#Tehran's nuclear program | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

eretzyisrael · 4 months ago

Text

by John Podhoretz

The great delusion of post-Marx history is that change results from vast impersonal forces rather than the workings of individual human actions and unforeseen circumstances. What history records is the way free will and sheer contingency gum up the works of the Great Machine of Progress.

Would there have been an Arab Spring without a fruit vendor in Tunisia setting himself on fire in 2010? What if Derek Chauvin had taken the day off on June 20, 2020? What if there had been a blizzard on January 6, 2021?

And…what if Yahya Sinwar had hit his head on a pipe in a tunnel on October 6, been concussed, and hadn’t given the order to move on the kibbutzim and the Nova festival on October 7? Had he hit his head, would we be living in a world today in which Hamas has been all but destroyed, in which Hezbollah has been literally and perhaps fatally crippled, in which Iranian strikes against Israel have led to the mullahs losing their air defenses while steeling themselves for the loss of their nuclear program—and with the Assads gone from power in Syria after 53 years of ghoulish evil the likes of which the world has rarely ever witnessed?

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

You could argue that a war conducted by Israel to destroy Hamas was always in the cards, just as the Israelis demonstrated they had thought the same with Hezbollah, since, beginning in 2015, they planned to destroy the Iranian catamite army by creating a shell import-export company that specialized in communications devices—and then laid in wait to activate the plan.

The war happened, though, because Sinwar made it happen. It was different north of Israel. The Jewish state chose the time, manner, and place of the pager detonation. They chose. It didn’t just happen. Impersonal forces didn’t move the levers in Gaza or in Lebanon. Leaders did.

Now, why Israel waited as the country’s north was depopulated and the financial, logistical, and psychological costs of that depopulation mounted will be matters of controversy there for the coming generation. Clearly its leaders believed they had to deal with Sinwar’s unprecedented blow first. And clearly they were managing world opinion, which is to say American opinion.

Israel knew it needed to win the war with Hamas, and that there was no way to conclude the war with Hamas without turning north and taking out Hezbollah. And I think Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet (as much as they all hated and hate each other) knew that the United States under Joe Biden simply did not want Israel to win. Biden and Co. may have wanted Israel to prevail in some fashion—but not if it was going to be too much of a pain in the Democratic Party’s ass.

At some point, Israel could not manage this ludicrous balancing act—prevailing without winning—and it moved. That was a choice. Human choice. And that choice led to other choices. Choices to make it clear that the Iran-backed terrorists had no quarter. Think you’re safe in Tehran? Think again, Haniyeh. Think you’re in the clear in Beirut? Bye-bye, Nasrallah. Think you can strike Israel without consequence from Tehran? No more defenses, mullahs. Think you just stay in Syria and keep sending weaponry through the Levant to your boys south of the Litani River? Say goodbye to Syria, Khamenei.

None of these events was inevitable. Rafah could have gone uninvaded. The pagers could have remained in Hezbollah pockets. Israel could have “taken the win,” as Joe Biden urged, wrongly, as was true of everything he has ever urged. It’s often said that the side that starts and loses a war does so out of a misperception of risk. The misperception that has led to this epochal change in the Middle East has to do with the way foolish Muslim fanatics and equally foolish American liberals view the Jews.

Here’s how they should view us:

We’re the eternal people.

You’re just the nomads.

#israel #jews #sinwar #lebanon #hezbollah #hamas #gaza #rafah #syria #iran

11 notes · View notes

dertaglichedan · 25 days ago

Text

Trump Threatens Iran with 'Unprecedented Bombing' Unless Nuclear Deal Is Reached

President Donald Trump has warned Iran that it will face unprecedented bombing if it does not agree to a nuclear deal with the United States. Speaking in an interview with NBC News on March 30, Trump emphasized that Iran is high on his list of concerns and that severe consequences would follow if Tehran refuses to negotiate.

"If they don't make a deal, there will be bombing—and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before," Trump stated. This marks a significant escalation in rhetoric as the U.S. seeks to address longstanding issues surrounding Iran's nuclear program.

