Israel, it's now or never. The former United States envoy to the UN warned on Monday that if Iran's nuclear facility in Bushehr, which is set to be unveiled in little more than a week, isn't destroyed soon it should never be attacked.
"Israel's got a problem, because once the fuel rods are inserted into the reactor, an attack ... would almost certainly release the radiation into the atmosphere," John Bolton said on Fox Business.
"If they were going to do anything militarily about Bushehr, they've only got a few days," he said.
Iran announced that the long-in-development nuclear power reactor will go online Aug. 21, thanks to help from Russia, when a shipment of nuclear fuel will be loaded into its core.
"So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr," Bolton warned, "it has to move in the next eight days."
However, the sharp-tongued former diplomat noted that Israel was unlikely going to act, chiefly because there are numerous other nuclear sites that would also need to be attacked. Israel would have to hit them all at once, since launching multiple attacks over the course of several days or weeks would be far more difficult.
Iran has already warned that any such attack by Israel would be met with the swiftest response.
"In that case we will lose a power plant, but Israel's existence will be in danger," Iran's defense minister Ahmad Vahidi is quoted as saying by the state-run Mehr news agency.
The Foreign Ministry's spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said Tuesday he "doubts" that Israel would "make such a dangerous move."
"Any aggression against this power plant will result in a serious reaction," he said.
Bolton, in language often used during the Bush administration, stressed that Iran's nuclear program has gone much further than it should have been allowed to, and that sanctions alone are "failing."
Iran has taken "steps to mitigate the effect" of the sanctions, he said. And "even if the sanctions - the U.S. sanctions, the European sanctions - are imposing some extra cost on Iran, some extra economic burden, it's not nearly enough to stop Iran from continuing to pursue nuclear weapons."
He stressed that the Bushehr nuclear power plant marks a "major, major plus for the Iranian weapons program," as they could obtain material from it to make nuclear weapons.
"Iran is on the verge of achieving something that Saddam Hussein was not able to achieve," Bolton said, "and that's getting a second route to nuclear weapons. It's a very, very significant step forward for the Iranian nuclear program."
Bolton served as envoy to the UN under President George W. Bush - despite being extremely critical of the international organization - for little more than a year, but left in December 2006 when he failed to be confirmed by the Senate.
DAILY NEWSource: http://arakaninfo.blogspot.com/2010/08/ex-un-envoy-john-bolton-israel-should.html
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