Iran's March Towards a Nuclear Arsenal

The IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program has been released. There are no surprises. Iran continues to minimize cooperation even as they recently brought sufficient centrifuges online to create, within one year, enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. This from the Washington Post:

Iran is providing "diminishing" information about its current nuclear program, even though it has recently provided some details about its past efforts to acquire nuclear technology in response to international pressure, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in a report issued in Vienna today.

"Since early 2006, the agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing," the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded. "The agency's knowledge about Iran's current nuclear program is diminishing," with Tehran's cooperation "reactive rather than proactive."

. . . The United States will work with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany on a third round of Security Council sanctions, since Iran has also failed to suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. Two earlier U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran, which passed in December and March, have been unsuccessful in changing Tehran's position.

The Bush administration has been counting on the IAEA report and a report by European Union chief Javiar Solana expected this month to end five months of tension among the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council about further steps to squeeze Tehran. Russia and China have particularly resisted U.S. pressure, mainly to give more time for the so-called "work plan" designed by the IAEA to find out about Iran's past activities through 2002.

Read the story here. As I posted earlier, we are out of time in dealing with the Iranian issue. If sanctions are to work, they must be economy crippling sanctions and they must be instituted immediately. That means Germany, France and Italy will finally have to face reality about the devil that they are dealing with in Iran. And they must understand that failure to act now will only increase the likelihood of war later.