Trump expressed a preference for diplomatic solutions, saying, "My big preference is we work it out with Iran. But if we don't work it out, bad, bad things are gonna happen with Iran." Despite his willingness to engage in talks, he indicated that all options remain on the table should negotiations fail.

Iran has so far rejected direct negotiations with the United States regarding its nuclear ambitions. The heightened tensions have raised international concern over the potential for conflict and the broader implications for regional stability.

#Iran #United States #NBC News

6 notes · View notes

newslink7com · 12 days ago

Text

U.S.-Iran Nuclear Talks Held at Secret Site in Oman as Tehran Refuses to Dismantle Nuclear Program Tensions rise as Iran digs in on its nuclear stance. Trump threatens airstrikes if no deal is reached. 👉 Read the full story at NewsLink7.com

4 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 9 months ago

Text

Iran’s outgoing intelligence minster, Esmail Khatib, must be eating his words. In late July, he boasted that “dismantling Mossad’s infiltration network” in Iran was the greatest achievement of his three-year tenure.

Six days later in the heart of Tehran, Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was under the protection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). What makes the assassination especially noteworthy is that the Iranian regime regards the IRGC’s own intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities as far more sophisticated than those of Khatib’s ministry. In fact, within the IRGC’s internal structures, the security-intelligence axis embedded within the all-powerful IRGC Intelligence Organization is the most powerful and influential force not only within the IRGC, but also more broadly in Iran—the crème de la crème of the regime’s security apparatus.

Let there be no mistake: The assassination of Haniyeh in an IRGC guesthouse in Tehran was a colossal intelligence failure. It has exposed major vulnerabilities within the IRGC’s intelligence apparatus, including likely foreign infiltration at the highest levels.

This is the biggest takeaway from the killing of Haniyeh—not his death, per se. Beyond the immediate question of Iran’s direct response to Israel, the regime’s paranoia at home will likely increase as it tries to root out foreign infiltration and tighten its grip on the security services as its supreme leader, the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, prepares for his succession, a crucial and potentially destabilizing event for the regime.

Of course, this is not the IRGC’s first intelligence failure. In April, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC Quds Force’s commander for the Levant—responsible for coordinating Hezbollah attacks—was killed in a targeted strike in Syria at a secretive Quds Force annex next to the Iranian Embassy. There was also the targeted killing in November 2020 of IRGC scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, who was also under IRGC protection.

The big difference this time, however, is that the intelligence failure took place while Haniyeh was in an IRGC compound in the heart of Tehran, where he had traveled from Qatar to attend the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

High-value terrorist leaders have always considered Iran to be one of the very few safe havens for them to travel, reside, and operate. These include Imad Mughniyeh—Hezbollah’s chief of operations, assassinated in Syria in 2008—whose daughter wrote in her Farsi memoirs that her father only felt safe on Iranian territory. Al Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel currently resides in Iran. Even leaders of European organized crime syndicates such as the Ireland-based Kinahan transnational criminal group have reportedly found refuge there.

The IRGC’s habit of guaranteeing sanctuary to terrorist figures has enabled it to easily cultivate and co-opt some of the deadliest militant organizations in the world, whose members often enjoy lavish lifestyles while they use Iran for training and plotting terror attacks. According to intelligence reports described by the Wall Street Journal, some of the Hamas militants who breached the Israel-Gaza border and conducted the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre were trained by the IRGC in Iran.

Israel’s ability to kill Haniyeh in an IRGC-protected compound at a time when the IRGC Intelligence Organization would have been on high alert will alter the perceived dynamic of Iran as a safe haven. The assassination will make terrorist leaders think twice before seeking refuge there and likely complicate the relationship between the Iranian regime and its proxies.

This is a significant setback for the regime. Whereas the intelligence leaks that led to the assassinations of Zahedi or Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani in Iraq in 2020 could be blamed on foreign moles, the responsibility in this case lies squarely with the IRGC. The IRGC’s fear of losing face can be seen in the organization’s quick denials of Western media reports that explosives had been smuggled into the IRGC guesthouse where Haniyeh was staying. To deflect blame from the IRGC, officials instead blamed a projectile fired from nearby. These attempts to dodge responsibility, however, did not prevent Iranian authorities from arresting more than two dozen individuals linked to the guesthouse and overhauling security protocols.

