Demagogue

If Bush & Co. intended to intimidate Iran with all the recent "secret plans to nuke Iran" talk it doesn't appear to be working.

Iran has successfully enriched uranium for the first time, a major development in its fuel cycle technology, news agencies quoted former President Hashemi Rafsanjani as saying Tuesday.

Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added that Iran "will soon join the club of countries with nuclear technology."

However, before anyone takes this to mean what Ahmadinejad wants people to think it means, consider this:

"Iran has put into operation the first unit of 164 centrifuges, has injected (uranium) gas and has reached industrial production," the news agency quoted him as saying.

"We should expand the work of these machines to achieve a full industrial line. We need dozens of these units (sets of 164 centrifuges) to achieve a uranium enrichment facility," he said.

Enriching uranium to a low level produces fuel for nuclear reactors. To a higher level, it produces the material for a nuclear bomb.

Iran would require thousands of operating centrifuges to produce enough uranium for either purpose.

If you read/hear anyone saying that Iran is 'this close' to having a nuclear bomb just keep this in mind-- how long do you think it will take for them to build thousands of operating centrifuges with the whole world watching? It seems to me that they're still well within the stage of being contained. Let's just hope that someone else successfully calls for an regional sit-down and can broker some kind of deal before our Cowboy-in-Chief gets an itchy trigger finger.