IAEA reports that Iran has fewer than 2,000 centrifuges divided into 12 cascades of 164 machines each at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. The 19 August report, revealed by Reuters this morning, shows Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below the levels claimed by the Iranian officials.
Earlier this year, President Ahmadinejad had claimed that the Natanz program has reached “an industrial stage.” Iranian officials have also said that their goal was to install 50,000 centrifuges which would have made the program operating at an industrial scale. Exaggerations by Iranian officials have not been explained, but they are eerily similar to Sadam’s claims of WMD.
2 comments:
People are quite simply wrong when they accuse anyone of lying about the Iraqi WMD intelligence. It is a popular belief among Iraqi war critics and democrats in general, but it simply is not true. The fact is that even the best analysts of the world's most successful intelligence agencies can and do (at least occasionally) read the evidence incorrectly. That is not a lie, nor can any statements made by their leaders that may have been based on such conclusions be considered an outright lie. The real question should be "how did so many of the world's great intelligence agencies get it wrong?"
I believe that the answer is threefold. First of all, answers can be found in Saddam's paranoid logic. He believed that it was better to risk the wrath of the world's greatest superpowers, than to let his neighbors know that he was not as militarily capable as he had been. Secondly, vast amounts of chemical and biological weapons were never accounted for by Iraq or the United Nations. Last is the basic fact that all of the intelligence agencies around the world were saying pretty much the same thing. It would seem that the agencies were vetting information through each other rather than vetting the sources of the information itself.
As far as any UN reports are concerned, they have been wrong more often than any intelligence agency could ever be accused of with any sincerity. After the first gulf war, it was found that rather than the years away from concluding Iraqi WMD programs as claimed by the United Nations, Saddam was literally within 12 months from finishing some of his most deadly weapons development programs, which included nuclear weapons.
At the time, Saddam’s own disinformation machine was in high gear shouting the UN's reports to the heavens in the hopes that he could stall any definitive actions until his weapons programs were completed. Today we see the Iranian mouthpieces doing exactly the same thing. The simple and deadly fact of the matter is that they only need one nuclear device to change the world in a most horrific and devastating way.
The United Nations does not represent the United States let alone any other government in the world, nor does it have any incentive to protect the United States or it's citizens and the UN has in fact proven itself time and again to be completely ineffective when it comes to accurately gaging the capabilities and or intentions of hostile regimes.
Western leaders on the other hand have every incentive to be as forthright and as honest as prudence and national security allows. Western leaders and the citizens they represent are not the fools Iran would have us to be. We know with little doubt or uncertainty that when a hostile, terrorist regime such as can be found in Tehran says openly that they are working towards the capability of producing weapons grade materials on an industrial scale and furthermore that they intend to destroy Israel, and then add to that the massive construction projects and security programs currently underway in their country, perhaps, just possibly, they might be a threat.
Thanks for your posting. There’s is not much doubt that the Iranians are after developing nuclear weapons. I’ve been reporting on this subject since I started this blog.
The reference on this post in the delays in operationalizing centrifuges in sufficient numbers required for “industrial stage,” and, more importantly, to their exaggerations regarding the stage of their development.
We have seen time and again exaggerations by leaders in the Middle East with disastrous consequences for their very own countries. I had mentioned Saddam’s WMD example. Another classic example was Nasser’s claims of superior military capabilities of the Arab countries which led to their devastating defeat in 1967.
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