Iran signaled ahead of international talks Monday that it will not meet Western demands for a deal that would move most of its enriched uranium out of the country and delay its gaining the ability to make a nuclear bomb.
This is actually a shock to the Obama administration.
This is going to work just swell, I'm sure.
UPDATE: As I said, this development is a shock to the Obama administration.
The administration thinks that throwing Iranian protesters to the wolves was a price we could pay to get a nuclear weapons-free Iran. That's smart foreign policy realism! What could go wrong?
We'll get a nuclear-armed mullah-run Iran with dissidents dead, in jail, or raped and abused into submission.
UPDATE: If we achieve this "victory," will we really just be saving Iran's enrichment program?
Since you're probably not a regular reader of the trade publication Nucleonics Week, let me summarize an article that appeared in its Oct. 8 issue. It reported that Iran's supply of low-enriched uranium -- the potential feedstock for nuclear bombs -- appears to have certain "impurities" that "could cause centrifuges to fail" if the Iranians try to boost it to weapons grade.
Now that's interesting. The seeming breakthrough in negotiations on Oct. 1 in Geneva -- where Iran agreed to send most of its estimated 1,500 kilograms of low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment -- may not have been exactly what it appeared. Iran may have had no alternative but to seek foreign help in enrichment because its own centrifuges wouldn't work.
The Iranians resist doing this to make it seem like a concesson to us, it seems. I'm betting we'll pretend it is victory to avoid looking like fools.
