Sunday, November 06, 2011

Iranium

Headlines in Israel and around the world are discussing whether or not Israel will attack Iran to stop its development of a nuclear weapon. This public debate was triggered when several Israeli politicians and former security experts leaked information to the press about current dicussions in the Israeli Cabinet regarding such an Israeli attack. In a poll the majority of Israelis support such an attack but only by a narrow margin.

The Iranian FM issued a statement saying that if Israel did attack Iranian nuclear sites their response would be "crushing." This is the big problem, will other nations support any such Israel strike and what would be the Iranian reponse. Although any actual attack might be a surprise for them, they are well prepared, having diversified and buried much of their nuclear facilities. Also, they have Iranian proxies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, both of which have tens of thousands of rockets that they could unleash against Israel, as well as large permanent armies of 8-10,000 men each trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards with plans to invade Israel.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ia about to issue a new Report on Iran, that documents Iran's lack of cooperation with the IAEA and its deliberate attempts to hide aspects of its nuclear program. They have detected the building of a large explosion testing facility as well as the development of a computer program to simulate atomic explosions. This will be the first Report on this subject issued under the new IAEA leader Japanese Yukiya Amano. Although the Report apparently fails to draw the obvious conclusions from the data, nevertheless it is more up-front than previous IAEA reports issued under the former Egyptian chief El-Baradei.

Statements by US officials indicate that they are against such an attack, preferring to use sanctions. But, Israel thinks that the sanctions that are in place are ineffective in stopping the Iranian regime from reaching its goal of developing the nuclear bomb and the means to deliver it with long-range missiles. The question is whether or not the Israeli officials leaked the information about Israeli plans because they genuinely oppose such an attack or as a means to initiate a world-wide debate in order either to facilitate stiffer sanctions against Iran or to indicate that Israel is seriously considering such an attack. In either case, the fact is that Iran is drawing closer to actually having such a nuclear device and Israel cannot live with the constant threat of it being used against us. At least the world cannot say it wasn't warned.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home