Iran is Not a Nuclear Threat!!! Jude Wanniski November 19, 2004

Memo To: Editors and reporters
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Please get off your behinds

Now that most of you have apologized for sitting on your duffs while the neo-cons planned and executed the totally unnecessary war against a toothless regime in Baghdad, I suggest you get off your duffs in regard to the neo-con plot to war against Iran. I've been posting memos here for months pointing out that Iran has not done anything to warrant the propaganda directed at it from the Perle Cabal, i.e., Richard Perle's network that is laced through both political parties, Congress and the White House. Iran is in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has a hundred times publicly pledged to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect any gol-durned site inside its borders if someone has reason to believe it has a secret nuclear program underway. Iranian exile groups pop up from time to time with press conferences about some diabolical site they have discovered, but Iran ALWAYS allows the inspectors to go in, and they find nothing.

Now I know it is impossible to get the Wall Street Journal editorial page to take a good look at the dopey charges being leveled against Tehran. It has been intellectually corrupted by the Perle Cabal and robotically publishes anything the Cabal asks it to. Today it runs a long op-ed by Henry Sikolski, a Perle stooge, who warns that Iran is not only deceiving all of us, but that it could soon be weeks or months away from having a nuke to rain down upon its adversaries in the region, i.e., Israel. Can this be possible? Not on your life. Not on your life.

But for goodness sakes, the New York Times has been pulled into the same orbit, a recent editorial wringing its hands over Iran and the possibility that it could have a nuke to threaten the region, i.e. Israel. The Times editors are well-meaning, but they do not seem to check anything out with independent sources. Here is what I wrote the Times editors after reading their editorial:

My longtime friend Gordon Prather, a nuclear physicist who actually designed nukes (when we were still designing new nukes) tells me your editorial today is factually incorrect in a very basic way and that you would do well not to accept the material being presented to reporters by the Boltons and Sikolskis of the world.

That is, the edit says: "The centrifuges at [Natanz] can just as easily be used to make bomb-grade enriched uranium as to prepare lower-grade fuel for reactors. Any country that builds and operates such a plant has taken the most crucial step down the road toward building nuclear weapons."

Dr. Prather says your editorial writer seems to think it would be easy to make a nuke once you have a uranium enrichment plant. He points out that Iran could not take the first step unless it first completed the plant at Bushehr and ran it for a year, then announced its withdrawal from the NPT, which requires six months lead time, and then spends several YEARS taking the fuel out of Bushehr, allowing it to cool down for a few years so it could be handled, then reprocessed, and eventually turned into one nuke device.... probably not one small enough to be able to be carried by a missile.

His recommendation is that you send your editorial writer to one of the URENCO plants in Europe, where he/she can ask the people who run their uranium enrichment plants what it would take for Iran to go from A to Z with what they have now. Prather believes the protocols Iran would sign in order to proceed with a low-enrichment plant would make it absolutely impossible for them to take steps two or three or eight hundred, etc., to make a nuke, without being detected.

Because Iran has the right to enrich uranium under the supervision of the IAEA in order to have a complete nuclear fuel cycle you are really asking the Iranian government to give up that right if it wishes to produce nuclear power.

Please editors and reporters, I hate to challenge your collective intelligence, but I must do so. In 2002-2003, the whole world demanded through the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein open up his whole country to prove to us that he had no weapons of mass destruction. And HE DID SO!!!! He invited inspectors from the U.N., from the IAEA, and from the US Congress, and from the CIA to come to Iraq and look into every nook and cranny. We did, found nothing, and still invaded. Now, dear editors and reporters, please take note that the neo-cons have been insisting Iran has all kinds of WMD programs underway and Tehran says it does not... and says we can send inspectors into any nook and cranny of Iran to check that out.

Doesn't it ever occur to you, dear journalists of the Fourth Estate, that you are not doing the MINIMUM to prevent a second or a third unnecessary war? Huh?