Guardian UK: If you lived in Iran, wouldn't you want the nuclear bomb?

[stockholmer]

The best way for the US to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons is to dial down the rhetoric and adopt some diplomacy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/iran-want-nuclear-bomb

Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.

On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America's Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to "attack Iran" and "cut off the head of the snake". http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-saudis-iran

Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents. The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.

If that wasn't worrying enough, your country seems to be under (covert) attack. Several nuclear scientists have been mysteriously assassinated and, late last year, a sophisticated computer virus succeeded in shutting down roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Only last weekend, the "pioneer" of the Islamic Republic's missile programme, Major General Hassan Moghaddam, was killed – with 16 others – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/14/iran-missile-death-mossad-mission in a huge explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base 25 miles outside Tehran. You go online to discover western journalists reporting that the Mossad is believed to have been behind the blast.

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Ex-Inspector Rejects IAEA Iran Bomb-Test-Chamber Claim

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105901

WASHINGTON, Nov 19, 2011 (IPS) - A former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repudiated its major new claim that Iran built an explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion.

The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist - identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko - had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself in an interview http://www.rferl.org/content/russian_scientist_iran_nuclear_danilenko/24393322.html with Radio Free Europe published Friday.

The latest report http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/IAEA_Iran_8Nov2011.pdf by the IAEA cited "information provided by Member States" that Iran had constructed "a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments" - meaning simulated explosions of nuclear weapons - in its Parchin military complex in 2000.

The report said it had "confirmed" that a "large cylindrical object" housed at the same complex had been "designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives". That amount of explosives, it said, would be "appropriate" for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon. But former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley has denounced the agency's claims about such a containment chamber as "highly misleading".

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[Cali_Democrat]

1. This is what is so obvious, but the media fails to report the TRUTH

Israel, the US and NATO are the aggressors. For the last 20 years, they have been constantly bombing other countries and occupying foreign territory. Iran has been doing no such thing.

The US has Iran surrounded with military assets on all sides and has been sabre rattling for years against Iran. Israel is talking about bombing them. Is it any wonder why they might feel threatened? :think:

Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq were without nukes and were promptly attacked. It is believed that the North Koreans have nukes and they were left alone. Of course Iran might feel the need to pursue nukes, especially considering the fact that Israel has nukes.