ISRAEL WINS 'NUKE WAR'

 

I like to know who funds these stupid warmongering studies? Are they tax deductible?

COULD DESTROY IRAN: STUDY

By ANDY SOLTIS

December 25, 2007 -- A doomsday war between nuclear-armed adversaries Iran and Israel would kill up to 28 million Iranians and destroy their nation, but the Jewish state might survive, according to a prestigious US think tank.

The nightmare "what if?" scenario concluded that Israel's state-of-the-art missile defense would intercept most of Iran's nuclear-tipped missiles.

That would limit Israel's deaths to as "few" as 200,000 - while its much more numerous and more powerful nukes would obliterate Iran, said the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term, though Israeli recovery is theoretically possible in population and economic terms," analyst Andrew Cordesman wrote.

The findings could cheer Israeli hawks who dispute the recent US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran is not seeking nukes.

But the study also indicates that Iran wouldn't use them even if it got them, because a war would lead to the same kind of "mutually assured destruction" that kept the US-Soviet Cold War from becoming hot.

"The 'War Game' paradox: The only way to win is not to play," the study concluded.

An exchange of nukes would last about 21 days and immediately kill 16 million to 28 million Iranians and 200,000 to 800,000 Israelis.

Long-term deaths, from the effects of radiation and other causes, were not estimated. The greater Iranian death toll is explained by several factors:

* Israeli bombs have a bigger bang. Israel has produced 1-megaton nukes, while Iran would be unable to produce anything more than 100 kilotons, a weapon with one-tenth the impact.

* Iran would have fewer than 50 nuclear weapons, while Israel would have more than 200.

* Israel also has an Arrow-2 missile defense, buttressed by US-made anti-missile weaponry. Iran has a limited missile defense.

* Israel's missiles would be more accurate, due to high-resolution satellite imagery.

If Syria joined its ally Iran in a wider war, it could attack Israel with mustard gas, nerve agents and anthrax in non-nuclear warheads.

That could kill another 800,000 Israelis, but in response, up to 18 million Syrians would die, the study found. With Post Wire Services

ISRAEL WINS 'NUKE WAR'

'Israel will attack Iran on its own' | Jerusalem Post

 'Israel will attack Iran on its own'

"I came back from a trip to Israel in November convinced that Israel would attack Iran," Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and senior adviser to three US presidents, George W. Bush among them, told the American Newsweek magazine in an article published Friday.

An IAF plane.
Photo: AP [file] , AP

Citing conversations he had in Israel with officials in Mossad and the Israeli defense establishment, Riedel concluded that "Israel is not going to allow its nuclear monopoly to be threatened."

While some US experts doubt Israel's ability to tackle Iran alone, David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, was quoted by Newsweek as saying that although information on the exact location of Iran's nuclear facility is incomplete, Israel's air strike on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility on September 6, widely discussed in foreign media outlets, could be seen as a test run for any future strike on Iran's facilities, as well as a direct warning to Teheran.

Riedel told the magazine his impression that Israel would venture a strike on Iran on its own was formed before the publication of the joint US intelligence agencies' report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). "This [the NIE] makes it [a strike on Iran] even more likely," he said.

Since the publication of the NIE, which reversed a previous American assessment by concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, leaders worldwide have been adjusting their publicly stated positions on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Even inside the US, President Bush attempted some damage control by stating a day after the report's publication that "Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous."

In Israel, responses to the report ranged from subtle criticism of the report's conclusions to outright slamming of the US intelligence community's capabilities, so much so that on last Sunday's cabinet meeting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed his ministers to refrain from commenting any further on the report.

In the international scene, Russia's decision to renew fuel shipments to Iran main nuclear facility at Bushehr was interpreted by many anlysts as stemming directly from the NIE's publication; another development possibly stemming from the report is Russia and China's hardened position on further sanctions against Teheran.

In Teheran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quick to capitalize on the NIE, calling it an "Iranian victory" and demanding that the United States publicly apologize for its previous bellicose stance.

Uzi Arad, a former Mossad official and adviser to opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, told Newsweek that on a recent trip to Moscow, a Russian general poked fun at the naiveté of the NIE, commenting that if the Iranians had halted weapons development in 2003 it was partly because they were satisfied with progress there and wanted to devote investment to harder parts of the nuclear equation, like enrichment.