This strike in the heart of Tehran will only increase the anxieties of an already-paranoid Khamenei and IRGC about Israeli infiltration at the highest levels of security in the IRGC Intelligence Organization.

Over the past few years, Khamenei has sought to mitigate foreign infiltration by purging the IRGC’s senior ranks following successive domestic intelligence failures. In 2009, for example, after the Green Movement threatened the stability of the regime following the disputed reelection of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei restructured the IRGC’s Basij militia and intelligence apparatuses.

A significant ouster also took place in June 2022, when hard-line cleric Hossein Taeb—one of the regime’s most powerful figures—was removed as the head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization. Taeb’s replacement—Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kazemi, the former head of the IRGC Counterintelligence Organization, which is tasked with identifying moles in the regime—exposed the ayatollah’s paranoid state of mind in relation to foreign infiltration. Replacing a cleric with a seasoned intelligence commander was also intended to improve the operational efficacy of the IRGC’s operations abroad.

But if Kazemi was brought in to make up for the successive intelligence failures that had led to key regime figures and nuclear sites being targeted and IRGC attacks against Israelis being consistently foiled, Haniyeh’s death showed that it was to no avail.

The man who succeeded Kazemi as the IRGC Counterintelligence Organization commander, Majid Khademi, will also come under new scrutiny: His agency is tasked with rooting out spies within the IRGC, and it clearly failed. Also at issue is the future of the IRGC’s Ansar al-Mahdi Protection Unit, which guards high-level Iranian and visiting officials. This unit has suffered from turnover in recent years amid suspicion of infiltration by foreign intelligence organizations. For example, its commander Ali Nasiri was removed in 2019 amid suspicions about his loyalties. Nasiri reappeared in the Counterintelligence Organization and was reportedly arrested there later. His successor, Brig. Gen. Fathollah Jomeiri, has overseen a series of spectacular failures, including the assassinations of Fakhrizadeh and Haniyeh. In all likelihood, officers of the Ansar al-Mahdi Protection Unit were guarding both.

Now that these vulnerabilities have been exposed, the IRGC will be all the more determined to save face and make up for its failings. There are numerous short-, medium-, and long-term options for its leadership to respond.

In Tehran, Khamenei’s appetite for doubling down on purging the regime’s security-intelligence apparatus will increase following Haniyeh’s death. The foreign infiltration that enabled the assassination of such a well-protected, high-value target has taken place against the backdrop of preparations for the supreme leader’s succession. Over the past five years, Khamenei has put most his remaining energy into ensuring a smooth and orderly succession process. His passing will inevitably be a potentially destabilizing moment for the regime, and he will want to ensure that the IRGC has full control over the security situation prior to his demise.

The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who was one of the two front-runners to succeed Khamenei, was a major setback for the ayatollah’s succession plans. At a time when the security-intelligence apparatus of the regime has clearly been compromised, guaranteeing the security of the other candidate—Khamenei’s power-hungry son, Mojtaba—will be at the front of the aging ayatollah’s mind. The complete unraveling of Khamenei’s succession plans—and a major danger to the survival of the regime—is now only one assassination away. After the Israeli operation in Tehran last week, another wave of internal purges is all but guaranteed.

The Iranian regime’s response to Israel could take several forms. While much of the global commentary is framing Iran’s response to Israel in terms of the usual tit for tat, Khamenei and the IRGC will be driven by different concerns. For the latter, the response will be driven by the intent to uproot foreign infiltration and inflict enough damage to the Israelis to stop them operating against the regime on Iranian soil.

Until now, the main discussion on how this would be achieved has been centered on the likelihood of a conventional military response, similar to the Iranian drone and missile barrage against Israel in April.

In tandem with this type of conventional attack, a global campaign of terror against Israelis and Jews should not be ruled out. After various IRGC plots to kill Israelis were foiled in recent years, Kazemi will be all the more motivated to make up for these failures. The IRGC may calculate that while it may be unable to meaningfully shift Israel’s calculus through conventional means—due to the Israeli military’s military superiority, especially in air defense—a campaign of terror against unarmed Israelis and Jewish people abroad could put enough pressure on the Israeli government to avoid striking inside Iran.

