Informed Speculation

…despite what some of you may think; I’m an easy-going, live-and-let-live type who is all in favor of peace, love, and understanding. Still, sometimes the news is so bad that you can’t sugar-coat it, and Iran’s nuclear program is one such story:

New traces of plutonium and enriched uranium — potential material for atomic warheads — have been found in a nuclear waste facility in Iran, a revelation that came Tuesday as the Iranian president boasted his country’s nuclear fuel program will soon be completed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency report detailing the discovery also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the U.N. watchdog’s attempts to investigate other suspicious aspects of Iran’s nuclear program.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a two-hour news conference in Tehran, asserted the world has no choice but to “live with a nuclear Iran,” although he conceded his country was “still in the first stages” of its uranium enrichment program.

So far, Tehran has been able to activate only two small experimental pilot enrichment plants that U.N. officials say have frequently broken down and have produced only small amounts of material suitable for nuclear fuel.

But Iran has progressed enough since resuming enrichment activities in February to provoke a U.N. Security Council demand that it freeze its program — a call Tehran has ignored. It says it intends to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment involving 3,000 centrifuges by late 2006, then expand the program to 54,000 centrifuges.

Iranian nuclear officials say 54,000 centrifuges would produce enough enriched uranium to fuel a 1,000-megawatt reactor, such as the one being built by Russia that is near completion at the southern city of Bushehr. Experts have estimated Iran would need only 1,500 centrifuges to produce a nuclear weapon.

Tehran insists it is only seeking to generate low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel and not the highly enriched variety needed for weapons. It also denies it is building a heavy water research reactor at Arak in order to obtain plutonium for nuclear arms, asserting it only wants to produce radioactive isotopes for medical research and treatment.

Still, when finished — probably early in the next decade — Arak could produce enough plutonium for about two bombs a year.

The Arak plant, along with the discovery of a secret Iranian enrichment program in 2003, Tehran’s refusal to cease uranium enrichment and findings by IAEA inspectors have increased suspicions about Iran’s program.

The AP account excerpted above is a masterpiece of understatement; of course, these findings only confirm what everyone knows: Iran is on the verge of joining the nuclear club. This is a disaster of epic proportions, as we have discussed at length elsewhere.

There is no matter facing the nation (indeed, the world) today, as I’ve stated often, more pressing than the nuclear one, not even the hot wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. I have heard nothing – not a single word – from the Democrats about how they plan to handle this issue. Perhaps it is more properly an executive concern – but that’s never stopped the opposition from criticizing the President’s plans before.

How about it, Nancy, Harry? You, too, 2008 aspirants – McCain, Rudy, et al…what are you going to do about the issue that dwarfs all others? The minimum wage is, with all due respect, very, very small potatoes next to Iran going nuclear…