LA
Times: Experts Say There’s No Imminent Threat of a Nuclear Iran
Contrary
to hyperbolic rhetoric and threats of preemptive attack from the US
and Israel, experts still agree there is no imminent prospect of a
nuclear-armed Iran, reports the Los Angeles Times.
3
August, 2012
As
has been known for several years but only rarely acknowledged in the
mainstream press, US intelligence has concluded that Iran does not
have a nuclear weapons program and has so far demonstrated no
intention of starting one. Recent visits to by Obama administration
officials and the Romney campaign have renewed Israeli claims that
‘the window is closing’ on blocking an Iranian nuclear weapon.
“This
is a window that has been closing for 15 years now, and it’s always
imminently about to close,” Jamal Abdi, policy director for
the National Iranian American Council told the Los
Angeles Times.
“I don’t
see any particular breakthroughs in the Iranian program,” says
Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, a nonproliferation scholar at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies. “It’s been on a pretty steady
course,” and “there is technically no urgency to” prepare for
an attack on Iran.
“According
to the U.S. intelligence community, the Iranian leadership hasn’t
even made the decision to weaponize their program,” said Alireza
Nader, senior policy analyst on Iran for Rand Corp. “They’ve been
creating the technical know-how and the infrastructure, but they
haven’t made that decision, and there is much more time than the
Israelis portray there to be.”
While
most of the coverage of the debate on Iran fails to emphasize the
complete lack of a weapons program or of any real security threat to
the US, some reports have covered this. In February the New
York Times ran
a front page story entitled “U.S.
Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.”
It reported: “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are
broadly consistent with a 2007
intelligence finding that
concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear
weapons program
years earlier. The officials said that assessment was largely
reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it
remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.”
Again
in March, they reported “top
administration officials have said that Iran still has not decided to
pursue a weapon, reflecting the intelligence community’s secret
analysis.” Another in the Los
Angeles Times was
similarly headlined, “U.S.
does not believe Iran is trying to build nuclear bomb.”
The
pundits and politicians engage in systematic threat inflation on
Iran. Their primary aim is to undermine
the regime;
they’re not concerned about some imaginary nuclear weapons program.
Alon
Ben-Meir, a professor of international relations at New York
University’s Center for Global Affairs, says Israeli bluster is not
all talk, necessarily. ”I don’t think Israel is bluffing
entirely. There is an element of exaggerating its readiness to act
and likelihood of winning. But many advisors to Prime Minister
Netanyahu are saying that if he waits six or eight months, they may
end up unable to do anything significant in terms of damage” to
nuclear facilities that Iran has been moving underground to protect
them from airstrikes, he said.
For
LA Times article GO
HERE
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