"The irony is that the effect of this report may be self-negating - by itself it will accelerate Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons," Arad told the magazine.

'Israel will attack Iran on its own' | Jerusalem Post

Stupid Intelligence on Iran - WSJ.com

Stupid Intelligence on Iran

By JAMES SCHLESINGER
December 19, 2007; Page A21

The reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, 750 miles south of Tehran, April 2007.

(Schlesinger has a new definition for civilian enrichment, Weapons program)

The NIE's about-face on Iran's nuclear weapons program represents a reversion to an earlier style of intelligence analysis -- featuring a renewed determination not to get beyond the "hard evidence." But as we shall see, this has led to a decision not to consider several crucial elements that lay behind the presumed 2003 decision in Tehran.

Clearly, the key judgments in the NIE were overstated. And that, in turn, may reflect the very late decision to declassify the key judgments, written in a kind of shorthand, and thus incautiously phrased.

The crucial decision, hidden in a footnote, was to define the "nuclear weapons program" which had been halted to mean only "Iran's weapon design and weaponization work and covert . . . uranium enrichment-related work." Thus it excludes Iran's overt enrichment program monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

We have long understood that the production of fissile material, whether overt or covert, remains "the long pole in the tent" in the development of a nuclear capability. Thus the NIE defines away what has been the main element stirring international alarm regarding Iran's nuclear activity.

Yesterday Tehran announced its Bushehr nuclear power plant will be operating at full capacity by the end of next year. Yet even though Russia supplied the nuclear fuel for Bushehr, the Iranians insist on maintaining their "civilian" uranium-enrichment program. Weapon design and weaponization, at least for the simpler weapons, is a far less demanding and less time-consuming task than uranium enrichment.

Let us examine what else has not been considered. The NIE asserts "that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure" and that "indicates that Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach." Now what might have constituted the principal elements in that "international pressure" to induce Tehran, at least temporarily, to halt its covert weaponization program?

• The American invasion of Iraq, resulting in the seizure of Baghdad in 10 days time -- something that had widely been suggested could not be accomplished.
• The earlier destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, another display of American military prowess.
• The decision of Col. Moammar Gadhafi to abandon his nuclear program and to renounce and make amends for terrorism.
• The exposure and partial demolition of the A.Q. Khan nuclear technology network, Khan's confession and his confinement by the Pakistani government to his home.

Does it not seem likely that Tehran took notice of these events, and may have been intimidated by them into more circumspect behavior? The NIE argues that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach." Given those successful American actions, those who guide decisions in Iran may well have decided that the potential costs of being caught with a clandestine program had risen sharply, and that the presumed benefits of early clandestine weaponization efforts could safely be deferred.

In brief, since the "long pole in the tent" remains the production of fissile material, Iran likely decided that the prudent course of action was to pursue an open enrichment program ostensibly to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. It is a course that had been chartered by North Korea -- and arguably was legitimate under the Nonproliferation Treaty. This central path to obtaining fissile material -- the focus of international concern -- has been treated in the NIE as quite distinct from the "nuclear weapons program."

Still, the achievements of American arms and American policy during that period were undoubtedly noted in Tehran. Why not mention them in the NIE as possibly influencing Tehran's decision in 2003?

The answer, in brief, is that it would have been speculative and in violation of the renewed commitment of the intelligence community to stick to the "hard evidence." There was no intercept; there was no agent's report that such calculations were, indeed, the source of Iran's switch. So in order to avoid the kind of speculation that had gotten the intelligence community into trouble in its judgments regarding Iraq, these realities were left up to the imagination of others and the intelligence community stuck to what it had evidence for.

What was obvious about events in and around 2003 should have been obvious at least to the American media. The media, Lord knows, have no inhibitions about engaging in speculation or urging us to "connect the dots," or feeling any obligation to limit themselves to hard evidence. The NIE almost begged for others to follow up on the nature of "international pressure" and the calculations behind Iran's "cost-benefit approach."

But the American media today almost reflexively treat any development as a setback for the administration of George W. Bush. So, the media quite clearly ignored the obvious: that a surprising decision by Tehran in 2003 to halt the covert weaponization effort likely was a tribute to the successes of American policy and arms during that period. Thus, administration policies and actions that likely induced caution in Tehran could be characterized, ironically enough, as an administration defeat.

