Air Strike on Iran Nuclear Assets Possible Now

When I posted two or three weeks ago that an American supported Israeli air strike was possibly eminent because the necessary assets had moved in place, I still lacked the reason as to why just now.  This tells us why it will happen now.  Assume Russia will arrange to be standing by for this one and to also be in the know.  They may be selling a reactor, but they want a nuclear weapon in these fool’s hands no more than we do.  Think of the rich targets for Islam in Russia.

A surgical strike is likely to happen this week.  The purpose will be to smash up the reactor itself.  The only interesting question is how the Iranian air force will be neutralized while the attack goes in, particularly if they wish to have a back up wave.  I assume the US will not be visible.

Iran’s reaction will be of serious interest.  The most damaging thing that they could do in the short term is to suspend oil shipments to the extent that they can.  This could precipitate a jump in oil prices to the $150 mark and generate a sharp decline in stock prices.  That though should be the most effect their actions may have.

In the medium term, regime control of the population will likely spiral out of control because the population will immediately blame the regime for bringing this attack on to themselves.  Discontent is also likely to become visible in the armed forces because of the regime’s reckless behavior and proven futility.  In short, the regime will be destabilized.

Beyond what we have just described, they have no creditable response.

I note from this map that the reactor is on the Persian Gulf itself.    Any attack seems way more difficult and may target the secondary assets instead.  In the event, we have reached a decision point.

John Bolton: Russia's Loading of Nuke Fuel Into Iran Plant Means Aug. 21 Deadline for Israeli Attack

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/John--Bolton--Iran--Nuclear--israel/2010/08/13/id/367449

Friday, 13 Aug 2010 01:41 PM

By: David A. Patten

News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran's Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively "immune" to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton. 

Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, "it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf." 

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared in March that Russia would start the Bushehr reactor this summer. But the announcement from a spokesman for Russia's state atomic agency to Reuters Friday sent international diplomats scrambling to head off a crisis. 

The story immediately became front-page news in Israel, which has laid precise plans to carry out an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities while going along with President Obama's plans to use international sanctions and diplomatic persuasion to convince Iran's clerics not to go nuclear. 

Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.

"If they're going to do it that's the window that they have," Bolton declared. "Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you're going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.

"So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it's been fueled."

Bolton cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor outside Baghdad and the September 2007 Israeli attack on a North Korean reactor being built in Syria. Both of those strikes came before fuel rods were loaded into those reactors.

"So if it's going to happen in Bushehr it has to happen before the fuel rods go in," Bolton said. 

The conversation that touched off the de facto deadline for Israeli military action was a telephone conversation with wire services involving Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian Energy State Nuclear Corp. 

Novikov said: "The fuel will be loaded on Aug 21. This is the start of the physical launch” of the reactor.

"From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation," Novikov said, adding that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, will visit Bushehr Aug. 21 to conduct a ceremony for the event.
According to Bolton, once the reactor is operational, it is only a matter of time before it begins producing plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

"And in the normal operation of this reactor, in just a fairly short period of time, you could get substantial amounts of plutonium to use as nuclear weapons," Bolton told Fox. 

Russia, which is operating under a $1 billion contract with Iran, has spent more than a decade building the reactor. If Russia moves forward with its plan to fuel the reactor, it could be seen as a major setback to the Obama administration's strategy of engaging Russian leaders in order to win their cooperation.

"The U.S. urged them not to send the Iranian's fuel rods," Bolton said. "They did that. The Obama administration has urged them not to insert the fuel rods in the reactors, but as they've just announced that will begin next week. What that does over time is help Iran get another route to nuclear weapons through the plutonium they could reprocess out of the spent fuel rods."

The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next 8 days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. 

Russian leaders have said the Bushehr reactor project is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog group. According to Iran's ISNA news agency, IAEA inspectors will be on hand to observe the fuel-rod loading process that is now scheduled to begin Aug. 21. 

According to Russian officials, Iran has promised in writing to send all spent fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, to ensure they cannot be used for nuclear weapons.


Bolton said the reactor has been "a hole" in American foreign policy for over a decade.

The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration "under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

"I don't think Iran is entitled to that, or I don't think we ought to allow it to happen, because they're manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it," Bolton said.

Russia’s move would put Iran "in a much better position overall," he said, adding, "I think this is a very delicate point, as I say, it closes off to the Israelis one possible target for pre-emptive military action.

U.N. sanctions against Iran, he said, "have not had and will not have any material effect on Iran's push to have deliverable nuclear weapons."

