Podcast # 18: Iran’s Nuclear Blunders
Scott: My name is Scott Paton. I am talking today with Allan Colston. He is the author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. This is a book dealing with prophecy.
For those listeners who may be new to this topic, this Podcast is another in the series “Signs of the Times”, and is titled “Iran’s Nuclear Blunders”. Hello Allan and welcome to the Podcast.
Thanks Scott. Always a pleasure to talk to you again.
Scott: Allan, in your last Podcast you talked about modern Iran, and how it would come to play an important part in future events prophesied in the Bible. How do you think this will come about?
Well Scott, as I mentioned earlier, what has taken place in Iran over the last few years has not only brought the country to the brink of disaster, but as a result of their nuclear blunders, they have brought the world closer to the very scenario predicted by Ezekiel.
The situation in Iran right now is that the entire country is in a state of crisis, largely as a result of international sanctions imposed by Western countries, in response to Iran’s intransigence, and its apparent efforts to produce nuclear weapons.
Scott: What sort of crisis are they facing?
A short while ago, Shamseddin Hosseini, who is the Minister of the Economy in Iran, reported that the country was facing a 50% drop in oil revenues as a result of these sanctions.
In addition, many of the country’s imports, such as food and consumer goods, have been drastically reduced. For example, the number of container ships visiting Iran dropped from 378 in 2010, to a little over one hundred in 2012.
And the number of dry bulk ships carrying food, as well as necessary commodities like coal and iron ore, has dropped by 75% over the last two years. Only eight refrigerated cargo vessels carrying fresh produce called in at Iranian ports during the first ten months of 2012. And only five fishing trawlers docked in the same period, down from 20 two years before.
In October the Government announced that traders would no longer be able to export goods like wheat, flour, sugar and red meat, in order to conserve dwindling supplies at home. And two weeks later, Iran’s Oil Minister announced plans to ration the supply of diesel fuel, in a bid to curb the rampant smuggling of scarce fuel to neighbouring countries.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the Rial, which is the main currency of Iran, has lost about 40% of its value against the American dollar since August. And while the official rate of inflation is given as 25%, many economists believe that it is actually closer to 75%.
This reduction in the value of their currency has brought severe economic hardship to citizens throughout Iran. And this has led to the first signs of social unrest, as street protests have broken out recently in various parts of the country.
And in a rare public confession that the Government was struggling under the weight of these international sanctions, the Ayatollah Khamanei was quoted as saying: “These sanctions are barbaric. This is a war against a nation“. And in a predictable show of defiance, he went on to add: “But the Iranian nation will defeat them.”
All of these problems have been brought about by Iran’s biggest blunder, and that is their decision to build nuclear weapons in the first place.
Scott: But don’t the Iranians say that their nuclear program is designed for peaceful purposes only?
Correct. In fact they have been saying that repeatedly to anyone who would listen, ever since their nuclear program began. But not many countries believe that today. Europe and the United States don’t. Neither do other Arab states. And Israel certainly doesn’t.
The very fact that Iran has been willing to undergo such hardships, and for so long, has sent a clear message to the world that they are determined to develop nuclear weapons as soon as possible, no matter how many sanctions they have to endure along the way.
The ironic thing about their present situation Scott, is that if they had wanted to, they could have succeeded in developing nuclear weapons long ago, soon after they came to power in 1979. The fact that they chose not to do so at that time, has subsequently proved to be yet another in a long series of political and strategic blunders by the religious leaders of Iran.
Back in the 1950’s, at a time when the Shah was the leader of Iran, he launched a nuclear program with the help of the United States that was part of an Atoms for Peace program. Under this program, the Shah approved plans to build up to 23 nuclear power stations by the year 2000.
As part of this program, President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a US built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel – the very thing that Iran is now trying so desperately hard to achieve.
However, when the regime of the Shah was toppled by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the new leader of the country, the Ayatollah Khomeini, cancelled the entire program, saying that it was incompatible with Islamic law.
And following the death of Khomeini in 1989, his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei went even further. He issued a “Fatwa” – or religious edict – saying that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islamic law.
Scott: So Allan, when do you think Iran decided to go ahead with the development of nuclear weapons?
Well Scott, it is evident that the attitude of the rulers of Iran changed dramatically after 9-1-1. As you will no doubt recall, the response by George Bush to the attack on the World Trade Center, was to launch a full scale invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
And if that didn’t cause the Iranians to reconsider the need for nuclear weapons, then the events of March 19th, 2003, certainly did. For it was on that night, as the world looked on, that CNN broadcast live coverage of the US attack on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad.
This destructive display of aerial firepower came to be known by the phrase “Shock and Awe”. There is little doubt that those who were most shocked and awed by this ferocious display of firepower, were the rulers in Tehran.
For in the space of just nineteen months, they had come to witness both countries on either side of them being attacked by the US. And in each of these cases, the aerial attacks were followed by land invasions, as part of George Bush’s global war on terror.
For a country that had captured US diplomats in the past, and held them hostage for over a year, all the while referring to America as the “Great Satan”, this should surely have caused the rulers in Tehran to ask themselves the question: how long it would be before they were next.
So the impetus to gain nuclear weapons would have gone into overdrive from that moment on. And the reason for doing so was, as I explained in my last Podcast, that no country that has successfully developed nuclear weapons in the past, has ever been attacked by any other state.
The perfect example of this is North Korea. Despite openly flaunting the West, including the United States, and continually threatening to destabilize the area, no nation has been willing to confront them, simply because they are known to have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Scott: So what has been happening in Iran over the last ten years?