Little more need be said about the process by which what might have been heralded as a victory was transformed into a defeat and echoed overseas. But a few words do need to be added about the intelligence community's decision to restrict its key judgments to "hard evidence." Many in the intelligence community embrace this as a return to virtue. Yet in itself it has severe drawbacks. As in this case, reading the key judgments may now require something akin to Cliffs Notes listing other relevant events and considerations that may be necessary in interpreting an Estimate limited to the hard evidence.

Exclusive reliance on hard evidence not infrequently results in deliberately blinding oneself to the most obvious explanation of what has occurred. The classic example of this failing occurred during the Vietnam War, when intelligence analysts stubbornly refused to accept that enemy supplies were pouring through Sihanoukville ostensibly on the grounds that there was no hard evidence. (Actually, there was an agent's report that revealed the activity, but it was dismissed as insufficient.) Intelligence based on hard evidence requires supplementation by other forms of intelligence.

"Failures of imagination," to which the 9-11 Commission referred, can come in a variety of modes.

Stupid Intelligence on Iran - WSJ.com

Iran Receives Nuclear Fuel in Blow to U.S. - New York Times

 

WASHINGTON — The United States lost a long battle when Russia, as it announced on Monday, delivered nuclear fuel to an Iranian power plant that is at the center of an international dispute over its nuclear program. Iran, for its part, confirmed on Monday plans to build a second such plant.

 

Pool photo by Ivan Sekretarev

Iran’s atomic chief, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said a second power plant was being built.

Related

Times Topics: Iran's Nuclear Program

In announcing that it had delivered the first shipment of enriched-uranium fuel rods to the power plant, at Bushehr in southern Iran, on Sunday, Russian officials said that while the fuel was in Iran, it would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitoring agency for the United Nations. Russia also said the Iranian government had guaranteed that the fuel would be used only for the power plant.

The Bush administration took pains not to criticize the Russian move publicly, even expressing support for outside supplies if that led Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program.

“If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich,” President Bush said Monday. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich.”

But from the American standpoint, the timing could not have been worse, coming just two weeks after the release of a United States intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The National Intelligence Estimate also concluded that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, undercutting a central tenet of the Bush administration’s basis for maintaining international pressure against Iran.

While administration officials maintain that the intelligence estimate does not mean that the United States and its allies should ease the pressure, the practical consequence of the report has been to embolden Iran. It has also made it more likely that China and Russia, two of the countries with perhaps the smallest appetite for sanctions against Iran, will not agree to a new round of tough sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

Russia’s decision to deliver fuel to Bushehr further encourages Iran, several administration officials and European diplomats said privately. They did not speak for attribution because they had not been authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The White House took a different tack in its comments. “There is no doubt that Russia and the rest of the world want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe. “And today’s announcement provides one more avenue for the Iranians to make a strategic choice to suspend enrichment.”

But privately, administration officials said they had been hoping, with dwindling confidence, that Russia would continue to stall on delivering the fuel, in part to send a message to Iran that the United States and its European, Chinese and Russian allies were hanging tough in their attempts to punish Iran for refusing to suspend enrichment.

“We for many years tried to stop it, and for the last year we’ve known there was no way to stop it, and that it was coming, and we held our breath on the timing,” a senior administration official said.

Indeed, Iran said it had no intention of suspending its uranium enrichment just because it had received the fuel shipment for Bushehr, and it even confirmed that it intended to enrich uranium for another new nuclear power plant in the south of the country, the Fars news agency reported.

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the chief of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, said Iran needed to produce fuel for a second plant under construction. “We are building a 360-megawatt indigenous power plant in Darkhovin,” Mr. Aghazadeh said.

“The fuel for this plant needs to be produced by Natanz enrichment plant,” he added, according to the news agency.

Darkhovin is a city in the southern province of Khuzistan, north of Bushehr, which is better known for its oil fields. Natanz is the site where Iran has been installing centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

Both Bushehr and Darkhovin were projects planned before the 1979 revolution, and then abandoned. It was not clear how much construction had been carried out at Darkhovin.

Construction of Bushehr has been hindered by repeated delays, most of them a symptom of Russia’s uneasiness about Iran’s nuclear intentions, European and American diplomats said. This year, Russia delayed a fuel shipment expected in March, accusing Iran of tardiness in making its monthly payments of $25 million. At the time, Bush administration officials privately expressed satisfaction about the delay and attributed Russia’s move, in part, to its desire to help the West pressure Iran into more openness about its nuclear program.