Stephen Hawking's Call to Escape Earth

This is all good fun and it is stating the obvious.  However, we have plenty of good options.  As developed in this blog, simply terraforming Earth will make it full habitable for a population base well over fifty billion while sustaining a bio-rich ecology.  Our biggest stretch will be to deploy the Eden machine.

Then there is the little matter of Venus, nicely prepositioned for been terraformed by our selves.  It is merely a matter of diverting plenty of comets into the planet.  Once we have the MEV (magnetic exclusion vessel) available for space travel this will be straight forward engineering and may well have been fully underway for the past ten millennia.

After that we get to build space habitats that are a good mile across and are spun up to provide artificial gravity.   Any one perhaps can be designed to hold and support a 100 million in population in complete comfort. Ten thousand of those in the asteroid belt would still be lost and invisible to our scopes with minimum effort.

The point I am making is that we can place fifty billion on Earth, fifty billion of Venus and a hundred times that out in the Asteroid Belt long before we have to think about other stars.

The only thing technically needed yet is the MEV.  We have the know how to do it all now.  The MEV will take perhaps another twenty years or less.  I have already described the tech and the key benchmarks in earlier articles and posts.

 Stephen Hawking's Warning: Abandon Earth—Or Face Extinction

Andrew Dermont on August 6, 2010, 12:00 AM

http://bigthink.com/ideas/21570

Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.

So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells Big Think. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man's existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind's survival has been nothing short of "a question of touch and go" he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientiststhere are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided. 

In fact, "the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future," says Hawking, "We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully." 

Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth's water will simply evaporate.

"Life on Earth will have disappeared long before 7.6 billion years," says Smith, "Scientists have shown that the Sun's slow expansion will cause the temperature at the surface of the Earth to rise. Oceans will evaporate, and the atmosphere will become laden with water vapor, which (like carbon dioxide) is a very effective greenhouse gas. Eventually, the oceans will boil dry and the water vapor will escape into space. In a billion years from now the Earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball."

Finally, between the next thousand years or so that Hawking says it will take man to make the planet uninhabitable and the billion years it will take for the sun to turn our planet into an arid wasteland, there is always the chance that a nearby supernova, an asteroid, or aquick and painless black hole could do us in. 

Takeaway One way or another, the life on Earth will likely become uninhabitable for mankind in the future. We need to start seriously thinking about how we will free ourselves from the constraints of this dying planet.

Why We Should Reject This Idea

Despite what Hawking describes as humankind's "selfish and aggressive instinct," there may be some biological impediments to finding another planet to inhabit.

"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," saysUniversity of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."

Unfortunately, at the moment we can only travel at about ten thousandth of light speed, which means if man were to use chemical fuel rockets similar to the those used during the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey would take about 50,000 years. Without the use of a science-fiction-like warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology, no human would live long enough to survive the journey. In addition, "the radiation you would encounter alone would kill you, even if you could get a rocket to go anywhere near that fast," says Freese.

On the upside, if man ever develops the technology to travel at the speed of light while remaining shielded from cosmic radiation, he could effectively travel into the future. "A five year trip at light speed could push an astronaut forward by 1000 earth years," says Freese, "If he wanted to see if any humans were still around by then."

Global Salmon Study Shows 'Sustainable' Food May Not Be So Sustainable

From: Science Daily

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Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems. Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental

benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.
For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.
he study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything -- how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits.
Article continues: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091124152803.htm

Iran is a Buy

I learned a long time ago that the best way to gather intelligence on a country is to tune into their markets.  Even boots on the ground cannot compete with thousands of locally informed investment decisions.  One can even sense pending shifts or even black swans.  I have picked off a few over the years.  The only question is always what?

For what it is worth we are approaching a bullish phase for resource stocks, although this may be at the expense of general markets and continuing unemployment woes in the US.  The USA continues to track the development of a full blown depression based economy similar to 1929 through 1932.  Failure to resolve the foreclosure crisis has hamstrung the economy and I see only fools in charge who will never give up their positions.  If anything Obama is far less prepared that Herbert Hoover.

In Iran, the money is betting that whack job and the blind mullahs cannot hold it together any longer.  The only question is what will tip it over.

I have not looked at the available stocks, but the telecommunication companies are a good place to start.  When money disappears, they can accept chickens and pay folks in chickens every day and still come out like bandits.

Iran is a Buy

By Christian A. DeHaemer | Friday, August 6th, 2010

In yet another example of why sanctions don't work, the Tehran Stock Exchange  (TSE) is booming. In fact, the TSE just hit a record high, and it remains one of the most undervalued markets on Earth.

You know the deal...

Iran has been a supporter of terrorism for the past forty years. The current president is a rabble-rouser who plays to his most conservative Islamic base. He denies the holocaust, and threatens to destroy Israel on a regular basis.