Another option is for the IRGC to significantly ramp up its nuclear escalation, which is already near breakout levels. Increasing enrichment to 90 percent, even if only by a symbolic amount, is something that the regime could consider as a way to show Israel that the Haniyeh assassination crossed a red line. Given the lack of any serious response to Iran’s nuclear activities for years, Iranian decision-makers may calculate that they would not face much backlash on the world stage.

However, Tehran’s main concern will be with its own intelligence and security failures. These could have significant long-term implications for the Iranian regime’s military and security services—with purges and paranoia lasting long after the promised riposte to Israel.

13 notes · View notes

beardedmrbean · 4 months ago

Text

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s capital and outlying provinces have faced rolling power blackouts for weeks in October and November, with electricity cuts disrupting people’s lives and businesses. And while several factors are likely involved, some suspect cryptocurrency mining has played a role in the outages.

Iran economy has been hobbled for years by international sanctions over its advancing nuclear program. The country’s fuel reserves have plummeted, with the government selling off more to cover budget shortfalls as wars rage in the Middle East and Tehran grapples with mismanagement.

The demand on the grid has not let up, however — even as Iranians stopped using air conditioners as the weather cooled in the fall and before winter months set in, when people fire up their gas heaters.

Meanwhile, bitcoin’s value has rocketed to all-time highs after the U.S. election was clinched by Donald Trump. It hit the $100,000 mark for the first time last week, just hours after the president-elect said he intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to be the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The surge has led some to suspect that organized cryptocurrency mining — sucking away huge amounts of power — has played a part in the outages in Iran.

“Unfortunately, some opportunistic and exploitative individuals use subsidized electricity, public networks and other resources for cryptocurrency mining without authorization,” Mostafa Rajabi, the CEO of Iran’s government-owned power company, said back in August.

Iran’s state energy company did not respond to a request for comment.

Power outages have come and gone in the past in Iran, which struggles with aging equipment at many of its plants. Over the summer, sustained blackouts struck industrial parks near Tehran and other cities. Then in October and November, rolling power cuts across Tehran’s neighborhoods became the norm in daylight hours.

Climate change has been blamed in part, with persisting droughts and less water running through Iranian hydroelectric dams.

Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered several power plants to stop burning mazut, a high-polluting heavy fuel common in the former Soviet Union countries. Tehran has used it in the past to make up the difference in electricity generation.

Fuel reserves, both in diesel and natural gas, also remain low even though Iran is an OPEC member and home to one of the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas, behind only Russia. There’s been no explanation for the decision to keep those reserves low, though critics have suggested Iran likely sold the fuel to cover budget shortfalls.

For his part, Pezeshkian has said that he must “honestly tell the public about the energy situation.”

“We have no choice but to consume energy economically, especially gas, in the current conditions and the cold weather,” he said in mid-November. “I myself use warm clothes at home; others can do the same.”

Still, winter heating isn’t in full swing quite yet on Tehran — raising questions where the power is going.

In many poor and densely populated neighborhoods across the country, people have access to free, unmetered electricity. Mosques, schools, hospitals and other sites also receive free power.

And with electricity in general sold at subsidized rates, bitcoin processing centers have boomed. They require immense amounts of electricity to power specialized computers and to keep them cool.

Determining how much power is used up by mining is difficult, particularly as miners now use virtual private networks that mask their location, said Masih Alavi, the CEO of an Iranian-government-licensed mining company called Viraminer.

Also, miners have been renting apartments to hide their rigs inside of empty homes. “They distribute their machines across several apartments to avoid being detected,” Alavi said.

In 2021, one estimate suggested Iran processed as much as $1 billion in bitcoin transactions. That value likely has spiked, given bitcoin’s rise. Meanwhile, Iran’s blackouts began in earnest as bitcoin spiked from around $67,000 to over $100,000 in its historic rally.

Rajabi, the state electricity company CEO, said his firm would offer rewards of $725 for people to report unlicensed bitcoin farms.

The farms have caused “an abnormal increase in consumption, disruptions, and problems in power networks,” Rajabi said.

The amount of power used by some 230,000 unlicensed devices is equivalent, he said, to the entire power needs of Iran’s Markazi province — one of the country’s chief manufacturing sites.

