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Thursday, October 30, 2008

 

Iran Testing Nuke Methods Ahead of Testing Obama

Foreign Confidential....

Ahead of testing the appeasement-advocating Barack Obama (assuming, God forbid, that he wins the US Presidential election), Iran's monstrous, missile-mad mullahocracy has been testing ways of secretly expanding and accelerating its suspect nuclear program, according to intelligence experts. AP reports:

Iran has recently tested ways of recovering highly enriched uranium from waste reactor fuel in a covert bid to expand its nuclear program, according to an intelligence assessment made available to The Associated Press.

The intelligence, provided by a member of the 145-nation International Atomic Energy Agency, also says a report will soon be submitted to the Iranian leadership for a decision on whether to go ahead with the project.

The alleged tests loosely replicate Saddam Hussein's attempts to build the bomb nearly two decades ago. But experts question the conclusion by those providing the intelligence that Tehran, too, is trying to reprocess the fuel to make a nuclear weapon.
They note that the spent fuel at issue as the source of the enriched uranium is not enough to yield the approximately 30 kilograms (65 pounds)of weapons-grade material needed for one simple warhead.

Still, they say that the alleged experiment appears plausible — if not as a fast track to weapons capability then as an incremental step that could move it further along that path.

With Iran's nuclear program already under international scrutiny, any new efforts by Tehran to increase its nuclear expertise and its store of enriched uranium would set off alarm bells. The concerns would be particularly serious if that stock was highly enriched. The higher the enrichment the less time and effort it takes to reach the 90-percent level used in the fissile core of nuclear warheads.

The 3-page intelligence report, drawn from Iranian sources within the country, says the source material would be highly enriched — some at above 90 percent, the rest at 20 percent.

In contrast, Iran's enrichment program under constant IAEA monitoring has churned out material that is less than 5 percent enriched, in line with the fuel needs of modern reactors.

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