Dreams Into Lightning 2

Unexpectedly!

"President Barack Obama recently received a new National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program, which shares Israel's view that Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability, Western diplomats and Israeli officials have informed Haaretz. ..."

Morning Report: 2012-06-11

Iran's former nuclear negotiator spills the beans. Al-Monitor:

Iran undercut its own negotiators by withholding from them key details of its nuclear program, according to a new book by a former senior Iranian diplomat.

The book, Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, reveals nuggets about Iran’s nuclear diplomacy and internal politics that make the failed diplomacy of the past decade easier to understand — and do not portend well for the future.

A top negotiator with the Europeans from 2003-2005, Mousavian notes that Iranian negotiators in 2003 did not know that Iran had obtained from Pakistan drawings for advanced centrifuges known as P-2s along with less sophisticated technology. ...

Internet kills illusions of advertising effectiveness. Walter Russell Mead writes that this applies to pr0n, but not just pr0n. 'The Internet also gutted the value of advertising (and continues to do so relentlessly), as Google and other ad networks revealed just how ineffective most of it actually is. It used to be that companies wouldn’t flinch to drop several million dollars on campaigns in glossy magazines, convinced that the “eyeballs” passing over their slick branding were being converted into customers. With the advent of online analytics, and with conversions becoming a hard statistic rather than something measured through market surveys, this illusion became harder and harder to sustain. ...' No word on how this will affect Snooki.

Pakistan: Chief Of Staff Declines Meeting With American Official. 'Pakistani army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani turned down a request to meet with U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary Peter Lavoy, Pakistani newspaper The News reported June 11, citing unnamed Pakistani and U.S. officials. Americans should not expect to meet with powerful Pakistani officials after undermining Pakistani sovereignty, issuing threats, intensifying strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles, killing Pakistani soldiers and refusing to apologize, and threatening to cut off aid, one Pakistani official said in explaining why the meeting might have been turned down.'

It's Unofficial: US, Israel Delivered Stuxnet Through Memory Stick, Human Agent

'The Stuxnet computer worm used to sabotage Iran's nuclear program was planted by a double agent working for Israel. The agent used a booby-trapped memory stick to infect machines deep inside the Natanz nuclear facility, according to a report published on Wednesday. ...'

Well, that's quite a change from the Bush years.

"The study by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) will likely cast further doubt on Tehran’s denials that it is seeking atomic bombs as the UN nuclear agency prepares to publish a new report on Iran in the coming days."

Iran's Regrettable Failure

The White House put out a statement using more than the usual number of hand-wringing words like "regrettable" and "unfortunate".

"We regret the failure of Iran to reach an agreement this week with the IAEA that would permit the agency to fully investigate the serious allegations raised in its November report," the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said on Wednesday at his daily news conference.

The nuclear watchdog on Wednesday acknowledged its "failure" in trying to probe suspicions that Tehran has worked secretly on atomic arms. ...

Presumably this is diplo-speak for "we're really pissed". Go to the link for the rest; we'll see what happens next.

How bad would an Iranian nuke be?

Dina Esfandiary at IISS says: Very bad.

Most importantly, it would make the Islamic Republic a great deal bolder in its foreign policy. Iran’s regional aspirations of hegemony would no longer be a matter of trying to appear like a bully, it would be one. ...

Read the whole article at the link. And bookmark the IISS homepage for up-to-the minute, thoughtful commentary.

Don't Try This At Home

Richard Handl had an interesting hobby: Attempting to conduct nuclear fission in his apartment.

The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.

Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden's Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police. ...

Live and learn.

Israel's MI Chief Kochavi Contradicts Mossad's Iran Assessment

Toronto Sun:

JERUSALEM- Sanctions have not held up Iran’s nuclear program and it could produce bombs within two years, Israel’s new top spy said on Tuesday, staking out a conservative timeline in the face of rosier U.S. assessments.

The remarks by Major-General Aviv Kochavi, chief of military intelligence, also appeared aimed at asserting authority over the rival Israeli espionage agency Mossad, whose departing chief said this month Iran might not have nuclear arms before 2015.

Outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan had said that Iran “will not achieve a nuclear bomb before 2015, if that.” Go to the link to read the full article.

"Even Mossad ...

... can get it wrong."

Nuclear Iran, Coming Soon

Via Planet Iran, here's JPost:

Dec. 25, 2009 HEATHER ROBINSON, Special to The Jerusalem Post , THE JERUSALEM POST Iraqi parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi is warning that Iran is much closer to attaining nuclear capability than most sources, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US State Department, believe. In fact, he predicts the Iranians could have a nuclear capability - and may announce that they have it - as soon as next month. "We are receiving information which says Iran is so close to producing an atom bomb," Alusi said in an interview earlier this month, the latest in a series of interviews conducted since September. "All the international community, they don't realize how close [the Iranians] are to the goal... The Iranians will surprise us one day [soon] and say, 'We have it.'" Alusi said he cannot reveal his sources of this information, because that would place in grave and imminent danger individuals within the Iranian "establishment" who risked their lives to share it with him. "I am talking about Iranian insider information. Very clear, from inside Iran," he said. "There are people within Iran who want to be normal... They know this is a dangerous regime. You see how they treat their own people... Iran is terrorizing the world already. What will they do once they have the bomb and they are stronger?" ...

Go to the link for the rest. Now if that's not enough, Muslims Against Sharia links John Noonan at The Weekly Standard, who says that Iran could be working on not just a fission bomb (A-bomb), but a thermonuclear fusion device (H-bomb):

Iran's nuclear program is spread throughout a variety of experimental laboratories, hardened enrichment facilities, heavy water manufacturing plants, and two plutonium reactors currently under development (Bushehr could come online within a few months). That far exceeds what's needed to turn on the lights, but it's also beyond what's needed for a basic nuclear weapons program. Consider North Korea, which manufactured two limited yield nuclear weapons using only a plutonium reactor, a plutonium reprocessing facility, and -- presumably -- some sort of weapons laboratory. Why is Iran pumping billions more into building and protecting triple the number of facilities required to build a basic nuclear weapon, akin to the Fat Man or Little Boy bombs detonated in 1945? The answer could be that Tehran is skipping basic weapons construction and moving towards an advanced thermonuclear design. Consider that they've already experimented with advanced weapons designs like two-point implosion, nuclear triggers, and have built their own facility at Arak that could be used to produce both tritium, which is a suspected boosting agent in hydrogen bomb designs, as well as weapons-grade plutonium. They've spent billions building, hardening, and protecting uranium enrichment, which could be used along with plutonium in a staged nuclear device. All this at an astronomical cost and effort compared to the similar North Korean nuclear program. And what of Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to South America, where he showed keen interest in Bolivia's massive lithium reserves? ...

Merry Christmas.