Independent Experts Rubbish the “Iranian Nuclear Threat” Report

At least two important and independent experts have dismissed the latest “Iranian nuclear threat” report as “amateurish” and a mish-mash of old news from an already discredited source.

According to Robert Kelley, an American nuclear engineer and former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the latest report is “very thin.”

Mr Kelly pointed out that almost all the source data was taken from the so-called “laptop of death,” a mysterious, anonymous set of documents handed in by an anonymous source to a US intelligence facility in 2005.

“I thought there would be a lot more there,” Mr Kelly told the CS Monitor news source.

“It’s certainly old news; it’s really quite stunning how little new information is in there.” Mr Kelly would know what he is talking about, as he was the IAEA inspector who was among the first to review the original data when it first surfaced in 2005.

The IAEA report said it had “supplemented” the laptop information with data from 10 member states, interviews on three continents, and its own investigations in Iran, Libya, Pakistan, and Russia.

Mr Kelly pointed out that much of the information is “years old, inconclusive – and perhaps not entirely real.”

Most of the weapons-related work it details was definitively shut down nearly a decade ago.

“The first is the issue of forgeries. There is nothing to tell that those documents are real,” Mr Kelly continued.

“My sense when I went through the documents years ago was that there was possibly a lot of stuff in there that was genuine, [though] it was kind of junk.”

He added that this would not be the first time that data was planted. In 1993 and 1994, the IAEA received “very complex forgeries” on Iraq that slowed down nuclear investigations there by a couple of years.

According to Mr Kelley, the latest Iran report is a “real mish-mash” that includes some “amateurish analysis.”

Among several technical points, he noted that the report’s discussion of Iran’s exploding bridge-wire detonators (EBWs) said it recognized that “there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few,” and claimed this was a “likely weapons connection.”

Mr Kelly said the IAEA report was “wrong. There are lots of applications for EBWs. To be wrong on this point, and then to try to misdirect opinion shows a bias towards their desired outcome . . . That is unprofessional,” he said.

His assessment that the latest IAEA report actually proved nothing, was backed up by Shannon Kile, head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Yes, Iran is making progress, they’ve covered the waterfront in terms of the main technical areas that you need to develop a nuclear weapon,” Mr Kile was quoted as saying.

“But there is no evidence they have a dedicated program under way. It’s not like they are driving toward nuclear weapons; it’s like they’re meandering toward capability.”

“It still goes back to the so-called ‘laptop of death’ and the alleged studies,” he added.

Crying Wolf: a timeline of warnings about an “imminent Iranian nuclear threat”

The warmongers in Washington and London have been trying to whip up public opinion in favour of a war against Iran for many years by making increasingly bizarre and now-proven-to-be-false accusations over that country’s “nuclear weapons.”

A time of these “warnings” illustrate the point:

– In 1984, Jane’s Defence Weekly quoted West German intelligence sources saying that Iran’s production of a bomb “is entering its final stages.”

– In 1984, US Senator Alan Cranston claimed that Iran was “seven years away” from making an atom bomb.

– In 1992, Israeli parliamentarian (and now prime minister of that country) Benjamin Netanyahu announced in the Israeli parliament that “Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon” and that the “threat has to be uprooted by an international front headed by the US.”

– In 1992, this claim was repeated by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres who told French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. “Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East,” Peres warned, “because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy.”

– In 1992, a “task force” of the US Congresses’ “Republican Research Committee” claimed that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two or three operational nuclear weapons.”

 – In 1992, the then -CIA chief Robert Gates said that that Iran’s nuclear program would be a “serious problem” in “five years or less.”

– In 1995, the New York Times quoted “senior” (but anonymous) US and Israeli officials who said that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” and that its first atom bomb was “about five years away”

– In 1998, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the US Congress that “Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years.” This has, of course, never happened.

– In 2002, a CIA report issued publicly said that the “danger from nuclear-tipped missiles, especially from Iran and North Korea, is higher than during the cold war.”

– In 2004, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. “We are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,” he said.

– In 2005, the US government publicised the contents of the so-called “laptop of death” which consisted of 1,000 pages of designs and other documentation allegedly retrieved from a computer laptop in Iran the previous year. The plans were said to contain details of “high-explosives testing and a nuclear-capable missile warhead. It is these “plans” which have been universally dismissed as forgeries by experts from around the globe, but which are still regularly produced as evidence, such as in the latest IAEA report.

– In 2007, US President George Bush warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney warned of “serious consequences” if Iran did not give up its nuclear program.

– In December 2011, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said that “Iran is getting closer to developing a nuclear bomb,” and called for “new and more crippling sanctions” against that state.