Well Scott, the leaders of Iran were now confronted with an enormous challenge. They not only had to acquire the materials and equipment necessary for the enrichment of uranium, as well as the facilities needed to house them, but they also had to find a way to do so without the rest of the world finding out about it.
And over the last ten years, this has been a saga that would have done justice to any James Bond novel.
The first thing that Iran needed to do was to create an elaborate smokescreen, designed to fool other countries into thinking that all they were doing was enriching uranium to the level consistent with that needed to fuel a civilian nuclear power plant, which is about 5%.
Secondly, they needed to make sure that the facilities designed to enrich uranium to the level needed to make atomic weapons, were hidden from the prying eyes of the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
As part of their strategy of stalling for time, Iran first entered into a series of long drawn out negotiations with the international community, over whether they should undertake this enrichment process themselves, or whether they should simply import enriched uranium from other designated countries like Russia or the United States.
When these negotiations inevitably failed, Iran announced that they would now have no choice but to build the enrichment facilities themselves. However, in place of the accepted standard of uranium enrichment needed for civilian nuclear power stations, which was 5%, they announced that they intended to raise the enrichment level to 20%.
When the international community refused to go along with this, and enacted a series of sanctions against them, the President of Iran announced that it was their “inalienable right” to do this. He branded the sanctions as “illegal actions imposed by arrogant powers”.
Scott: So where does Iran have their enrichment facilities?
Well Scott, Iran now has seventeen sites that are known to be involved in various aspects of their nuclear program. Of these, two are the most important, because they are the ones that contain the centrifuges that do the actual enrichment of uranium.
The biggest of these facilities is known as Fordow, located outside the holy city of Qom, about a hundred miles to the south of Tehran. The other is at Natanz, roughly midway between Qom and the city of Isfahan.
Both of these facilities are underground. The Fordow site is located about 300 feet below the ground, and has been excavated from the inside of a mountain. Fordow is considered to have about 3,000 centrifuges at this time.
Natanz is a hardened Fuel Enrichment plant that is built about 25 feet underground, that is protected by a layer of concrete some two and a half feet thick, as well as another 70 feet of compacted earth on top of that. There are currently about 7,000 centrifuges installed at Natanz.
The other key location is Parchin. This is a military complex about 12 miles from downtown Tehran. Although Parchin is officially described as a facility for the testing and manufacturing of explosives, there have been reports that it has also been involved in nuclear weapons research.
But although inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency claimed in November 2011 that they had credible information that the Parchin facility had been used for implosion testing, their repeated attempts to visit this site have so far been blocked by Iran.
So as you can see Scott, this is not the sort of behaviour that would encourage the belief that the Iranian authorities are simply engaged in peaceful research, especially in countries like Israel and the United States.
Scott: So what has the rest of the world been doing about this?
Well Scott, Western countries have been relying for some years now on an escalating series of sanctions, to try to force Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. But as we have already seen from the response I quoted earlier by the Ayatollah Khamanei, these sanctions only seem to have made Iran even more determined to succeed.
But behind the scenes, almost every kind of covert operation that you can think of has been tried at one time or another, especially by Israel and the United States. And that is why I compare this covert operation to the sort of thing you might read in a James Bond novel.
One of the strategies used was to attack the centrifuges themselves by means of cyber warfare. In June 2010, a computer worm was discovered that came to be known as Stuxnet. Although no one has ever admitted to creating Stuxnet, it is believed to have been a joint creation of Israel and the US.
Stuxnet was the first system of malware designed to target industrial systems, specifically the Siemens software and equipment used by Iran in their enrichment process. Stuxnet was believed to have rendered hundreds of centrifuges inoperable.
Two years later, another source of computer malware emerged, that also targeted Iranian computers. This one was called Flame. Flame was designed to record audio, screenshots, network traffic and keyboard activity.
This information was then relayed to command and control servers scattered around the world. The Flame virus could also spread to other computer systems over Local Area Networks, or by way of USB sticks, and it is thought to have been responsible for infecting thousands of centrifuges.
But this covert campaign has not been limited to cyber warfare. During the years 2010 and 2011, at least five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed by unknown attackers. Their favourite MO has been to approach on motorcycles and then plant magnetic bombs on the outside of the cars in which these scientists were travelling.
I have even read stories about specially designed pens containing Radio Frequency ID chips, that have been given to Iranian scientists by visiting dignitaries, that could send radio signals to overhead drones to signal their locations. As I say Scott, we would probably be amazed if we knew the full extent of this covert operation targeting the Iranian nuclear program. And this is where I feel the Iranians have been guilty of another huge strategic blunder.
Scott: Why do you say that, Allan?
Well Scott, if their purpose in developing nuclear weapons was designed to protect them from outside attack, then their nuclear enrichment program of the last ten years has been an unmitigated disaster.
Not only has the country been brought to its knees economically, as a result of the severe sanctions that have been applied by the West to all the countries that do business with Iran, but it seems ever more likely that they will invite the very attack that they fear.
I fully expect an aerial attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by either Israel or the United States, or both, before the end of this year. And when that happens, it will set in motion a chain of events that will lead to the very scenario predicted by the prophet Ezekiel.
It still amazes me Scott, that in spite of the fact that we live in such a sophisticated world, with supposedly wise heads governing the affairs of nations, that a situation could arise that exactly matches the words of an old Hebrew man who lived more than 2,600 years ago.
And just a reminder for those people who would like to read my book, it can be reached here
Scott: Thanks Allan. You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. Do join us for our next Podcast, which will be another in the series called “Signs of the Times”.
