Friday.....America.....Breakout Capability

I checked the news a few minutes before 3 pm on Wednesday, the 10th, for it was about midnight in Iran, the morning of the 11th. This was the day that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would identify the threat to the West that he mentioned in a speech the previous week. There was nothing on activity in Iran but the United Stated Government announced that it would bring increased sanctions on Iran, more specifically on the holdings of the Republican Guard so, as not to effect the ordinary Iranian citizen. There was nothing new about Iran for the rest of the day but the headlines the next morning on the web were all similar, Iran Is Now A Nuclear Nation! What Iran had done is formally announce that they had indeed achieved the breakout capability that Scientists describe as the moment when a nation proves it can enrich uranium to weapons grade. This is what Ahmadinejad had announced. They had produced their first product of 20% enriched uranium. The headlines on the web lasted most of the day but were superseded by Former President Clinton's trip to the hospital. By the time the next day's newspaper were out there were no such headlines in bold print as when North Korea had detonated its first device; but then an announcement of enrichment capabilities is not exactly an earthquake producing underground explosion. Ahmadinejad's strategy is startlingly successful, for now. It is successful in the enormity of the announcement and blase' response. He basically admitted that he is making a bomb but no one seems to care. Of course we all knew that, except those who Robert Gibbs speaks for, but the time element is what is important here. Our intelligence agencies, officially, have stated that the earliest Iran could produce a bomb would be around 2013 while various independent scientists have said that they have the capability right now. The latter were right, but it's no big news! Iran has the capability to go from 3.5% to 20% enrichment through the centrifuge process. This is the breakout. Advancing to 80% or 90% enrichment is simply a matter of time and this is not a long process. The reliability of Iran's centrifuges is the only hindrance in their producing enough enriched uranium for one bomb now and many others in short order. This is assuming that Iran does not have secret facilities, and that is in no way out of the question. What we have known all along is that Iran has a problem with quantity of uranium to be enriched. Before you relax, the problem is that they do not have enough uranium for uses in nuclear power plants, but they do have enough for producing quite a number of bombs. There is an elephant in the room at the Oval Office and it's not a Republican. It is Ahmadinejad with nuclear weapons capability. How is your geography. Iran borders Afghanistan on the east and Iraq on the west, both of which have large numbers of American troops. It essentially is the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian border is roughly the distance of Pittsburgh to Boston, from the border of Israel. It has access to the Arabian Sea and therefore the oceans of the world. The news reported yesterday that a son of Osama bin Laden, who has rejected the tactics of his father stated that his father is mild compared to the fanaticism of his cohorts. This is the same with Ahmadinejad. There are those of influence who even he distances himself from, officially. I have stated many times in this blog that Iran's missile technology is not the most pressing issue with a nuclear weapon, rather who might they give a device to when built, if not already built? One intelligence analyst actually said that it may be beneficial for Iran to have nuclear weapons for stability, a la the element of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) among contentious Arab states. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu may be a politician, but he made an emotional statement that I believe, it being that he will not let another holocaust happen, and he also gave this answer to a question that shows his patience is wearing thin, This means not moderate sanctions, or watered-down sanctions. This means crippling sanctions and these sanctions must be applied right now. Even with Netanyahu's comments an Israeli former top general said that it might be too difficult to end Iran's nuclear proliferation all by themselves. Meanwhile Iran is attempting to limit its citizens communication with the outside world, and tampering with satelite transmissions into the country.