NightBlogger

(IsraelNN.com)
Israel’s leadership resolved, in top-level strategic discussions three months ago, to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from having nuclear bombs. This is Maariv’s front-page headline on Friday. Maariv’s veteran political reporter Ben Caspit stops short of detailing the precise solution Israel will implement to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program, but writes, “Preparations for an Israeli military option intended to stop Iran’s nuclear program are underway.” The results of the series of highest-level discussions are thus clear: “The debate between those who believe in doing everything, including a military operation, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, and those who think we can live with Iranian nukes, has been settled.” Not only that, but “if the ayatollahs’ regime does not fall in the next year, if the Americans do not strike militarily, and if the international sanctions do not break the Iranian nuclear plan, Israel will have to act forcefully.” More

Debkafile
Military sources report Moscow’s planned retaliation for America’s missile interceptors in Poland and US-Israeli military aid to Georgia may come in the form of installing Iskandar surface missiles in Syria and its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. Russian Baltic and Middle East warships, submarines and long-range bombers may be armed with nuclear warheads, according to Sunday newspapers in Europe. More

Iran will not retreat “one iota” from its nuclear rights, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday, the day of an informal deadline set by Western officials in a row over Tehran’s atomic ambitions. Ahmadinejad made the remark in a statement posted on the presidential Web site after talks in Tehran with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “In whichever negotiation we take part … it is unequivocally with the view to the realization of Iran’s nuclear right, and the Iranian nation would not retreat one iota from its rights,” Ahmadinejad’s statement said. Western powers gave Iran two weeks from July 19 to respond to their offer to hold off from imposing more U.N. sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran freezing any expansion of its nuclear work. That would suggest a deadline of Saturday, but Iran, which has repeatedly ruled out curbing its nuclear program, has dismissed the idea of having two weeks to reply. More

Moscow is angry about U.S. plans for missile-defense sites in eastern Europe and Izvestia cited a “highly placed” military aviation source as saying, “While they are deploying the anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, our long-range strategic aircraft already will be landing in Cuba.” Izvestia said this apparently refers to long-range nuclear-capable bombers. Former Russian Air Force Commander-in-Chief Anatoly Kornukov told Russia’s Interfax news agency Thursday that the country’s “strategic bombers are entitled to use airfields in any country, including Cuba, as long as its leaders do not object.” More

In These Times
Foes of nuclear proliferation got two disturbing bits of news last month. One was the May 26 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said Iran has not been candid about its uranium enrichment program and that it has serious concerns about alleged research into nuclear weapons.

The other news was less official but perhaps more sobering: Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons in its arsenal. Carter responded to a question about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran during a news conference at a May 25 literary festival in Wales, U.K. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union (sic) has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” Carter said, according to the BBC.

This off-handed reference to Israel’s nuclear capabilities was unusual for U.S. officials, who are usually mute on the issue. According to a May 26 story from BBC News, however, “most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country’s Dimona nuclear reactor.” U.S. officials usually follow Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” which neither confirms nor denies Israel’s nuclear capacity. This is official deception and it has allowed Israel to ignore the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, as well as conventions on biological and chemical weapons. More

Asia Times
Julian Delasantellis
…I present before the bar of humanity this item I recently came across on the Internet, a report authored by respected military analyst Anthony H Cordesman of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank, entitled “Iran, Israel and Nuclear War” [1].

The 77-page report is formatted in the US Pentagon’s current dominant lingua franca, the ubiquitous Microsoft Powerpoint…The first and core scenario of the report involves a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, some time between 2010 and 2020. It is speculated that during this period, the Iranians would have about 50, mostly minimum-yield, nuclear weapons at their disposal.

Thirty would be in the form of missile warheads to be emplaced on their Shahab 3 and 4 intermediate range ballistic missiles, 20 in the form of bombs that would be carried on the now antique F-14 Tomcats bought from the US by the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, along with a few on the old Russian SU-24s, and the more modern SU-37s, that Iran has recently purchased during shopping trips to the world’s global arms swap meet. More