Not so good news for warmongers and Neocons this morning:
London, 5 March (AKI) – Military strikes against Iran over its nuclear programme could accelerate rather than halt Tehran’s production of atomic weapons, according to a report by British think tank Oxford Research Group published on Monday. In the report’s introduction, Hans Blix, the former chief of the nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), wrote that “armed attacks on Iran would very likely lead to the result they were meant to avoid – the building of nuclear weapons within a few years.”
One of the researches’ authors, British nuclear scientist Frank Barnaby, noted that “if Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapons capacity it is doing so relatively slowly, most estimates put it at least five years away.” “However, attacking Iran, far from setting back their progress towards a bomb, would almost certainly lead to a fast-track programme to develop a small number of nuclear devices as quickly as possible,” warned the researcher.
The report also stressed that military strikes – reportedly being considered by the US to halt Iran’s atomic programme – would lead to a high number of casualties as well as lead to an even harder political stance by the government in its pursuit of a nuclear programme.
It also indicated as likely that Iran had built secret facilities and “false targets” in case of military strikes.
“With inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that it would be possible to identify and subsequently destroy the number of targets needed to set back Iran’s nuclear programme for a significant period,” it noted.
“In the aftermath of a military strike, if Iran devoted maximum effort and resources to building one nuclear bomb, it could achieve this in a relatively short amount of time: some months rather than years.”
Not surprising really. The Israeli attack on Iraq’s reactor in 1981 had the effect of accelerating Saddam’s nuclear program. Then again, we’d be attacking Iran to support the troops in Iraq getting killed by all those (bogus) Iranian EFPs. Or for regime change. Or whatever. There will always be more than enough other justifications for why we had to strike Iran offered by the Bush administration and its right wing supporters regardless of how disastrous the outcome.
