"Iran to enrich uranium at 2d site, official says; Report adds to tensions with US, allies" by David Sanger New York Times / January 9, 2012
CAIRO - Iran’s top nuclear official announced during the weekend that the country was on the verge of starting production at its second major uranium enrichment site, in a defiant declaration that its nuclear program would continue despite new international sanctions restricting its oil revenue.
The announcement, made through official news media reports, came after a week of escalating confrontations between Washington and Tehran, including a threat that Iran would respond with military force if the United States tried to send an aircraft carrier strike group back into the Strait of Hormuz.
Does Iran have it's navy parked in the Gulf of Mexico?
Kayhan, a leading hard-line newspaper, reported yesterday that enrichment had already begun at the site. The opening of the site - the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum - presents the United States and its allies with difficult choices about how far to go to limit Iran’s nuclear abilities.
The new facility is buried deep underground on a well-defended military site and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz, limiting what Israeli officials, in particular, consider an important deterrent to Iran’s nuclear aims.
When the existence of the Qum facility was first disclosed by President Obama and his counterparts in France and Britain in the fall of 2009, US officials expressed doubts that Iran would ever go forward with the facility.
If I remember correctly Iran caught them off-guard by announcing it, and now my media has twisted it into this.
But hey, why quibble anymore about distortions and the like? As a long-time newspaper reader I expect them now because there are so many on a daily basis.
But once it goes into operation, the chances of disabling it, in the words of one former top Israeli official, “diminish very dramatically.’’
That's why war coming soon, real soon.
The declaration that the facility was nearly ready came in an interview on Saturday with Fereydoon Abbasi, who was made the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization shortly after surviving an assassination attempt in 2010. Iranian newspapers reported the development yesterday.
While Iran has often exaggerated its abilities, nuclear analysts said this claim is plausible.
The AmeriKan media ought to know all about exaggerations.
In December, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that during a visit to the plant they saw the finishing touches put on enrichment centrifuges, and said they expected the facility to be operating soon.
Then USrael attacks soon.
Iran says its nuclear program is critical to its national security - not because it is seeking weapons, but because it wants an alternative energy source to oil and is seeking to refuel a reactor that makes medical isotopes.
Yeah, when Obama showers billions of taxpayer dollars on the nuclear power industry because of global warming (if so why is Florida freezing?), that's okay.
And HOW WOULD YOU FEEL if YOU WERE TOLD by some FAR-AWAY, MILITARILY AGGRESSIVE EMPIRE that YOUR RELATIVE can NOT HAVE TREATMENT for CANCER, Americans!?
Four years of sanctions have deeply hurt the Iranian economy, but have not changed its nuclear strategy.
If anything those sanctions drove them to it. Must go forward and be independent given the treatment they are getting.
But the new US sanctions, along with an oil embargo under discussion in Europe, aim to undercut the government by squeezing its most important source of revenue: oil sales.
See: E.U. Equivocates on Iranian Oil Embargo
In response, Iran has clearly signaled that the sanctions have only hardened its determination to proceed. For instance yesterday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began a highly publicized series of visits to South American leaders that have been critical of the United States, starting with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
Not in my newspaper. I think that is the only time I've seen any reference to the trip.
Iran threatened early last week to close off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, an action that analysts say could send global oil prices soaring. Iran conducted military exercises in the waterway, and then said it would use force to bar any reentry of the US aircraft carrier John C. Stennis and its escort ships.
Related: Huffing and Puffing in the Strait of Hormuz
I'm hyperventilating on this MSM s***!
While US officials and outside analysts have dismissed the threat as hyperbole, and say they have every intention of patrolling the area with a carrier, there is broad concern that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy could harass oil tankers passing through the narrow strait or lay mines that could create significant risks to shipping.
Related:
"Israel has been sending their Dolphin class submarines through the Suez Canal. Traveling on the surface, the Dolphins can travel 8000 miles without needing to refuel. Given a sub-tender in the Indian ocean, Israel's Dolphins may safely be assumed to be at or near the Straights of Hormuz. While the Clinton administration officially refused to sell Tomahawk cruise missiles to Israel, reports are that the US did supply 100 Harpoon missiles which were loaded onto Israel's Dolphins when they made a highly unusual voyage down to Diego Garcia in 2003. Whether later administrations did provide Tomahawks to Israel is unknown. Israel also manufactures the Gabriel series of anti-ship missiles, with the latest version able to fit into a torpedo tube canister launching system. The concern here is that Israel wants the US to go to war with Iran. A Dolphin class submarine running on batteries could easily slip into the shallow waters near the coast of Iran, fire missiles at the US battle groups, and blame Iran for the attack, much as Israel ships and planes attacked the USS Liberty and attempted to blame Egypt for that attack."-- Wake the Flock Up
Also see: What War with Iran Might Look Like
I'd say it should be avoided at all costs don't you, American?
