Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran within 2 months

Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran in
two months

DEBKAfile: An Iranian official postulates first US military action
against Iran in two months

January 31, 2007, 11:59 AM (GMT+02:00)

The first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsein Rezai,
estimated in recent conversations with Western sources that the US
would not start out with a large-scale attack but only pinpointed
military raids against RG bases in Iran. The opposition Mujaheddin al
Khalq are reportedly being trained to take part in these operations,
which would probably escalate as Iran began retaliating to the
American strikes.

"AirRaid Mach 2.5" wrote in message
oups.com...
Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran in
two months

Isn't it interesting how this stuff just "comes up" around election time in
Iran....

* PLONK *

"Mike Dennis" wrote in message
...

"AirRaid Mach 2.5" wrote in message
oups.com...
Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran in
two months

Isn't it interesting how this stuff just "comes up" around election time
in
Iran....

* PLONK *



yeah, bush's saber rattling has no effect on his comments.
every day the whitehouse makes new accusations. of course they have "proof"
that they can't share for security reasons. and the whitehouse wouldn't lie
now would it.

"AirRaid Mach 2.5" wrote in
oups.com:

Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran in
two months

DEBKAfile: An Iranian official postulates first US military action
against Iran in two months

The question is when though.
It could be 0400Z Thursday.
Or 1700Z three weeks from last Tuesday.
The Iranians won't know until it happens
at which point it all becomes moot.

IBM

On Jan 31, 7:20 pm, "Ray O'Hara" wrote:
"Mike Dennis" wrote in message

...



"AirRaid Mach 2.5" wrote in message
roups.com...
Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran in
two months

Isn't it interesting how this stuff just "comes up" around election time
in
Iran....

* PLONK *

yeah, bush's saber rattling has no effect on his comments.
every day the whitehouse makes new accusations. of course they have "proof"
that they can't share for security reasons. and the whitehouse wouldn't lie
now would it.

What proof are you talking about? I have heard no accusation of proof
that Iran is building nuclear weapons. I've seen estimates that they
could get from where they are now with their nuclear programs to a
deliverable weapon in a pretty short period of time, but I've seen
nobody claim to have evidence that they are activly working on it.

However, there are clear facts that...

1. Iran's leadership would like to annhilate Israel. This is not
speculation. Various Iranian leaders, including the current President,
have said it many times, and re-confirm it whenever they are asked.

2. Iran is building nuclear mining, processing, enrichment, and
reactor facilities. Again, Iran makes no denial that this is taking
place. They claim that it is for peaceful power generation purposes,
not for creating weapons. Now, anybody who wants to can look into what
is required to prepare uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that
many of the things that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully
in the open), is not necessary unless you are making weapons. I also
like their repeated states of "Even if we WERE making nuclear weapons,
we have a right to do that if we want to. Israel, India, Pakestan, and
others have them, what gives anyone the right to say we can't have
them as well".

3. Iran is building, and testing, long range ballistic delivery
systems. They have announced the capabilities of these systems to the
worrld and put out a press release each time they conduct a test. No
secret stuff here either.

So without the benefit of ANY sensiitive intel, you have clear
pointers to a potential threat.

An analagy.

-A guy tells you seriously, that he wants to kill one of your
neighbors.
-The next day you see him entering a gun shop.

Sure, maybe he went in there to get change, or maybe he just wants an
air pistol for shooting crows. Maybe they refused to sell him a gun,
or maybe he just bought a gun with no ammo so he could be threatening,
but maybe he actually plans to follow through with what he said he
wanted to do.

In article .com,
(Airyx) wrote:

Now, anybody who wants to can look into what is required to prepare
uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that many of the things
that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully in the open),
is not necessary unless you are making weapons.

Can you be specific about these activities? You /do/ need to enrich
uranium for a pressurised-water reactor: it won't go critical with
natural uranium.

You can make a reactor that will run on natural uranium with either
high-purity graphite or heavy water as moderators, but they aren't that
good for power generation. All the USA's commercial nuclear power
plants, and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones are
PWRs, because that's easier to build and run and quite effective.

