Iran: The stand off continues.
The face off between the international community and Iran continues today as Mohamed ElBaradei flies into Tehran to demand that Iran stop enriching Uranium. It's a fools errand as Ahmadinejad has already announced that Iran has succeeded in enriching uranium to the 3.5 per cent level required for fuel in a civilian power plant and has refused a UN demand to resume its suspension of enrichment-related activities. Weapons- grade uranium is enriched to 90 per cent or more.
Condoleeza Rice, predictably, called for the international community to take, "strong steps" to bring Iran back into line with UN wishes, led by demands from the US, who fear the Iranians are attempting to build a nuclear bomb, a charge the Iranians have always denied.
The enrichment of uranium is Iran's right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. However experts are saying that Iran is still many years away from acquiring a nuclear capability.
Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions, even as a senior Iranian official said Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium for fuel.
The official, Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's atomic energy organization, said Iran would push quickly to put 54,000 centrifuges on line — a vast increase from the 164 the Iranians said Tuesday that they had used to enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.
Still, nuclear analysts called the claims exaggerated. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020.
As I pointed out here Scott Ritter, one of the few people proved right about Saddam's lack of WMD before the last American misadventure in the Middle East has said, "Where are they going to get the Uranium Hexafluoride? They've got 100kgms provided by China, that's enough to do low level testing; but to actually run a cascade that enriches Uranium, Iran will have to use it's own indiginous supply of Uranium ore which are heavily contaminated with the element molybdenum.
Iran can't seperate molybdenum from it's uranium. So, if they run UF6 uranium hexafluoride through a cascade, they will destroy the cascade.
This is known. Everybody knows this."
The Americans, who appear to be spoiling for a fight on this issue, are unlikely to persuade Russia and China to take the kind of actions that the Americans would like, as the rest of the world does not share the US's estimation of the imminence of the threat.
So the horrible stand off continues, with all of us wondering what Bush will do when his UN route proves fruitless.
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