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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Scaremongering Headlines - Why?
A story in Bloomberg News, picked up on the Drudge Report, claims "Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says".

The operative word is "could". As in - they could produce a bomb in 16 days if they ramped up their production facility to 300 times its present capacity. Read further into the story and you see the details. At present capacity, Iran could build a bomb in 13 years.

They currently have 164 centrifuges for enrcihing uranium. They would need 50,000 to get on a 16 day production cycle. It has taken their program 30 years to get to the point of enriching a miniscule amount of uranium to 3.5% - as opposed to the large amounts, at 90% used for a bomb.

So we have to ask...Why these headlines? Why did Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, present these figures? Why did Bloomberg phrase the headline so? What is the motivation to hype this crisis, rather than deal with the reality of the situation?


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