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Friday, 16 November 2007 |
 Source: The Wall Street Journal
So Iran has now released its blueprints for casting uranium into nuclear warheads. Lest you missed that newsy detail, we suggest you read past today's headlines that the Islamic Republic is being "generally truthful" about its nuclear programs by offering up various tokens of cooperation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The story about the blueprints arrives alongside yesterday's IAEA
update on Iran's nuclear dossier. True to media hype, the report
concludes that the Iranians seem to have truthfully answered at least
some of the previously unresolved questions concerning their
decades-old nuclear black market transactions. But as with the release
of the blueprints, which the IAEA first discovered two years ago but
was not allowed to copy until this week, the Iranians seem to have done
little more than tell the IAEA what it already knew.
Despite the show of good mullah behavior, the report also notes that
"since early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information
that Iran had previously been providing. . . . As a result, the
Agency's knowledge about Iran's current nuclear program is
diminishing." Among the more worrisome unresolved issues are the links
between Iran's ostensibly civilian Atomic Energy Organization and its
military, such as those that relate to "high explosives testing and the
design of a missile re-entry vehicle."
On one point, at least, the report is unequivocal: Iran is now
enriching uranium using no fewer than 2,952 centrifuges, in violation
of two legally binding U.N. Security Council demands. That number
represents an 18-fold increase in Iran's enrichment capabilities in the
past year alone. Diplomatic efforts at the U.N. will never match that
pace. Unless U.S. and European efforts do, we'll be writing about
another 18-fold increase this time next year, if not something more
explosive.
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