This is why the sharp division between civilian and military nuclear
technology that people try to draw is illusory. To run civilian power
plants in a cost-effective manner you need to make large quantities of
low-enriched uranium. If you can do that, you also have the technology
to make highly enriched uranium.

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007 21:35 +0000 (GMT Standard Time),
(John Dallman) wrote:

In article .com,
(Airyx) wrote:

Now, anybody who wants to can look into what is required to prepare
uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that many of the things
that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully in the open),
is not necessary unless you are making weapons.

Can you be specific about these activities? You /do/ need to enrich
uranium for a pressurised-water reactor: it won't go critical with
natural uranium.

You can make a reactor that will run on natural uranium with either
high-purity graphite or heavy water as moderators, but they aren't that
good for power generation. All the USA's commercial nuclear power
plants, and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones are
PWRs, because that's easier to build and run and quite effective.

This is why the sharp division between civilian and military nuclear
technology that people try to draw is illusory. To run civilian power
plants in a cost-effective manner you need to make large quantities of
low-enriched uranium. If you can do that, you also have the technology
to make highly enriched uranium.

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

Ontario Power Generation would be interested in your comments as
they show clearly the impossibility of generating the 45
tera-watt hours they made last year (they own two other stations
but lease them to private companies who sell back the power, not
included in the 45).

They use CANDU technology, a heavy water reactor. Unfortunately a
by-product is plutonium. This has been an embarassment in the
past.

Peter Skelton

On Feb 1, 3:35 pm, (John Dallman) wrote:
In article .com,

(Airyx) wrote:
Now, anybody who wants to can look into what is required to prepare
uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that many of the things
that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully in the open),
is not necessary unless you are making weapons.

Can you be specific about these activities? You /do/ need to enrich
uranium for a pressurised-water reactor: it won't go critical with
natural uranium.

You can make a reactor that will run on natural uranium with either
high-purity graphite or heavy water as moderators, but they aren't that
good for power generation. All the USA's commercial nuclear power
plants, and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones are
PWRs, because that's easier to build and run and quite effective.

This is why the sharp division between civilian and military nuclear
technology that people try to draw is illusory. To run civilian power
plants in a cost-effective manner you need to make large quantities of
low-enriched uranium. If you can do that, you also have the technology
to make highly enriched uranium.

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

That's part of the rub, isn't it. Many of the things you need to do
to produce fuel for a nuclear power plant are also things that you
would need to do to create nuclear weapons. There is, however, a
differenciation point in a couple of areas.

It is my understanding that there is a diminishing economic return
once you enrich uranium past a certain point. Anything beyond that is
spending more money on the enrichment process than you can expect to
get in return for power. IAEA inspectors have been shown enrichment
processes that go far beyond this point.

In addition, Iran has been processing plutonium, even though none of
their reactors are designed for plutonium.

In article ,
(Peter Skelton) wrote:
(John Dallman) wrote:
... and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones
are PWRs, because that's easier to build and run

They use CANDU technology, a heavy water reactor. Unfortunately a
by-product is plutonium. This has been an embarassment in the
past.

Yes, yes, I said "most of", and then simplified for a summary. I know
about CANDU, at least in outline. As I understand it, Canada uses CANDU
at least partly because they built a lot of heavy water manufacturing
plant during WWII, and then had nothing much to do with the stuff. The
CANDU has various attractive features, but they have not tempted any
other country to build the requisite heavy water facilities.

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.

In article om,
(Airyx) wrote:

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

That's part of the rub, isn't it. Many of the things you need to do
to produce fuel for a nuclear power plant are also things that you
would need to do to create nuclear weapons. There is, however, a
differenciation point in a couple of areas.

It is my understanding that there is a diminishing economic return
once you enrich uranium past a certain point. Anything beyond that is
spending more money on the enrichment process than you can expect to
get in return for power.

Oh, absolutely. The only people who use HEU in reactors are navies,
where physically small reactors and infrequent refuellings are very
worthwhile.

IAEA inspectors have been shown enrichment processes that go far
beyond this point.

"That go past this point" or "That /can/ go past this point"? That's the
kind of point that the media can mess up really easily.