Iranian officials and media have not linked bitcoin’s surge and the ongoing blackouts but the public has, with social media users resharing a video showing a massive bitcoin farm earlier this year uncovered in Iran. A voice off camera asks how it was possible the electrical company did not discover the farm sooner.

The U.S. Treasury and Israel have targeted bitcoin wallets that they’ve alleged are affiliated with operations run by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard to finance allied militant groups in Mideast war zones.

That suggests the Guard itself — one of the most-powerful forces within Iran — may be involved in the mining.

In contrast, Iranian media nearly every day report on individual mining operations being raided by police.

Iran may see bitcoin as a hedge against increased pressure from the incoming Trump administration and as regional allies are engulfed in turmoil, said Richard Nephew, an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“The question for the economists inside Iran is do we trust this enough to fund the government,” said Nephew, who has long worked on Iran issues and sanction strategies in the U.S. government.

However, he cautioned against thinking of bitcoin as a magic bullet for Iran, particularly as bitcoin wallets can be targeted in sanctions.

“A pattern of behavior screams out to intelligence services,” Nephew said. “It screams out to bank compliance departments.”

#nunyas news #lol

6 notes · View notes

the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 months ago

Text

by Melanie Phillips

The eagerness to assume that Islamists have reformed themselves accompanies the West’s suicidal refusal to see what is so plainly the case—that whether it involves Shia or Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah or the Houthis, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamists are waging world war against unbelievers wherever they are.

The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, set in train a series of events that have shaken the geopolitical kaleidoscope. Tiny Israel is now well on the way to smashing the Shia axis and—in the words of a member of the Iranian regime—becoming the foremost power in the region.

This also represents a shattering defeat for the strategy of former President Barack Obama, which has been continued by the Biden administration. This strategy was—remarkably—to empower the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To this end, the Obama and Biden administrations spared no effort to appease and protect the Tehran regime. In the war that followed the Oct. 7 pogrom, Washington refused to respond appropriately to repeated Iranian attacks while putting Israel under enormous pressure also not to do so.

And, after Donald Trump won the presidential election last month, the United States renewed a controversial sanctions waiver that will allow Iran access to some $10 billion in payments from Iraq.

The stupendous developments in the Middle East are a cause for unprecedented optimism. With the likely destruction of the Shia axis, the way will be set for Saudi Arabia finally to make its peace with Israel and thus end, once and for all, the Arab war against the Jewish state. The cause of the Palestinian Arabs, who never were the issue until the West chose to make them so, would simply evaporate.

To envisage this is not to fall into the trap of wishful thinking. The dangers for Israel and the free world remain acute and unresolved. Iran is poised to get the nuclear bomb, and there are fears that with its back to the wall, it will now do just that.

But Iran now has no military defenses or proxy shields. This is therefore the moment to destroy totally its nuclear program and maybe finish off this evil regime altogether.

To do this, however, Israel needs America to be involved. Will Trump be willing to do this? Or will he believe that he alone can make a deal that will tame the Iranian regime?

Any such deal would be illusory. Iran has lied about its activities for more than four decades and won’t stop now.

The old order has been shattered. Bad actors have been weakened; others are now empowered. It will take wise heads indeed to turn this extraordinarily complex set of developments into a real leap for peace in the world. It can be done. Are there the leaders to do it?

#hamas #hezbollah #gaza #syria #lebanon #hayat tahrir al sham #bashar assad

29 notes · View notes

mybookof-you · 17 days ago

Text

3 notes · View notes

voskhozhdeniye · 1 month ago

Text

Donald Trump has laid down a Ukraine-like ultimatum to Iran: either agree to give up your nuclear program within two months or suffer the consequences. He’s been vague about what these consequences might include, but I can now report specifics that are as severe as you can imagine.

“We can't let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump says. “I would rather have a peace deal than the other option but the other option will solve the problem.”

To the casual observer that might sound like more of the targeted airstrikes the U.S. has been doing, but behind the scenes, as the Pentagon prepares for a "major" regional war with Iran, the use of nuclear weapons is on the table.

The new Iran war preparations that have been underway since last year include new nuclear options.

