Sunday, November 06, 2011

Sources: Iran Already Has Nuclear Arms

Some pretty distressing news is hitting the airwaves. Tensions have continued to rise due to Iran's nuclear program. Leaked information has indicated that Israel is considering a strike on Iran, and so is the United States and United Kingdom.

For all of this news, some could be disinformation meant to confuse the Iranian clerics. However, there may be some grains of truth to the idea that Iran is nearing a nuclear weapon.

However, there is even worse information coming from multiple sources. Unfortunately, according to both Israeli and Iranian defection sources, the Islamic Republic may already have nuclear arms. Both rumors surround supposed purchases that Tehran made in the aftermath of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

One source is the Israeli site DebkaFile. Debka file correctly predicted Syria's second nuclear reactor last week-- which was later picked up by American sources.

In waiting for a new United Nations report on Iran's nuclear activities, it appears that Debka has heard rumors of already existing Iranian arms. These functional weapons are moving the Israeli leadership to prepare a strike on the country.
According to DEBKAfile's Washington sources, the Obama administration attributes the change of heart by those ministers to a conviction that Iran already has a nuclear weapon.
A separate Debka report stated that the Islamic Republic threatened to target a million Israelis with just four missiles should there be an attack on the country's nuclear program.
However our sources cite Western intelligence as suspecting that Tehran obtained those warheads from Belarus or from unconventional arms traffickers based in the Muslim Republics which were part of the USSR up until the 1990s. And indeed the Fars report did not specify what warheads the "conventional" missiles would carry.
Separately through the Washington Post (quoted on World Threats), an Iranian defector stated that the country purchased tactical nuclear weapons nearly twenty years ago. These weapons, based in what is today Kazakhstan, were confirmed missing by Russia.

In any case, the reports are not good:
“Last week, Mathew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who was at one point hired by the State Department as an adviser to one of its provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq, said that in March 2008, during a briefing on Iran at the State Department, the department’s Middle East expert told the group that it was “common knowledge” that Iran had acquired tactical nuclear weapons from one or more of the former Soviet republics.

Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, an experienced intelligence officer and recipient of a Bronze Star, told me that his sources say Iran has two workable nuclear warheads.”
These sources could be spurious, but there seems to be a lot of agreement on some fundamental issues. This could be the reason that Israel is so concerned in the last several weeks. Or it could be intentional disinformation.

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