Everything I've read has said that they're concentrating on centrifuges.
This is the most practical technology for any kind of uranium enrichment
at present. Now, the enrichment on a single centrifuge stage is tiny,
not remotely enough for reactor usage. You have to run centrifuges in a
long cascade to get any worthwhile enrichment.

So, if you have an industrial-scale centrifuge plant, you can run it in
several parallel cascades to get a large quantity of low-enriched
uranium, suitable for running PWRs, or you can run it in fewer, longer
cascades and get less HEU, suitable for bombs. But it's the same plant,
and the changes needed to reconfigure it are tiny compared to the effort
of building it.

So anyone with a big centrifuge plant can make HEU if they want to. The
biggest centrifuge plant in Europe belongs, not to the UK to France, but
to the Netherlands, who thus have a considerable latent nuclear weapons
capability.

Unfortunately for politics, uranium enrichment via centrifuges isn't
proof of nuclear weapons intent.

In addition, Iran has been processing plutonium, even though none of
their reactors are designed for plutonium.

There is also, sadly, a legitimate civilian use for reprocessing
capability. At the point when reactor fuel is running out of reactivity,
that isn't because most of the U235 in it has been burned up. It's
because the various fission products in the fuel are absorbing
significant numbers of neutrons. If you take the fuel out of the
reactor, and chemically separate the plutonium and uranium from the
other stuff, you end up with uranium that's less enriched than it was,
but is still significantly above natural U235 levels, and is thus
cheaper to enrich back to reactor-grade.

Now, the USA does not do this, having decided decades ago that the
downsides of reprocessing - plutonium, high-level nuclear waste - meant
that the game was not worth the candle. The only large-scale
reprocessing the USA has ever done has been for making military
plutonium, on fuel from reactors designed for making plutonium, rather
than power generation. However, several other states (UK, France, Japan)
do, or have, undertaken large scale-reprocessing or civilian nuclear
fuel, because it's much more economical of limited uranium supplies.

So if a country is wanting to build up a full-scale nuclear fuel cycle
capability, experimenting with small-scale reprocessing to see just how
hard it is - you always learn more from doing it yourself than from
reading about it - is legitimate. The USA's decision that it is not
worth doing is a piece of industrial policy that several other countries
don't agree with. It absolutely isn't a rule in the NPT.

And the idea that Iran wanting civilian nuclear power is obviously and
only a cover, because they have lots of oil, doesn't stand up either.
Yes, they have lots of oil, and it's substantially the only thing they
have. They presumably know approximately how much they have, since they
must surely have surveyed anywhere remotely geologically promising by
now. But when their oil runs out (more accurately, starts getting
economically unattractive to extract) they don't want to return to
poverty. They've ben very poor within recent history, and they don't
want to go back. That's entirely reasonable. There may be more oil to be
discovered elsewhere - but it's elsewhere, and they won't get to benefit
from exporting it.

So they want to create other industries, so they'll have other things to
export. Since they have a somewhat more advanced educational system than
most countries in the region - still, even after years of the Islamic
state (Shias don't have the hostility to all things modern that
extremist Suni so often suffer from) - they're trying to build high
technology stuff. And there seems to be a significant chance that
nuclear technology will make a comeback for electricity power
generation, since fossil fuels have massive advantages for mobile uses,
and less so for fixed plant.

They don't need it for power generation now, so offers of Russian
enrichment and reprocessing aren't very interesting. Besides, would you
trust the Russians to keep up your energy supplies? Europe is learning,
rapidly, that Russia regards turning off the tap as a basic price-
negotiating tactic, about like this ("We think we should end our current
contract and have a new one where you pay twice as much", "We aren't
keen on this idea at all", 'Click').

And yes, the idea that this may also give Iran nuclear weapons is
undoubtedly attractive to them. But it isn't the only plausible reason
for a nuclear programme. If they were being even slightly cunning, they
would genuinely not have a nuclear weapons programme at present, so that
they couldn't be caught doing it. Building up their technology to the
point that, say Japan or Germany were at in the seventies, so that they
could then swiftly execute a weapons programme, would be much smarter.

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.