“One might find it extraordinary to think that nuclear weapons are even considered,” a retired senior military officer who has been briefed on the planning tells us, “but we have entered a new era.”

The officer says that a combination of factors — none of them precipitated by Donald Trump directly — have created a perfect storm to bring nuclear weapons back into the picture.

“Reintroducing nuclear deterrence,” the officer says, serves three purposes:

To directly deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons (or then from using them).

To convince Israel not to use its own nuclear weapons — that is, by making it clear that the U.S. equally would (or could) preempt Iran if something dire happened.

To dissuade Saudi Arabia from perceiving that it has to develop its own nuclear weapons because Iran is doing so.

To implement these seemingly unconnected national objectives, Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. combatant command for the Middle East, is charged with maintaining capabilities to back up Washington. Today, for instance, the White House claimed that in a telephone call between Trump and Putin that the two agreed “that Iran should never be in a position to destroy Israel.” To Washington, an Iranian nuclear program is just “destroy Israel” spelled another way.

“Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a top priority with global implications,” CENTCOM commander Gen. “Erik” Kurilla told Congress last year. “We will continue to develop military options for the Secretary of Defense and President, should they be necessary.”

Down in Tampa where CENTCOM headquarters is located, there is scrambling to make sure that whatever capabilities exist supports the new position. The nuclear options are contained in Appendix 1 to Annex C of the Iran war plans, I am told.

CENTCOM’s planning for the potential use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East has undergone three significant shifts in the past 45 years.

Cold War Era

The first generation of war plans (called the “OPLAN 1004” series) were written during the era of the Shah and were completed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The plans included the potential use of nuclear weapons to counter a potential Soviet invasion. This included two “vertical escalation” options — referring to stepping upwards on the nuclear escalation ladder —, one “passive escalation” envisioning the 5th Special Forces Group parachuting into northern Iran and detonating backpack nuclear land-mines on Iranian soil, and the other “active escalation envisioning B-52 bomber strikes on targets in the Soviet Union and frontline Army artillery and missile strikes on Soviet forces in Iran to buy time. The last war plan of this generation was completed in 1984.

“With four decades of hindsight, the idea of the US and the Soviets engaged in a great battle in the Zagros [mountains] for control of the Middle East seems unrealistic at best,” CENTCOM itself said at a retreat in 2020.

Planning for war in the Middle East was essentially moribund under the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. CENTCOM OPLAN 1002, finished in the 1994-1995 timeframe, included a nuclear annex that planned for nuclear strikes against targets in Iraq and Iran, now in the name of countering proliferation. U.S. policy had shifted to having the capability to threaten nuclear strikes against any and all potential nuclear adversaries.

War on Terror Era

After 9/11, new “strategic concepts” regarding Iran were articulated by President Bush. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its inclusion in the “axis of evil” dominated war planning during the next decade. The war on terror was the singular focus of Washington, and Iraq war planning (now under CONPLAN 1025 and first prepared in August 2003) ignored nuclear weapons. CENTCOM continued as a “nuclear” command, but “regional” nuclear planning was shifted to Strategic Command (STRATCOM) so that Tampa could focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and counterterrorism.

A U.S. military attack on Iran is "simply not on the agenda at this point," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in February 2005. That same month, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of CENTCOM, said that there were no new plans to deal with Iranian nuclear weapons. The command, he said, was focused on Iran’s support for the insurgency in Iraq.

In 2008, Iran test fired a new missile capable of hitting Israel. The next year, it launched a satellite into space. More missiles came. Gen. James Mattis, who was then CENTCOM commander (and would go on to become Trump’s first secretary of defense) pushed for a regional collective approach to air and missile defense against Iran but found no takers. The rest of the Obama administration focused on Iran nuclear diplomacy and the new war on ISIS, with Iran military options falling off of Washington’s radar screen.

The Trump Era

When Donald Trump announced in May 2018 that he was withdrawing from Obama’s nuclear deal, he said that during Washington’s singular focus on nukes, Iran had “escalated its destabilizing activities in the surrounding region.” Trump didn’t know it, but he was articulating the Obama administration “whole of government” approach, that everything was connected. He reinstated sanctions on Iran and designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. It was the first time that the U.S. officially identified another country’s military as a terrorist organization.

