Useful Fools

Bill Gertz is one of my favorite national security reporters. Working for the conservative Washington Times, he has outstanding sources in the national security establishment.

Hence I was shocked to read an article by Gertz and Scarborough containing (emphasis added):

Israel has ready a plan to bomb Iran’s Bushehr nuclear-power plant should the Persian Gulf coast facility, now under construction, begin producing weapons-grade material, an insider tells us.

This source says Israel has mapped out a route its jet fighters would take to destroy what is designed to be a two-reactor plant. A successful strike would ensure that the radical Tehran regime does not develop nuclear weapons.

(The full article is here.)

That a successful strike would ensure that Iran could not develop nuclear weapons is very, very wrong.

Destroying the reactor would stop Iran from producing Plutonium based weapons. But it does nothing about enriched uranium weapons, and the IAEA has already found evidence that Iran has been enriching uranium as reported by The Washington Times. A more detailed report, describing the facilities and Iranian efforts to hide them, is here.

In a historical parallel, although Iraq’s Osirak reactor was destroyed by Israel, after the first Gulf War Iraq was found to be close to producing an enriched uranium weapon!

For more information on nuclear weapons, check here.

Note: Why did I pick on Bill Gertz? Because I don’t know who Scarborough (the other author) is