MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

All they need now are a few more “technical glitches” …

Reuters – “Iran has significantly stepped up its output of low-enriched uranium and total production in the last five years would be enough for at least five nuclear weapons if refined much further, a U.S. security institute said.

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think-tank which tracks Iran’s nuclear programme closely, based the analysis on data in the latest report by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which was issued on Friday.

Progress in Iran’s nuclear activities is closely watched by the West and Israel as it could determine how long it could take Tehran to build atomic bombs, if it decided to do so. Iran denies any plan to and says its aims are entirely peaceful.

During talks in Baghdad this week, six world powers failed to convince Iran to scale back its uranium enrichment program.

They will meet again in Moscow next month to try to defuse a decade-old standoff that has raised fears of a new war in the Middle East that coulddisrupt oil supplies.

Friday’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a Vienna-based UN body, showed Iran was pressing ahead with its uraniumn enrichment work in defiance of UN resolutions calling on it to suspend the activity.” Read more.

Flashback: German Media: North Korea May Have Already Tested Nuclear Warheads For Iran (Google Translation) – “The ‘Welt am Sonntag’ reported, citing Western security circles, some intelligence agencies assumed that the government in Pyongyang had conducted at least one of these [nuclear] tests for Iran. This would mean that Tehran [bomb] has been built with North Korean help, and ignited a nuclear warhead. According to the newspaper ‘Welt am Sonntag’, this assumption is based on data from the Organization of the contract for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban… The longtime director of the Policy Planning Staff in the German Defense Ministry, Hans Rühle, writes in the ‘Welt am Sonntag’ that ‘… North Korea has actually conducted a nuclear test in 2010, at least for Iran.’” Read more.

Flashback: Former Ambassador John Bolton: Iran May Be Much Closer to a Nuclear Bomb Than the World Realizes – “A report that Iran is about a year away from having the capability to build a nuclear bomb may be too optimistic, contended John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. ‘I worry the publicly available information is giving only a very small picture and that Iran is actually even much further along,’ Bolton said today in a radio interview. Bolton was on ‘Aaron Klein Investigative Radio’ on New York’s WABC Radio… Reacting to the one-year timeline, Bolton stated, ‘I think it can be even less than that.’” Read more.