Imad Khadduri, Iraqi nuclear
scientist
This article was originally published
in Arabic on www.aljazeera.net
With the escalation of the
American-Israeli media and diplomatic campaigns in the past few years countering
the accelerating Iranian nuclear program, justified qualms, from countries
adjacent to Iran as well as form military and political strategists, continue
to accumulate regarding the nature the Iranian nuclear program and its ultimate
intentions.
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Pertinent questions
1 - Is it in Iran’s interest to constantly attract
so much attention to its nuclear program by trumpeting the news at every step
of the development of its centrifuge uranium enrichment process while having tried
and yet failed to keep secret other suspect nuclear projects such as developing
the technology for the extraction of heavy water for use in an indigenously designed
and built natural uranium reactor that is capable of producing plutonium that
they had embarked on in the early nineties of the last century? Or Iran’s procrastination for two years before
the recent submission of a classified report to the International Atomic Energy
Agency that details the casting and manufacturing of the atomic bomb’s core on
the grounds that the report was given to Iran in gratuity by the Pakistani nuclear
scientist Abdul Kader Khan and without Iran’s specific request for it, along
with the purchased drawing maps of the centrifugal uranium enrichment process?
Has
2- What is the more feasible alternative, an American-Israeli military strike against Iran’s
defensive and offensive military forces followed by the destruction of Iran’s
nuclear infrastructure, or allowing for the hope that a nuclear armed Iran
would follow in the steps of other countries that have developed a nuclear
military capability and who had then adopted a mature political stance that
reflected their content with achieving their ambitions and international
prestige and proceeded to employ their nuclear might only as a military
deterrent that serves their regional political strategies?
An attempt will be made here
to respond to these two questions and to foresee the near term consequences of
The Iranian Nuclear Program
In answering the first
question; we claim that the ferocity and intelligence of Iranian negotiating
skills have provided it with the necessary negotiating umbrella to gain enough time
for the conclusion of