This is thoroughly disgusting, especially since WaPo is always held up as part of the liberal media by conservatives.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. Franklin D. Roosevelt

I keep the sound off on my tv during the day and have it on Headline News but will periodically switch around from CNN to MSNBC and for the last week or two every time I look at the screen it has captions pertaining to Nukes in Iran or some other scary headline.  It's the same old shit to scare the general public silly so when the bush administration nukes Iran most of the public will be behind the action.

This is the very first time in my life that I've actually been afraid of what our government will do regarding using nuclear weapons and worse the consequences to everyone.  WW111 will be on it's way and we won't be the good guys.

'Poverty is the worst form of violence'--Gandhi

Why do I keep going back to the 1970's?

I am glad you do keep bring it up, I just don't know why those on our side refuse to open their eyes and face the fact, our government is willing to screw with their citizens, not just the minorities. Everybody.

Keep bringing it up, it will finally sink in, some day.

But I think those in left wwwLand, and you, too, are mistaken in pushing the "10 year, 10 years" theme like some kind of amulet.

First:

The Dafna Linzer piece was not on the Front Page today. It was in the paper in August when the NIE came out on the subject.

Second:

Hiatt is not wrong about the experts. The truth is that nobody - probably including Iranian scientists - knows for certain how close Iran may or may not be to being able to make a Bomb. Or even if they are planning to make a Bomb. They deny it, there's a fatwa against it, but I tend not to trust the mullahocracy.

Since we have not seen the NIE, we don't know how the team made its calculations, what evidence it based them on, or how many of the experts on the team disagreed with the supposed consensus of 10 years.

Third:

The Iranians just this week declared that they are going to industrial scale on centrifuges, 54,000 of them. We don't know how long it will take them to engineer and build those, or get them running, or whether they will be in a single facility, say, in Natanz, or scattered. But I would guess that it won't be anywhere near 10 years.

What we do know is that 54,000 is more than enough to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make several Bombs. Indeed, you need far fewer than that:

From the respected folks at Global Security Org about how gas centrifuges actually do their job.

First, a glossary:

SWU: Separative Work Unit. A measurement of the effort needed to separate the U[ranium]-235 and U-238 atoms in natural uranium to make a product richer in U-235 atoms. SWUs are measured using a standard formula derived from the physics of uranium enrichment.

LEU: Low-enriched uranium. Material enriched to between 4% and 5% U-235 (and as high as 20%) is called low-enriched uranium (LEU). SWUs are measured using a standard formula derived from the physics of uranium enrichment.

HEU: Highly enriched uranium. Material enriched a bove 20% U-235. A uranium Bomb usually contains 85% HEU. But an inefficient Bomb could be made with as little as 20% HEU, according to some sources. Its shelf-life, however, would be short.

A single centrifuge might produce about 30 grams of HEU per year, about the equivalent of five Separative Work Unit (SWU). As as a general rule of thumb, a cascade of 850 to 1,000 centrifuges, each 1.5 meters long, operating continuously at 400 m/sec, would be able to produce about 20-25 kilograms of HEU in a year, enough for one weapon. One such bomb would require about 6,000 SWU.

    A typical centrifuge facility appears to have a capacity of 10-20 SWU/meter square, and to consume in the range of 40-50 kWh per SWU. A facility capable of producing one bomb per year would thus require about 600 square meters of floor space, and consume in the range of about 100 kWe.

    With current technology, a single gas centrifuge is capable of about 4 separative work unit [SWU] annually, while advanced gas centrifuge machines can operate at a level of up to perhaps 40 SWUs annually. Separative Work Unit (SWU) is a complex unit which is a function of the amount of uranium processed and the degree to which it is enriched, ie the extent of increase in the concentration of the U-235 isotope relative to the remainder. The unit is strictly: Kilogram Separative Work Unit, and it measures the quantity of separative work (indicative of energy used in enrichment) when feed and product quantities are expressed in kilograms. The effort expended in separating a mass F of feed of assay xf into a mass P of product assay xp and waste of mass W and assay xw is expressed in terms of the number of separative work units needed, given by the expression SWU = WV(xw) + PV(xp) - FV(xf), where V(x) is the "value function," defined as V(x) = (1 - 2x) ln((1 - x)/x).

    A kilogram of LEU requires roughly 11 kilograms U as feedstock for the enrichment process and about 7 separative work units (SWUs) of enrichment services. To produce one kilogram of uranium enriched to 3.5% U-235 requires 4.3 SWU if the plant is operated at a tails assay 0.30%, or 4.8 SWU if the tails assay is 0.25% (thereby requiring only 7.0 kg instead of 7.8 kg of natural U feed).

    An implosion weapon using U235 would require about 20 kg of 90% U235. Roughly 176 kg of natural uranium would be required per kg of HEU product, and about 230 SWU per kg of HEU, thus requiring a total of about 4,600 SWU per weapon. To enrich natural uranium for one gun-type uranium bomb would requires roughly 14,000 SWUs. Thus, producing one HEU weapon in a year would require between 1,100 to perhaps 3,500 centrifuges.

    About 100-120,000 SWU is required to enrich the annual fuel loading for a typical 1000 MWe light water reactor. A 20,000 kg-SWU per year centrifuge plant would fit within a typical factory building and would consume only 600 kW electrical power. The power consumption of a plant using laser isotope separation would be a factor of three smaller.