A Day Of Infamy

The US has suffered its biggest-ever foreign policy defeat at the hands of the CIA working in concert with the Mullahs, the UN, and Russia. In consequence a nuclear exchange within the next 10 years is now almost certain.

The defeat:

Iran halted a secret nuclear-weapons program in 2003 under international pressure but still can produce a nuclear bomb by 2010 to 2015, according to a new U.S. intelligence estimate released yesterday.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a consensus of analysts at the CIA and 15 other agencies, reverses a 2005 estimate that said Iran was bent on building nuclear arms.

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear-weapons program,” a brief summary of the formerly classified estimate said.

The winners:

A new U.S. intelligence review concluding Iran stopped developing an atomic weapons program in 2003 is a “declaration of victory” for Iran’s nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.

Others are celebrating too:

Iran has been “somewhat vindicated” by a new US intelligence review that concludes the nation stopped developing a nuclear weapons program in 2003, the head of the UN atomic watchdog agency said Wednesday.

International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohamed ElBaradei called the report a “sigh of relief” because its conclusions also jibe with the agency’s own findings.

Russia’s foreign minister, meanwhile, indicated that the U.S. report’s findings undermined Washington’s push for a new set of U.N. sanctions against Iran.

Serious sanctions against the Mullahs are now impossible, so they can import whatever German and Russian materials they need to accelerate their nuke program. And its inconceivable Bush 2.0 can now stop them militarily.

All of which would not matter if the CIA were telling the truth. But they aren’t.

The Iranians already have bomb designs (from the Chinese via AQ Khan) and missiles to deliver them onto Israel and most of Europe.

These designs don’t need “development”: one is a simple shotgun warhead similar to the Hiroshima bomb. Even in 1945, that was so simple that the US never bothered to test it, and modern designs are simpler and much lighter.

The other design uses implosion and some amount of boosting with neutron injection. That needs efficient explosive lensing to compress a sphere of uranium uniformly and quickly, and the recently-demonstrated Iranian efficiency in using EFPs to kill our troops confirms they’ve mastered this (it’s not hard).

There are some manufacturing hurdles, but nothing a well-equipped machine shop can’t handle.

If I were running this program, I’d have 20 weapons built and stored in safe places, awaiting the one missing component – weapons-grade enriched uranium.

Now, with the CIA, UN and Russia flying top cover, that’ll come soon.

Their prediction of “2010 to 2015” is ridiculous, since weapon availability is gated exclusively on enriched uranium availability, and that depends on how many centrifuges the Mullahs spin. That number just went up, since the Germans and Russians don’t have to worry about sanctions and so will supply all the centrifuge components the Mullahs can afford – and with oil over $90, that’s a lot.

With the US out of the game, Israel is going to have to face this alone, since 20 Hiroshima-sized nukes will wipe it off the map (although it’ll probably take Iran and Syria with it).

The Mullahs, the UN and and Russia will now work to block Israeli preemption, but they’ll likely fail.

However, the US intelligence and foreign policy establishment that staged this coup has real power over Israel, so if I were the IDF, I’d shut the US out of my planning loop forthwith.

But Israel is tiny, and its enemies may succeed, so we in the West must start planning on how we can survive a MidEast nuclear exchange, which may spill over into Europe. That won’t be easy – just a hundred nuclear weapons detonating in the MidEast will wreak enormous damage to our network-based, globalized economies.