US officials have estimated that they would have six months to a year to react, if needed, before the enrichment was completed. But should it come to that, the Fordo site would greatly complicate any military action. Satellite photographs show it is surrounded by antiaircraft guns, and the mountainous setting could make a bombing campaign nearly impossible.
The implication being sooner rather than later?
Already Iran has produced enough fuel to manufacture about four weapons, but only if the fuel goes through further enrichment, nuclear analysts say.
Translation: THEY ARE NOT MAKING A BOMB!!!!
Some of the fuel at Fordo, Abbasi said, would be enriched to 20 percent purity for use in a research reactor in Tehran. Those batches would be the easiest to convert for use in weapons.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, speaking at a conference in Washington last month, strongly suggested that the United States was determined to stop not only a weapon, but the ability to produce one. But yesterday, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,’’ Panetta was less specific about how close to the line Iran would be allowed to go.
Sanctions against Iran were “working to put pressure on them, to make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they’re doing,’’ Panetta said.
Related: Panetta admits Iran not developing nukes
But once again we will go to war on lies to back up our "friend" Israel.
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Also see: Nothing New From U.N. On Iran
No, I stopped looking to them for help a long time ago.
"Iran nuclear work at bunker is confirmed" January 10, 2012|By George Jahn
VIENNA - The UN nuclear agency yesterday confirmed that Iran has begun enriching uranium at an underground bunker to a level that can be upgraded more quickly for use in a nuclear weapon than the nation’s main enriched stockpile.
Doesn't mean it IS being upgraded, but that is the impression that is left.
God, I am so sick of the sloppy inexactitude of the war-promoting press.
Comment from the International Atomic Energy Agency came after diplomats said that centrifuges at the Fordo site near Iran’s holy city of Qom are churning out uranium enriched to 20 percent. That level is higher than the 3.5 percent being made at Iran’s main enrichment plant and can be turned into fissile warhead material faster and with less work.
Yeah, they have to bump it up into the 90% range and that takes time and industrial facilities that war-mongering world authorities would see.
Iran began to further enrich a small part of its uranium stockpile to nearly 20 percent in February 2010 at a less-protected experimental site, saying the nation needs the higher grade material to produce fuel for a Tehran reactor that makes medical radioisotopes for cancer patients.
But with the time and effort to make weapons-grade uranium thus reduced, the start of the Fordo operation increases international fears that Iran is determined to move closer to the ability to make nuclear warheads - despite insistence by the Islamic Republic that it is enriching only to make reactor fuel.
Not mine. They haven't invaded anyone for strategic geopolitical objectives, nor written a document for continuing world hegemony into the 21st century and beyond. Written before 9/11 -- the "New Pearl Harbor" they called it -- the issue of regime change transcended Saddam. It was to establish a large AmeriKan presence in the area.
Wow, what a freakish coincidence, huh?
And look where we are now!
Fordo’s location increases concerns.
The facility is a hardened tunnel and is protected by air defense missile batteries and the Revolutionary Guard. The site is about 20 miles north of Qom, the religious nerve center of Iran’s ruling system.
If that place gets damaged by an attack the Arab Spring will look like a picnic.
The semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, as saying Sunday that “the enemy doesn’t have the ability to damage it.’’
Built next to a military complex, Fordo was long kept secret and was acknowledged by Iran only after it was identified by Western intelligence agencies in September 2009.
That's a lying distortion. Iran announced before.
You keeping track, readers, 'cause I lost count.
Iran’s dismissal of findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency of secret experimental work on a nuclear weapons program worries the international community.
Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, called the latest move “a provocative act which further undermines Iran’s claims that its program is entirely civilian in nature.’’
Tehran’s “claim to be enriching for the Tehran Research Reactor does not stand up to serious scrutiny,’’ he said. Hague said that Iran “already has sufficient enriched uranium to power the reactor for more than five years and has not even installed the equipment necessary to manufacture fuel elements’’ out of the enriched material.
Tehran has been angered by the West’s efforts to sanction Iran over its nuclear program, including a possible ban on European imports of Iranian oil. It recently threatened to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, an important transit route for almost one-fifth of the oil traded globally.
Hague said Fordo’s size - it is too small for an industrial enrichment complex of the type Iran says it needs to make fuel - as well as its “location and clandestine nature raise serious questions about its ultimate purpose.’’
Two diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity because their information was confidential said 348 machines were operating at Fordo in two cascades - the linked-up configuration needed to enrich. Two other cascades were nearly assembled but not working, they said.
The centrifuges appeared to be the standard old-generation machines in use at the main enrichment site at Natanz and not advanced, more efficient prototype versions. That, too, was confirmed by the atomic energy agency, which said it was monitoring operations at the plant....
EXCUSE ME?
The U.N. is ON the SCENE and MONITORING OPERATIONS?
Then WHY, oh, WHY all the WAR HUFFING and PUFFING, AmeriKan media?!!!!
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