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Posts tagged ‘nuclear’

Reuters: Iran Now ‘Weeks or Days’ From Nuclear Weapons Material


Thursday, 18 April 2024 12:12 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/iran-nuclear/2024/04/18/id/1161521/

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said Thursday that Iran could review its “nuclear doctrine” amid Israeli threats. While it was unclear exactly what he meant, and that term tends to refer to countries that, unlike Iran, have nuclear weapons, below is an outline of where Iran stands.

As its 2015 nuclear deal with major powers has eroded over the years, Iran has expanded and accelerated its nuclear program, reducing the time it would need to build a nuclear bomb if it chose to, though it denies wanting to.

COLLAPSE OF THE DEAL AND BREAKOUT TIME

The 2015 deal introduced strict limits on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran. It slashed Iran’s stock of enriched uranium, leaving it only with a small amount enriched to up to 3.67% purity, far from the roughly 90% purity that is weapons grade.

The United States said at the time that a main aim was to increase the time Iran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb – the biggest single hurdle in a weapons program – to at least a year.

In 2018 then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, reimposing sanctions on Tehran that slashed its oil sales and battered its economy. In 2019, Iran started breaching the restrictions on its nuclear activities and then pushed far beyond them.

It has now breached all the deal’s key restrictions, including on where, with what machines and to what level it can enrich uranium, as well as how much material it can stockpile.

Its stock of enriched uranium, which was capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tons in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran’s enrichment plants.

Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition.

That means Iran’s so-called “breakout time” – the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb – is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days.

The IAEA inspects Iran’s declared enrichment sites: an above-ground plant and a larger, underground one at its Natanz complex and another buried inside a mountain at Fordow.

As a result of Iran ceasing to implement elements of the deal, the IAEA can no longer fully monitor Iran’s production and inventory of centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, and it can no longer conduct snap inspections. That has prompted speculation about whether Iran could have set up a secret enrichment site, but there are no concrete indications of one.

WEAPONIZATION

Aside from uranium enrichment, there is the question of how long it would take Iran to produce the rest of a nuclear weapon and potentially make it small enough to put in a delivery system like a ballistic missile, should it choose to. This is much harder to estimate as it is less clear how much knowledge Iran has.

U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA believe Iran had a coordinated nuclear weapons program that it halted in 2003. It worked on aspects of weaponization, and some work continued until as late as 2009, the IAEA found in a 2015 report.

Iran denies ever having a nuclear weapons program, though Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said that if it wanted to world leaders “wouldn’t be able to stop us.”

Estimates of how long Iran would need for weaponization generally vary between months and about a year.

In March 2023 the top U.S. military officer at the time, General Mark Milley, testified to Congress that weaponization would take Iran several months, though he did not say what that assessment was based on.

In a quarterly report in February this year, the IAEA said: “Public statements made in Iran regarding its technical capabilities to produce nuclear weapons only increase the Director General’s concerns about the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations.”

Diplomats said those statements included a television interview by Iran’s former nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi in which he likened producing a nuclear weapon to building a car, and said Iran knew how to make the parts needed.

© 2024 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

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International Politics

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Additional Politically INCORRECT Cartoons for Monday September 18, 2017


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Political

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More Politically INCORRECT Cartoons for Monday September 11, 2017


 

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Political

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North Korea: Test Proved Missile Could Carry Nuclear Warhead to US


Posted by NEWSMAX.COM | Sunday, 14 May 2017 08:17 PM

URL of the original posting site: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/North-Korea-missile-test-nuclear/2017/05/14/id/790057/

Image: NKorea: Test Proved Missile Could Carry Nuclear Warhead to US

North Korea said on Monday it had successfully conducted a newly developed mid-to-long range missile test on Sunday, supervised by leader Kim Jong Un and aimed at verifying the capability to carry a “large scale heavy nuclear warhead.”

Kim accused the United States of “browbeating” countries that “have no nukes” and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the North’s “sighting range for strike,” the North’s official KCNA news agency reported.

The North fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that Washington called a message to South Korea, days after its new president took office pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

The missile was launched at the highest angle so as not to affect the security of neighbouring countries and flew 490 miles reaching an altitude of 1,312 miles, KCNA said.

Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 2,500 miles, experts said.

“The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead,” KCNA said.

“If the U.S. awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history, Kim said, strongly warning the U.S. should not to disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in the DPRK’s sighting range for strike and that it has all powerful means for retaliatory strike,” KCNA said.

DPRK is short for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea is believed to be developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching the mainland United States. The U.S. military’s Pacific Command said the type of missile that was fired was “not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile“. 

The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss North Korea’s latest missile launch, diplomats said on Sunday, which was requested by the United States and allies South Korea and Japan.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday.

“You first have to get into Kim Jong Un’s head — which is, he’s in a state of paranoia, he’s incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him,” Haley told ABC’s “This Week” program, referring to North Korea’s leader.

The report on the missile’s flight was largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments on Sunday that it flew 700 km (435 miles)and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km (1,243 miles), which is further and higher than an intermediate-range missile tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang.

“North Korea’s latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile,” Washington-based monitoring project, 38 North, said in an analysis issued on Sunday.

“It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM),” it said. 

© 2017 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

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International Politics

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Iranian Officer and Government Advisor says Iran has Supporters in the USA ready to Attack


waving flag disclaimerwarning-unvetted-postAuthored By Onan Coca February 28, 2017

URL of the original posting site: http://constitution.com/iranian-officer-government-advisor-says-iran-supporters-usa-ready-attack/

Hassan Abbassi

We have Iranian activist Banafhseh Zand to thank for once again revealing to us the danger that we face from the Muslim world. In a recent post to his Twitter feed, Zand exposes the threat that Iran (one of the nation’s on Trump’s travel “ban” order) poses to the United States.against-america

The threat is voiced by Hassan Abbassi, who happens to be an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran and heads up a think-tank that provides counsel for the Iranian government’s leadership. He is an important supporter of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he is a trusted advisor to the Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khamenei.

I say all of this so that you understand that when Abbassi speaks of foreign policy issues, particularly ones that pertain to the USA, we should be paying attention. The man has a lot of influence in Iranian politics.

Recently, Banafhseh Zand happened to get a hold of a video that showed Abbassi explaining that Iran had many loyal supporters in the United States who were ready, willing, and waiting to attack.

“We have 2 million Iranians there (in the USA) be certain that I will raise a guerilla army from amongst them against you, you know this well.

Look how vulnerable you were on 9/11 when 4 Arabs from Saudi who don’t know how to fight managed to endanger your foundations. Yet with us, you face a nation even stronger. Don’t forget, we have 7,000 PhD holders in the U.S. If only 11 people created 9/11, do you realize what we can do?

We don’t need nuclear weapons, you have 6000 nuclear warheads those warheads are our target for our guerillas to destroy. Not even an Iranian guerilla movement but we have people from ALL Islamic countries…

We will guide anyone who has problems with the U.S. We have identified the U.S.’s Achilles heel…”

The threat is real, folks, and it’s time we demand our government and our media take the threat seriously. Liberals must be forced to stop playing politics with our lives and get proactive about our national defense.America Never Forget

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca

Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Liberty Alliance media group. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.

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