US Condemns Iran for Making Civilian Nuclear Sites Harder to Bomb
VIENNA – U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu accused Iran of nuclear "denial, deceit and evasion" on Monday, warning that Tehran's decision to move some uranium enrichment facilities to an underground bunker brings it closer to being able to producing the fissile core of a warhead.Ok, as a nuclear engineer, that's just nonsense. Either that, or its an open announcement of American intentions of bombing Iran. Take your pick. Certainly, the location of the equipment has nothing to do with the physics of uranium enrichment. The same equipment works pretty much the same above ground or underground. You don't get better efficiency or higher levels of enrichment because you are underground.
The only way this statement could be anything other than nonsense is if you take into account the fact that an above ground facility is more susceptible to bombing from American or Israeli warplanes. So, this statement is either more goobly-gobbly nonsense from the American government about Iran's nuclear program, of which there has been a lot over the years, or its an open statement of American/Israeli intentions to create a massive disaster by bombing Iran's civilian nuclear facilities.
And note that all of this is still over civilian facilities that are producing only domestic reactor grade levels of enrichment and nothing anywhere near bomb-grade levels of enrichment as regularly confirmed by IAEA inspectors. In some ways, one could well say that Iran is no closer to producing a nuclear weapon with the facility underground than above ground because the odds of it happening appear to be zero in either case with the IAEA inspectors keeping watch.
People always need to understand that building a nuclear weapon doesn't happen in someone's garage. During the Manhattan Project, the US government created three new secret cities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington state. It could be smaller today because we know more today, but we still aren't talking about building a nuclear weapon with two test tubes and a beaker in someone's garage. This is why inspections worked and were accurate in Iraq, and there's no reason not to believe that IAEA inspections aren't working and aren't accurate in Iran.
But still, this really just sounds a lot like the fake headline above. The Big Bad Wolf is complaining that the Piggies are daring to build a brick house, calling it a severe provocation to wolf rights to attack little piggies. And that such provocations can only be answered by pre-emptive strikes against the little piggies before the little piggies can successfully move into their brick house. Tell the file photo department to find a photo of Secretary Chu huffing and puffing to run with the story.
Secretary Chu of course runs the worlds largest nuclear weapon production line, and is lobbying Congress for billions of dollars in which to build new facilities to 'modernize' nuclear weapons. Talk about the Big Bad Pot calling the kettle black.
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