Throughout the next year, Trump imposed more sanctions even as he articulated that the U.S. “does not seek conflict with Iran.” Iran had other ideas though, and in September 2019, Tehran shot missiles and drones at Saudi oil facilities. It was at a time when Secretary Mattis was declaring the war on terror over and a new era of “Great Power Competition.”

Iranian attacks continued, and in December 2019, Secretary of State Pompeo said that any attack on a U.S. base by Iran or its proxies “will be answered with a decisive U.S. response." The next month, Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike. “They see we have the will to act,” said Gen. Frank McKenzie, the CENTCOM commander at that time.

“For far too long, all the way back to 1979, to be exact, nations have tolerated Iran's destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond,” Trump said in an address to the nation upon Soleimani’s killing. “Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen.”

That same month, my editor revealed that nuclear weapons were already back in the picture and that a war game undertaken just days before Trump was elected in 2016 ended with the U.S. nuking Iran. A new nuclear weapon was deployed in February 2020, a low-yield warhead for Trident II submarine-launched missiles. The Pentagon said it was “to strengthen deterrence.”

Just days before Biden was elected, responsibility for Israel shifted under CENTCOM for the first time, accelerating the current generation of war plans. Iran’s development of a full array of missiles and attack drones, now combat proven in the Houthi war (and later in Ukraine) finally resulted in the collective air defense system for the Middle East and even put Arab and Israeli generals in the same room to discuss common war plans against Iran.

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Lapid met in Jerusalem in July 2022 and signed a declaration reaffirming the "unshakeable U.S. commitment to Israel's security," and, as part of the pledge, to use "all elements of its national power" to ensure Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.

With the Saudis now saying that they could pursue their own nuclear capability if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon and Israel saying that its capabilities against Iran had “dramatically improved” and that it was “ready for the day when an order is given,” the Gaza war erupted. The ingredients came together as Iran put its full might behind Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah and then attacked Israel directly. The massive use by Russia of Iranian drones (and, more recently, ballistic missiles) against Ukraine has raised the stakes.

I described yesterday the general development of the war plans against Iran, but buried within those plans, I’ve learned from procurement documents and corporate internal communications, including a renewed focus on nuclear weapons. The basic framework of OPLAN 1025 persists, but behind the “C-Iran” strategy (counter-Iran) to attack Iran’s missile and drone capacity, and now to attack Iranian leadership, either with “kinetic” or “non-kinetic” means (including covert and cyber actions and special operation forces) lurked the nuclear options.

As part of the current “SEED Project” that I described yesterday, there is a more highly classified nuclear planning effort. Escalating an Iran conflict to the use of nuclear options can originate in two ways: One, with the CENTCOM commander “requesting” the use of nuclear weapons, mostly to stave off Iranian conventional military success; and two, in a “top down” order, that is, by the President, mostly as a “demonstration” to “signal” to Iran.

Once again the Trident II low-yield option is in Donald Trump’s hands. A submarine can stealthily deploy and the White House can decide. This is the problem of having secret and unexamined plans. The option is now available to this president.

In the decade or so I’ve been reporting, I don’t recall ever once writing about nuclear weapons. Not because it wasn’t important, but I didn’t take it seriously and it never seemed real. Now, the nuclear threat seems very much a live issue with this latest generation of detailed military planning that could be put in motion at any time and by a single person who has already shown himself to have a much bigger appetite for risk, even than in his first time.

The voices of complacency, those who are telling America to go back to bed and that everything is under control, will insist that all of this is hypothetical and that military plans are just plans. (He’s just loading the gun and cocking it, what’s the big deal!) As I’ve shown, the nuclear options go way back; but they’re now being actively modified in completely novel ways. With Donald Trump openly threatening “the other option,” it’s surreal that this isn’t front-page news.

The press needs to be way more vigilant than it has been; and I need more of you guys to become paid subscribers so I can keep reporting on our alarmingly quiet march to war.

It’s Donald Trump waving that gun, after all.

#That Cold War Era bullet point is the plot to the film Threads.#Sleepwalking into destruction.

3 notes · View notes