SO, IRAN WILL HAVE A BOMB WHEN?

Back in August 2005 Dafna Linza writing in the ‘Washington Post’, reported that Iran would be ten years away from having a nuclear bomb. The report was based on the reckoning of the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Yet today Israeli Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon reckons that Iran is less than two years way from having a nuclear weapon.

So, according to Ya’alon, Iran is ahead of schedule by some five years. This is confusing because the last NIE, released in November of 2007, stated that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The same report also stated that if Iran were to resume their program at that point then they might have a weapon by 2010-2015.

German online magazine ‘Spiegel’ seems to think Iran could have a weapon by the end of this year while Ha’aretz reports that ex-Iraq Survey Group member David Key thinks it’ll be 2 to 5 years before Iran has a bomb. However, back in May of this year, the ‘Jerusalem Post’ reported an Israeli ‘senior defence official’ as saying that “Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year”, 2009.

Jerome Corsi, writing in World net daily, told his readers that “Iran will have enough highly enriched uranium to make one or more simple gun-type atomic bombs by the end of this year”. That was in April 2006.

I could go on and on linking to stories that all make some claim about how far away Iran is from building a nuclear bomb. Neocons for years in their various magazines have been scaremongering about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon ever since the US-sponsored Shah got the boot out of Iran way back in October 1979. The neocons were saying then that Iran was only a few years away from having a bomb.

The one thing all these articles have in common is a total lack of any evidence whatsoever that Iran even has a nuclear plant up and going yet, let alone a nuclear weapons program. Despite nearly thirty years of propaganda and rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear weapon program there has been not one tiny piece of evidence that even remotely suggests that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

Now, if you were to ask me about Israel on the other hand…

Iran is not an existential threat to Israel; however, Israel, the only country in the Middle East that does have nuclear weapons, is an existential threat to Iran. It’s something that should be kept in mind next time one reads that Iran will have a bomb any day soon now. The reality is Israel has several hundred of them right now.