Last week, Sergei Shmatko, the director of Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor responsible for the plant, announced that Russia and Iran had ended their financial disputes over the project, although he did not indicate a date for when the long-awaited opening would occur.

Irina F. Esipova, a spokeswoman for Atomstroyexport, said Bushehr would be ready technically to operate no sooner than six months after all the uranium fuel rods needed to power the station were delivered.

Russia alerted Bush administration officials two weeks ago that the fuel shipment was going ahead, administration officials said. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said Russia agreed to put certain safeguards in place to allow for greater international inspections at Bushehr.

The United States had already agreed in principle that it was acceptable for Russia to provide the fuel to Iran, as long as there were safeguards to handle the spent fuel. Administration officials said they decided that the United States had no choice but to concede that it could no longer keep prodding Russia to delay shipping the fuel.

But “when I was under secretary for arms control, we spent a lot of time trying — successfully — to convince the Russians not to ship the fuel,” John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview on Monday.

He said he believed that Russia’s latest actions reflected a change in the people who were dealing with Russia’s nuclear program, a change of heart by President Vladimir V. Putin and the economics of the deal.

Iran Receives Nuclear Fuel in Blow to U.S. - New York Times

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

 

Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Henry Kissinger has thrown his shoulder behind the so-called "push-back" strategy being applied to the new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program. Specifically, he's even given hawks in the lame-duck George W Bush administration a helping hand in countering the backlash sparked by the NIE's most inconvenient finding - that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
Despite the decades which have passed since he served in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, former US secretary of state Kissinger is still considered one of the most prescient US observers of global affairs. His recent opinion pieces published in The Washington Post go a long way in fanning the flames of a perceived Iranian nuclear threat - at least at the level of American public opinion - now that much of the fear has been extinguished by the NIE's findings.

This is, in fact, so typical of Kissinger. He's long made a virtue out of rehashing old ideas and assumptions as refreshingly new simply through linguistic acrobatics intermixed with calibrated obfuscation. Such rhetoric is swathed in additional, artificial layers of semantic ambiguity and "double talk". Worse, Kissinger's trademark has long been to simultaneously embrace contradictory ideas and yet escape serious scrutiny in a thick fog of semantic wordplay.

As a result, Kissinger can be everything to everyone these days. He's at once an avid advocate of serious disarmament and also a powerful voice for a "strong American military" and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's reliance on its nuclear arsenal. He's an enthusiastic supporter of various arms limitation treaties and also a reasonable voice for their reconsideration. He's a proponent of post-Cold War, post-hegemonic America and, equally, a principal architect of American primacy in the new global milieu (not to overlook his own singular contributions to the thesis of a "new Cold War" in the Middle East in recent publications in the Arab press).

 

It's nothing new: during the 1970s, Kissinger went to Baghdad and promised that the US would do everything possible "to reduce Israel's size", when, in fact, he never even waved a finger in that direction.
Kissinger now writes opinion columns about the perils of nuclear weapons without ever repudiating his earlier views. For example, in 1957, he wrote that "with proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears".

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

Henry A. Kissinger - Misreading the Iran Report - washingtonpost.com

 

The extraordinary spectacle of the president's national security adviser obliged to defend the president's Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community's relationship with the White House and the rest of the government?

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

Henry A. Kissinger - Misreading the Iran Report - washingtonpost.com

The Associated Press: Israel Officials in US to Discuss Iran

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli intelligence officials are in the U.S. trying to convince the Bush administration that Iran is still trying to develop nuclear weapons — contrary to the findings of a recent U.S. intelligence report, security officials said.

(and they ask why Ahmadinejad is mad at Israel)

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, scolded a Cabinet minister on Sunday for his harsh, public criticism of the U.S. report.

The U.S. assessment, released earlier this month, concludes Iran halted its weapons development program in 2003 and that the program remained frozen at least through the middle of this year. The findings reversed a key conclusion from a 2005 intelligence report that Iran was developing a bomb.

Israeli officials fear the report will weaken international resolve to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It was not clear what type of material the Israeli delegation — for the most part military intelligence officers — presented to U.S. officials during its unscheduled visit. The Israeli delegation hoped to receive additional information from the U.S. report, which for the most part was classified, the Israeli officials said.

The Associated Press: Israel Officials in US to Discuss Iran