Recently I saw an article in the Calgary Herald about Iran and how the rapidly modernizing country has joined the arms race and has joined the nuclear weaponry team by creating several nuclear power plants to create “additional energy” for Iranian national interest. This discovery was made by the UN when it built it a seismic monitoring station in Turkmenistan, near its border with Iraq. This station was built to detect tremors from nuclear explosions. The UN immediately suspected signs of nuclear activity. When the UN made an appeal to Iran to stop gathering WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), Iran responded by saying that Iran is only creating Nuclear energy and has no intention of gathering WMDs. After further investigation from the UN, it was decided that the uranium for the energy had been in the process of gathering for a long time. The fact that Iran had been manufacturing and processing uranium for energy purposes put a lot of suspicion on Iraq and it is obvious that the uranium is not being processed for “security” or “energy” related reasons.
Through the recent discoveries of Wikileaks, it has also been seen that some superpowers of the middle east like Saudi Arabia and Israel would greatly enjoy it if the US were to step in and solve the problem of Iranian nuclear technology. A reason for this is because if the US is to step in to invade Iran, the oil exports of Iran would stop, thus greatly decreasing competition for oil in the middle east. This would bring most countries of the world that had been trading with Iran previously to bring their money to Saudi Arabia, thus increasing revenue in oil. Also, since Iran was believed to process uranium to make nuclear weaponry, the intervention of the United States would end any threat that Saudi Arabia or Israel might have from Iran’s nuclear weaponry. This is because Israel is a superpower in the Middle East in terms of military power and Saudi Arabia is a superpower in the Middle East due to their flourishing economy.
Another development that was also recently made in the Iran and nuclear weaponry conflict is that there were discussions between the officials of Israel and the USA on the best way to end the nuclear program of Iran with a minimal amount of lives lost. There was still an existing factor of whether the countries would strike Iran command a preemptive strike on Iran nuclear power plants and uranium processing centres. This means that USA and Israel have not abandoned the option to destroy all the nuclear enriching centres of Iran, beforehand, to prevent a future war in the middle east or the world.
Even though Iran claims that the uranium is only for nuclear energy purposes, it is evident that this road will eventually lead to weaponization. These were the words of President Barack Obama after the US, along with the United Nations, made another assessment of Iran’s nuclear program. Two factors that reinforce this assumption is that in February 2010, Iran launched a satellite in space meant only for research and telecommunication purposes but it is evident to many countries that the satellite could also be used to launch nuclear forces. Another factor that reinforced the assumption was that Iran increased its uranium enriching to a level of 20 per cent which is a huge increase from the previous 3.5 per cent.
Information courtesy of the Calgary Herald and CNN News