Lost in the Shuffle

The world is largely agreed and independent international agencies have found that Iran, under the leadership of an insane anti-Semite Holocaust denier, is racing toward nuclear weapons capability under the guise of a nuclear "energy" program and we or the Israelis or both are going to have to do something about it pretty damn quick or the smoking gun will come in the form a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or Chicago from a device smuggled in by Tehran's terrorist allies.

We trust we have adequately summed up the case for attacking Iran as derived from the various utterances and innuendoes from Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their various minions and media mouthpieces and, of course, Ms. Rice.

Sound familiar ? Sound like the run-up to Iraq ? It is. Does it have fatal flaws like the case against Iraq? It does. Do we know about these flaws ? We do, but they have been lost in underreporting and the growing thunder of the war drums. Fortunately, a principal flaw, reported back in March in the New York Times can be summed up in a single word:
molybdenum.

The whole story is, of course, extremely technical. the Nukes-4-Dummies version goes like this. For nuclear energy or nuclear weapons, both of which require enriched uranium, you need yellowcake uranium (shades of Niger). From the yellowcake you make a gas, UF4, which you run through a series (or cascade) or centrifuges to make UF6 from which you make the enriched uranium.

Unless, your yellowcake is contaminated with, you guessed it, molybdenum. Unless you can separate it out at the UF4 stage it will still contaminate the UF6 and wreck your centrifuges before you get anything useful.

The Times said Iran has been struggling with this problem without success for twenty years.

So when Bush & Co. ratchet up the case for war on Iraq (and they are) think aluminum tubes, think mobile biological weapons labs, think forged documents, do everything you can think of to stop them and

Stay Naked
jd