out of the G-8, making the association the G-7
- Increase defense spending, particularly for the Navy. Build more ships and submarines.
- Increase economic and political sanctions on Iran outside the United Nations
Just to name a few……..
Previous:Iran Nuclear Watch: Iran Sanctions Delayed AGAIN
Iran Nuclear Watch: Nuclear Issue Closed
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Technorati Tags: IranAhmadinejadVladimir Putin, Russia