He steals elections.  His thugs in the militia beat and jail students who protested the sullied election. His judges sentence females accused of adultery to death by burying them up to the waist, and having their neighbors throw rocks at their heads.

Iran will have the bomb

On top of this, Iran is actively seeking the atomic bomb.  And in a year or two they will have it.  There is nothing to stop them from getting this weapon, just like there was nothing to stop India, Pakistan, North Korea or Israel.  But that's not going to stop the powers that be from posturing like a guinea hen.

In fact, the U.S. believes Iran is such a threat that it has built up bases and carrier groups completely surrounding the country.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, said last week on "Meet the Press" that the Pentagon has plans for attacking Iran and that "military actions have been on the table and remain on the table."

CIA Director Leon Panetta, in late June, appeared on ABC's "This Week" and carefully hinted at covert war options against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

And the United Nations has written a strongly-worded letter and offered up a fourth round of sanctions on high-tech and military goods. Hillary Clinton gave away who-knows-what to get the Russians on board.

It is not working

Despite all the saber rattling and jawboning, Iran remains uncowed.

In fact, judging by the stock market, Iran is doing just fine. The Tehran Stock Exchange hit an all time high on Monday and is up more than 60% this year.

Furthermore, the TSE remains ridiculously undervalued.

The average price to earnings ratio is 5.5, and the average dividend yield is 15.8%. This is the average of 337 companies listed with a total market capitalization of $70 billion.  The average.

That's incredibly cheap for the country that ranks third in the world in terms of petroleum and natural gas reserves.

In fact, the Tehran Stock Exchange's main index is up 27% since March 21 – about the time the saber rattling began.

This is because while the U.S. and Europe are trying to "put the pressure" on Iran, the leaders in the country are making it easier for foreigners to invest.

In fact, in the new sanctions there are no restrictions for foreign investors to invest in Iran. Capital gains taxes have been cut to zero.  And as far as I can tell there are no restrictions on investing in Iran.

According to Reuters the sanctions are as follows:

The U.S. effectively deprived foreign banks of access to the U.S. financial system if they do business with key Iranian banks or Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.

And EU measures set limits on the transfer of funds into Iran, requiring any transfer of over 40,000 euros to have prior government authorization.

Despite these sanctions Iran is taking a different course than America - Iran is trending toward capitalism.  Iran will raise $12.5 billion this year by selling state firms, including two refineries.  I forget how much Bush and Obama paid for GM, AIG, Freddie, Fannie, etc.  Was it billions or trillions?

The truth is that Iran was the only country in the Middle East to hold candlelight vigils after 9/11.  The vast majority of the country (two-thirds, or some 50 million people), is under the age of 30.  They do not remember the Islamic revolution in the 1970s, nor do they care.

They want what we all want: peace, prosperity and freedom.  And they will get it along with the bomb.

Despite what you may have heard, the atomic bomb has brought more peace for longer than any other item, thing or philosophy in history.  In ancient Rome, the doors to the Temple of Janus were closed when Rome was at peace.  They were closed on five occasions for a total of twelve years. 

And as an aside, the Samurai sword killed far more people in WWII than the atomic bomb did.  And the Roman short sword, or gladius, has killed more people than any weapon ever devised.

My point is that Pakistan and India used to go up 16,000 feet in the Hindu Kush and lob artillery shells at each other in the dead of winter.  They were arguing over a boundary line in a piece of territory that no one could ever use or inhabit.

Since they both got the bomb all they do is strut at the border like chickens. 

 Don’t get me wrong, there are obvious political risks to investing in Iran.  But right now there is tremendous upside.  The more sanctions you put on the country the more they will pull their money back home.  The political situation can’t be worse, so it will likely get better.  They will find a Mikhail Gorbachev.  Oil and gas will not get cheaper.  No one can beat a diversified 15% dividend yield.

If I can find a way in I’m betting on Iran.  I’m currently looking into ways to invest.  I’m rounding up my contacts as we speak (if you know anyone who can buy Iranian stocks drop me a line).

The only way I know how to play it is indirectly by buying the Wisdom Tree Middle East ETF (NASDAQ: GULF), which I told you was a buy last week.  GULF is far from a pure play however. 

I’ll find a way sooner or later.  And as I wait, I’ll be happy knowing my other frontier market, Mongolia, has given my readers 727% gains in six months.  The best way to make the most money in stocks is to get there first with the most.  I've done it in South Africa, Libya, and Mongolia.  I’ll do it in Iran as well.

Keep in touch,

Christian DeHaemer

Energy & Capital