Iran has no nuclear bomb program

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Ehud Barak Admits Iran Has Defensive Posture, No Weapons Program

John Glaser at antiwar.com

The most important and most frequently ignored distinction in the debate about Iran and its nuclear program is that Iran’s current postures are defensive in nature, not offensive. Right-wing pundits constantly harangue about Iran’s supposed intentions to annihilate Israel, wipe Israel off the map, and so on – and this, they claim, is why it’s so important to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. This assumes Iran would want a nuclear weapon for offensive purposes, which is incorrect.

Now, US and Israeli intelligence agencies agree that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. But there are aspects of the program, like increased enrichment in recent years, that is meant to place Iran in a technical range of capability, to produce a weapon on short notice if they decide to do so. 

As has been discussed at Antiwar.com for years, Iran is operating under constant threat from the US and Israel. 

The US has Iran militarily surrounded, 

has conducted covert attacks along with Israel, 

constantly threatens Iran with preemptive military strike, 

and is heaping harsh economic sanctions. 

In this environment, Iran has tried to abstain from developing nuclear weapons while having the know-how needed to get there; this essentially is an attempt to have a deterrent without actually having a deterrent. They don’t get in trouble for having a weapon, but they are able to ward off attack or invasion.

(Well this is pure conjecture, written as absolute certainty---if Iran does have a "SURGE PROGRAM" where exactly is the proof? The mullahs have been in power for 33 years, and doesn't take 33 years to get a basic "surge program" up and running.....many states around the world have "surge programs"...maybe two dozen or more, who are after all trying to copy something that is 67 years old, AND whose technology is now open knowledge and in the public domain. 

The fact is the mullahs don't even have a "surge program", otherwise if the intention was there, it would have been ready by the late 1980's when Saddam was using chemical weapons against thousands upon thousands of Iranian troops with the aid of WESTERN COMPANIES, and fired 800 SCUD missiles into Iran....The maximum motivational period to have at least a surge program had passed. 

The arguments offered by John Glaser is half truth' liberal clap trap, which in part justifies greater scrutiny of Iran then is already justified either by the IAEA of nine years of very intrusive inspections, or the USA/Israel overt aggression based on such an allegation. It leaves open the atmosphere of suspicion, and what ifs...in fact no better than the NIE 2007 report which falsely stated that the Iranians HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONIZATION PROGRAM, but that it some how mysterious ceased to exist in 2003....presumably because Iran was scared that the USA had invaded Iraq? AND that Iran would be next?

That's why Iran spends less than 3% of their GDP on defense, as a pose to Israels near 8% and Saddam's Iraq of 25% in 1990????!!!!!

Iran has no nuclear weapons program, period 

But Jew Jew should know that if Iran is attacked, based on the premise that mullah Iran is about to go nuclear, some of  those 40 states with "Surge programs" mentioned on the Seattle rag, will convert to full nuke bomb programs....and no amount of clever snake eye ops such as those in Japan or Saudi Arabia

prevent a good deal of them realizing their targets. Now some of these states may already be Israeli friendly, some of them may not be.

The mullahs might ALSO rethink their present peaceful trajectory over civilian nuclear power. Got to remember that when the CIA brought these mullahs into power in 1979...the first thing the mullahs did was shut down the $90 billion nuclear power program of the Shah, AND close ALL universities for 3 years, AND all research facilities.

Far greater military effort of unknown quantity and quality will have to be expended trying to prevent a real live nuclear program over many years in Iran, than is now over a non-existent one....if Iran is attacked.

It would be supremely ironical if it was snake eyes paranoiac ISRAEL, which eventually persuaded these CIA puppets to go for a full nuclear weapons program 33 years after coming to power.....along with a couple of other states in the Greater Middle East...and the world)

As renowned international relations theorist Kenneth N. Waltz recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Such a breakout capability might satisfy the domestic political needs of Iran’s rulers by assuring hard-liners that they can enjoy all the benefits of having a bomb (such as greater security) without the downsides (such as international isolation and condemnation).”

This distinction is almost always ignored by the pundits and the politicians, despite its supreme importance. But now, one of the most reckless hawks on Iran, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, has acknowledged this distinction out loud. Appearing on CNN (via Micah Zenko), Barak admitted that “[Israel and the US] both know that Khamenei did not yet ordered, actually, to give a weapon, but that he is determined to deceit and defy the whole world (He needs English lessons....or he should speak Hebrew+translator, no wait, that will make him sound even more foreign and alien....Netanyahu is good, as he has adopted a good American accent).” Wolf Blitzer asked, “What does that mean, that the ayatollah has not given the order to build a nuclear bomb?” Barak replied:

It’s something technical. He did not tell his people start and build it — a weapon on — an explodable device. We think that we understand why he does not give this order.

He believes that he is penetrated through our intelligence and he strongly feels that if he tries to order, we will know it, we and you and some other intelligence services will know about it and it might end up with a physical action against it.

So he prefers to, first of all, make sure that through redundancy, through an accumulation of more lowly enriched uranium, more medium level enriched uranium and more centrifuges and more sites, better protection, that he can reach a point, which I call the zone of immunity, beyond which Israel might not be technically capable of launching a surgical operation.

Here it is admitted that Iran is thinking rationally and defensively. 

The real concern, Barak says, is allowing Iran to enter a “zone of immunity” wherein it can deter attack or invasion. 

How dare the ayatollahs deprive Washington and Tel Aviv of the right to attack a weak and defensive Iran!

The whole story about how ‘we need to attack an aggressive Iran determined to get nuclear weapons’ falls apart under Barak’s admission above. 

First, if Iran has no nuclear weapons program (something admitted widely in US and Israeli officialdom), then there is no conceivable imminent threat and thus no attack is justified. 

If Iran is demonstrably intimidated by the threats from the US and Israel – that is, if it is acting defensively vis-a-vis its nuclear program – then current US/Israeli capabilities are proving sufficient to deter an Iranian attack whether it has a bomb or not (As Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate in February: Iran “is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict or launch a preemptive attack”), and thus an attack is not justified.

Finally, what the pro-war crowd can’t seem to grasp is that an attack on Iran would be most likely to push them towards reconstituting their nuclear weapons program. As Thomas Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under George H.W. Bush, warned recently:

[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding, which it has not yet done according to our intelligence, to make a nuclear weapon to seemingly defend itself under what might look to them and others to be an unprovoked attack.

Iran has great possibilities for asymmetrical reactions including against Israel through Hezbollah and Hamas who have accumulated a large number of missiles. [...] It is a series of potential escalatory possibilities that puts us deep in the potential for another land war in Asia, something that I think we’ve spent the last number of years trying to get out of.

This has been virtually confirmed after a classified war simulation held a few months back forecasted that a “strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States” and kill many, many people. 

As Ha’aretz reports, this Congressional Research Service report estimates that Iran could completely recover from a strike on its nuclear program within six months.

So, seriously, what is driving the ‘bomb Iran’ crowd at this point?

(Maybe as with so many subsequent wars in the past, it is the sheer momentum and irrational fear, along with paranoia....which cascades like a strong current into eventual war)

Update: One commenter has pointed out that having nuclear capability, or ‘know-how’ as I call it, is not an indication of any military dimension to Iran’s program. Indeed, in the same Foreign Affairs piece I quoted above, Ken Waltz explains, “[One] possible outcome is that Iran stops short of testing a nuclear weapon but develops a breakout capability, the capacity to build and test one quite quickly. Iran would not be the first country to acquire a sophisticated nuclear program without building an actual bomb. Japan, for instance, maintains a vast civilian nuclear infrastructure. Experts believe that it could produce a nuclear weapon on short notice.”