Nuclear

Israeli Analysts Describe ‘Reasonable’ Parameters For A Final Nuclear Deal With Iran

By Ben Armbruster on April 7, 2014 at 12:50 pm
A group of Israeli experts last week laid out what they believe would be a “reasonable” final nuclear deal with Iran, namely allowing Iran some civilian enrichment capacity, widening the time it takes for Iran to build a nuclear weapons should it choose that path, and making sure the Iranians come clean about its past nuclear weapons work.

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“From my point of view,” said retired Israeli Defense Forces Brigadier General Shlomo Brom at an event last week sponsored by the Center for American Progress and Molad, a progressive Israeli think tank, “a reasonable deal is a deal that lessens the break out time so there will be enough time to react if Iran will decide to break out towards a nuclear bomb.”

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Has Iran Really Pursued Nukes?

Gareth Porter’s new book challenges years of the West’s claims about Tehran’s nuclear program.
By Kelley Vlahos • April 1, 2014

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What do most of us really know about the Iranian nuclear program? After a decade of hearing that Iran is just one year from getting the bomb, and that its leaders are radically bent on the destruction of Israel and its Western allies, no one could be blamed for thinking that Iran really wants (or already has) atomic weapons. Gareth Porter knows the narrative. He has worked tirelessly to pursue the truth of the matter. His conclusion: Iran never had a nuclear weapons program and, frankly, it doesn’t want one.

Can he prove it? Well he’s got 300 pages representing at least six years worth of work to try to get you over to his side. Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published this year by Just World Books, is not just some ham-fisted polemic. It’s a journalist’s read: dense with interviews, reports, citations, notes. He finds obscure sources that would otherwise be lost to history. He pokes holes in unquestioned news stories, and exposes what he believes is an orchestrated campaign by the U.S. and its ally, Israel, dating back to the 1979 Islamic revolution, to prevent Iran from developing a non-weaponized nuclear power program.

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Obama administration confidant lays out possible Iran nuclear deal

By Barbara Slavin March 31, 2014
In what some Iran watchers see as a trial balloon, Robert Einhorn shares ideas on the terms of a final deal with Tehran.

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Robert Einhorn, a former senior U.S. official who is well regarded by Barack Obama’s administration and retains close ties to its top nuclear negotiator, has proposed parameters for a long-term nuclear agreement with Iran that would allow it to continue enriching uranium at low levels and would ask Congress to preauthorize military action if Iran violates the accord.
Einhorn’s proposal — unveiled Monday at the Brookings Institution, where he is a senior fellow — seeks to marry Iran’s limited need for nuclear fuel to the scope of its nuclear infrastructure and provide confidence that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons.

In publishing his ideas, Einhorn — who left the Obama administration less than a year ago and retains close ties to chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman and other administration officials — illustrates that the fate of a long-term nuclear agreement with Iran rests not just on the negotiators meeting in Vienna but also on how political elites in the United States and Iran approach the compromises required to reach an accord. U.S. officials have compared the process of broadening the current six-month interim agreement to solving a Rubik’s Cube, in which changing one part affects all others.

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