Iran says it may need to enrich uranium to 56%

Iran would enrich uranium to 56 percent in order to fuel boats and submarines if it needed to operate such vessels, the head of the country’s nuclear agency said Tuesday.

International treaties forbid countries from enriching uranium to 20% or higher, since that type of enrichment is considered too high for civilian usage and indicates it could be for military purposes.

Think tanks make case for Obama administration’s policy shift on Iran

Two long-time left-leaning think tanks lead the charge in turning a blind eye to a real threat.

WASHINGTON — Two leading U.S. think tanks have dismissed a military option against Iran and are in line with the Obama administration’s push for a U.S. reconciliation with Iran and acceptance of its nuclear program.

The man who turned Iran nuclear

In a rare interview, the man dubbed “the father of Iran’s nuclear programme” tells how the project began under the Shah, who wanted to leave the option for a bomb open.

Now in his 80s, Akhbar Etemad remembers all too clearly the pressure the Americans tried to apply to him when he was head of Iran’s nuclear programme between 1974 and 1978.

Mr Etemad was the president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation and it was under him that the country’s nuclear project began and flourished.

Germany tracks flow of nuke material to Iran through Turkey

Turkey has been linked to Iran’s efforts to smuggle material for its nuclear program.

Germany has determined that Teheran established more than a dozen fronts in Turkey to transport dual-use components for Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama intimates US to strike Iran in a year if diplomacy fails

Iran can produce a nuclear weapon in just over a year and diplomatic efforts have just less than that to halt Iran’s drive to the bomb, US President Barack Obama said Thursday, intimating that should diplomatic efforts fail this year or early next year, America will be forced to carry out military action against Iran.

Contrary to statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the moment of truth concerning Iran’s nuclear program was spring 2013, Obama said that the US estimates that Iran can produce a bomb only in about a year given its current rate of progress.

“There is a window, not an infinite period of time, a window of time where we can resolve this diplomatically,” Obama said. ”Right now we think that it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but we obviously don’t want to cut it too close.”

‘Nuclear Iran would permanently change region’

Italy’s foreign minister on Wednesday said that a nuclear Iran would permanently change the political landscape of the Middle East and urged immediate action to prevent a regional nuclear arms race.

Speaking at the 2013 Herzliya Conference in the eponymous Tel Aviv suburb, Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata said that even if a nuclear-armed Iran were to act rationally, it would still constitute an unacceptable international threat.

U.S. Warned: Al-Qaida Hit-Squads Coming

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander has warned America and Europe that al-Qaida operatives will soon attack them.

And a source in the Islamic regime’s Intelligence Ministry told WND that another terror team is about to enter the United States. Should the West not accept Iran’s rights to its nuclear program within six months, the terrorists will attack, he said.

The potential targets in the U.S. include high-voltage towers to create blackouts, cell towers, water supplies, public transportation and various buildings belonging to the Defense Department and military.

Iran’s Ahmadinejad seeks strategic axis with Egypt

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the first visit to Cairo by an Iranian leader in more than three decades, called for a strategic alliance with Egypt and said he had offered the cash-strapped Arab state a loan, but drew a cool response.

…

“We must all understand that the only option is to set up this alliance because it is in the interests of the Egyptian and Iranian peoples and other nations of the region,” the official MENA news agency quoted him in remarks to Egyptian journalists published on Wednesday.

Iran sends monkeys into space – so can place nukes anywhere on earth

As pointed out in the article, it has also been discussed in previous posts here, that Iran masks their advancements in nuclear weapons in the name of science. In the future, it also shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Iranian regime is already in possession of nuclear weapons and that these ‘advancements’ are to perfect what they already have. Western intelligence agencies, sadly, have a recent history of being caught off guard and behind the times.

Iran will parade its ballistic rocket achievements by sending monkeys into space next month. Hamid Fazeli, head of the country’s space agency said Tuesday, Jan. 15 that the launch would be part of the celebrations leading up to the 34th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Feb. 10 and part of the program for putting humans in orbit in 2020.

Five monkeys in a capsule named Pishgam (Pioneer) will be carried into orbit by a Kavoshgar rocket and orbit earth 120-130 kilometers in space, he said. Western space experts are dubious about Iran’s ability to send a capsule into orbit and expect the monkeys to come down to earth quite soon.

Obama planning direct talks with Iran; US will strike in 4-5 months if they don’t bear fruit, Israeli TV report says

Washington has decided to negotiate directly with Iran, and will resort to military force in four or five months if diplomacy can’t persuade Tehran to relinquish its alleged atomic weapons program, Israel’s Channel 10 News reported on Tuesday night, quoting a senior American official.

Iranian scientists running simulations of large nuclear weapon

Diagram suggests Tehran’s planned bomb would be three times stronger than Hiroshima blast

VIENNA (AP) — Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.

The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon. The officials provided the diagram only on condition that they and their country not be named.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog — reported last year that it had obtained diagrams indicating that Iran was calculating the “nuclear explosive yield” of potential weapons. A senior diplomat who is considered neutral on the issue confirmed that the graph obtained by the AP was indeed one of those cited by the IAEA in that report. He spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

The undated diagram that was given to the AP by officials of a country critical of Iran’s

atomic program allegedly calculating the explosive force of a nuclear weapon. The curve

peaks at just above 50 kilotons at around 2 microseconds, reflecting the full force of the

weapon being modeled. The Farsi writing at the bottom translates “changes in output and

in energy released as a function of time through power pulse” (photo credit: AP)

An electromagnetic pulse attack — the ‘other’ Iranian nuclear threat

Just what might happen if the Iranians got their hands on a nuclear weapon? Would they fire it at an Israeli city, causing tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties? Or would they use it as a geopolitical weapon, seeking to dominate the Middle East and forcing the hand of Western powers, either subtly or by overtly threatening death and destruction to those who fail to heed their dictates?

While political scientists and world leaders have debated the likelihood of those two possibilities, there is a third plausible scenario: The use of a nuclear weapon by Iran to carry out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against Israel, the US, or Europe. Such an attack could cause severe damage to the electrical grid in the targeted nations, to the extent that the routines of daily life — centered around the use of electrical power — could be halted, for a short or even long period of time.