Fresh Clues Of Iranian Nuclear Intrigue

In 2003, the Islamic Republic suspended all of its nuclear activities for it feared that an emboldened George W. Bush administration fresh from the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq may target Iran next. The mullahs are sensitive to power, and not blandishments, and will likely think twice before tangling with a hawkish administration.[91]

Unlike its adversaries, Israel has a deep-rooted democratic government and does not threaten the existence of other states. It also has an obvious goad; David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, began the Jewish state's nuclear quest in the 1950s with harrowing images of Dachau and Belsen still fresh in his mind. For him, the bomb was the ultimate guarantor of \"never again.\"

In the 1970s, nuclear utilities in Western Europe and Japan found a temporary fix for their waste problems by shipping spent fuel for reprocessing in France and the United Kingdom, which had originally built reprocessing plants to produce plutonium for their weapons programs. In parallel, the Soviet Union took back spent fuel from Eastern European countries that it had supplied with fresh fuel and reprocessed some of it. 1e1e36bf2d