Iran

In the space of just a few days, a slew of truly insane news broke — and I’m not even talking here about anything emanating from the Trump regime. US Intelligence, if any such thing still exists, announced it foresaw an attack on Iran’s nuclear centers by Israel in the next six months. By ‘attack’, they mean ‘bomb’. The Iranian government immediately barked back with an announcement that for every hundred such facilities destroyed they would “build a thousand other ones.” This is no idle threat from either side. Just last October, according to US and Israeli officials, Israel reportedly destroyed a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research facility. (Iran continues to deny it is developing nuclear weapons.) In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, a cyber attack likely launched by Israel and the United States, infected computers at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant before spreading across other facilities including to the Natanz uranium enrichment complex. Israel has also assassinated at least five of Iran’s nuclear scientists, between 2010 and 2024. No one really knows what if anything got destroyed by Israel (and the US) in Iran and what has been rebuilt at least once, if perhaps not one thousand times. Also this week came the news that Japan would go for a “maximization” of nuclear power, aiming for a 20% energy share by 2040 with 30 reactors back up and running. Elsewhere on these “pages”, Karl Grossman writes that the U.S. could be considering a resumption of atomic testing, following the advice to do just that advocated by Robert Peters, a research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the far-right Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 is the blueprint being followed by the Trump administration, never mind all their hollow denials before the election.