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During this week an interesting tale came to light over the Israeli bombing of a nuclear facility in Syria which had up until now been shrouded in mystery. The guts of the story was that the plant in question was designed by and supplied by North Korea and its purpose was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons as it was unsuitable for electricity generation and too large for just research purposes.

Who and What…

However the “revelations” of all this raise as many further questions than the apparent answers supplied. What on earth was Syria doing getting involved in this in the first place ? Given the geography, the very last thing Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank would want is the possibility that a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the region. In fact and once a solid peace deal has been put into place and held for some years, the removal of the Israeli capability in this area is crucial.

Who actually funded this and on whose behalf was this being done ? Iran comes top of the list and yes, I do suspect that in some part it was intended as a “warning shot” to Iran over its nuclear programmes.

Iran and it’s Nuclear Programmes

There is a major problem with Iran over it’s nuclear intentions which “may” turn out to be a re-run of Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, Saddam didn’t have any because they had already been destroyed but, he went to great lengths to give the impression he still had them (probably to impress the Iranians), which even Russia believed at the time to be true, the consequence of which, we invaded Iraq.

It might be that Iran does not have the intention or indeed the technical capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear warheads with their matching delivery systems. Whilst Iran certainly has medium range rockets, it would take a lot to match the sophistication of the existing major nuclear armed countries in these technical areas but that said, Iran is playing a very dangerous game. For the West and particularly for the US and UK, the experiences of Iraq have been painful and would not be repeated in Iran so the other day in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton was only pointing out a basic truth.

If Iran needed to be “stopped”, there would be no ground invasion, nuclear weapons would be used and as there appear to be many widely dispersed locations, the damage would be widespread and drifting radioactivity clouds, devastating to the region. Whilst I have no love of the Government in Tehran, Persia is an ancient country and I would not wish to see its people and history destroyed just because of the foolishness of the language used by its Government.

It Doesn’t Add Up

Then again to me, none of this makes much sense anyway. Whilst with the help of rouge states such as North Korea and Pakistan, it is possible for any country with the money to get involved in a nuclear programme, as it requires a lot of heavy engineering and international compliance regimes, any diversion into a weapons programme will become fairly obvious and retribution in one form or another will follow.

You can call the Iranian Leadership very stupid if you like but it doesn’t make sense to either over estimate or, under estimate your enemy. The Iranians have acquired and developed medium range missile technologies that can hit targets in their region but to try and nuclear tip them would be foolishness, more likely will be chemical and biological warheads but even so, it would still get ‘nuked’ the moment it used them. The real likelihood is that they only want to develop radiation weapons that could be used by “Terrorist Client Organizations” as “dirty bombs” in major cities around the world.

Imagine a 9/11 with radioactivity – the retaliatory nuclear strike would be both massive and immediate, protestations of it being “Hezbollah not us…” will fall on deaf ears – that would be a very silly game for any country to play, the politics of Washington and London have both changed following Iraq.