Two disturbing news items out of Iran suggest that Iran may already have a nuclear bomb capacity.
Firstly, an Armenian station recorded a seismic event measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale in Iran on Saturday 5th October and according to Armenian researchers, its characteristics suggest it was more like an explosion than an earthquake.
Secondly, a source in the Islamic republic said in a private conversation with an official close to Khamenei that
“Allah has already given us everything, everything is far away from the eyes of the Zionists, and we are ready to release this genie in response to any hint of a real threat to the existence of our state”
Iran has announced (the Iranian Tasnim agency) it has plans to conclude a “Resistance Pact” with a number of Middle Eastern countries and movements which will guarantee military and economic assistance in the event of an attack by the United States or Israel on one of the signatory parties. The “movements” will undoubtedly include Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah all dangerous Iranian proxies committed to attacking Israel.
This scenario does not of course come under the above threat of using a nuclear bomb under a “real threat to the existence of our state” but is nevertheless ominous as in April of this year, Iranian authorities suggested that they might revise their nuclear doctrine in the event of aggression from Israel.
(First the USA and then Russia have made similar “revisions” to their nuclear strike doctrines in recent years)
Combined with news of possible Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities (supported by Donald Trump) the war rhetoric has now been made all the more dangerous by these seismic indications of a possible bomb test in Iran.
Iran’s main nuclear facilities are south of Tehran and it was in the desert to the south of Tehran in the area of Kavir that the Armenian sources (published on Tigranes Telegram channel) detected the seismic event on 5th October 2024 .
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Earthquakes normally have an aftershock or seismic “tail” which a nuclear test does not exhibit. These graphs show the difference with examples of past tests and earthquakes in Pakistan, India, Russia and North Korea:
Iran has been expanding its uranium enrichment programme since 2018, reducing the so-called “breakout time” it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb to a matter of weeks from at least a year under the (President Trump abandoned) 2015 accord.
“Actually making a bomb with that material would take longer. How long is less clear and the subject of debate.
Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the 90% of weapons grade, at two sites, and in theory it has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for almost four bombs, according to a yardstick of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. watchdog” (Reuters)
It is interesting that there is a lack of western press coverage of this possible nuclear test by Iran, nor any attempt to refute the reports.
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