What Is This World Coming To?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad jarred the world’s nuclear experts with his recent admission that Iran has more than 7,000 working centrifuges, instead of the 3,000 the West was basing all its ‘point of no return’ calculations on.

“We don’t know what to believe about the Iranian program. We’ve heard many different assessments and claims over a number of years,” said Clinton of Iran’s latest claims.

“We do not attribute any particular meaning, with respect to the range of issues that we are looking to address with the Iranians, from this particular statement.”

Given that Iran is now believed to have the capability  to mount a nuclear warhead on missiles capable of reaching all the major capitals of Europe, possibly the east coast of the United States and definitely all of Israel,  an admission that the US doesn’t know what to believe is troubling, to say the least.

The specter of a nuclear Iran will not go away and the current Global Financial crisis only exacerbates this concern. Stephen Brown from FrontPageMagazine discusses what may lie ahead for Israel and the US in light of president-elect Obama taking office in January:

An International Atomic Energy Agency report last week escalated the debate concerning whether the United States or its ally, Israel, will soon launch a military strike against Iran. Experts determined from the report, which was sent to the United Nations, that the Islamic Republic now has enough enriched uranium for at least one nuclear weapon. Just as disturbing, the report states the Iranians intend to install “thousands more” of the machines that enrich uranium gas.

They clearly have enough material for a bomb,” said Richard L. Garwin, a respected nuclear physicist and government advisor, in the New York Times. “They know how to do the enrichment. Whether they know how to design a bomb, well, that’s another matter.

Brown concludes with the following, sobering observation:

With no regime change in Iran, it is inevitable the religious fanatics in Tehran will possess a nuclear weapon in the next few years. Looking through Israeli eyes, such a horrible eventuality does not bear thinking. So if Israel and the United States intend to end this nightmare scenario by military action, expect it to happen soon.

Stephen Brown is a contributing editor at Frontpagemag.com. He has a graduate degree in Russian and Eastern European history.

Only time will tell how president-elect Obama will tackle the Iran nuclear problem. We really do live in interesting times.

If Russia goes through with the sale of its most advanced anti-aircraft missile system to Iran, Israel will use an electronic warfare device now under development to neutralize it and as a result present Russia as vulnerable to air infiltrations, a top defense official has told The Jerusalem Post.

The Russian system, called the S-300, is one of the most advanced multi-target anti-aircraft-missile systems in the world today and has a reported ability to track up to 100 targets simultaneously while engaging up to 12 at the same time. It has a range of about 200 kilometers and can hit targets at altitudes of 27,000 meters. Read the rest of this entry »