A nuclear scientist working at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility was assassinated in Tehran today. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan died when a motorcyclist stuck a magnetic mine on the side of his Peugeot 406 in traffic. Fingers will be pointed at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency which has a long history of successful extra-territorial assassinations. Israel expects Iran will have a workable nuclear weapon by the end of 2012*. According to Iran it has achieved the uranium enrichment level of 20% at a new underground facility outside Qom that it says is invulnerable to the most sophisticated ground penetrating bombs. This latest ratchet in the war of nerves between Iran and the West is ominous as both sides seemingly move toward a military confrontation. A few days ago Iran said it would impose the death penalty on a US spy, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a former marine with dual citizenship. Economic sanctions are having some effect on the regime in Tehran as the rial has dropped to a new low on currency exchanges and the government has begun to stockpile oil against the US threat to cut off imports of Iranian oil. These developments may all be bluster and posturing, but given the stakes and the
narrow confines of the Straits of Hormuz, there is little room for error. By a well known symbolic action reminiscent of the Cold War, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
[image] moved the Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight, now set at five minutes before catastrophe, citing the failure of nations to control nuclear proliferation. The last time the hands were moved was in January 2010 when it was pushed back one minute to six minutes before the hour. The clock was initially set in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight.
*Leon Panetta, now Secretary of Defense, slipped on the Face the Nation interview program by saying that Iran is not pursuing the development of an atomic bomb, but rather "nuclear capability". That assessment is contrary to the broadcast jingoism of war hawks in Washington. The International Atomic Agency (IAEA) made statements last year suggesting that Iran was getting closer to building a nuclear weapon, but former agency personnel disputed that inference as misleading. Scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko firmly denied on Radio Free Europe that a containment chamber for hydrodynamic testing of trigger devices had been built with his participation at the Parchan military complex in 2000. Robert Kelly, a former inspector for the agency and nuclear engineer also said the claim was misleading. Testing of explosive initiation devices is customarily done outdoors for safety reasons. Danilenko is known for his work with the explosive synthesis of nanodiamonds, a process that uses a containment chamber. In 2008 an IAEA member state handed in a purported Iranian document describing a 2003 test of a possible implosion system for a nuclear weapon. The member state is believed by informed sources to be Israel. We have been here before. {"Niger Documents"}