That threat and heightened speculation in the press about the preparations by Washington and its allies for war against Iran came on the heels of an April 11 announcement by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the country’s nuclear industry has for the first time successfully produced enriched uranium.

Tehran resumed work on uranium enrichment in February, following the decision that month by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to escalate the pressure on Iran by placing it on the agenda of the UN Security Council. Enriched uranium is necessary to fuel nuclear energy plants. It is also used in the production of nuclear weapons. Iran’s government insists its aim is to meet the country’s growing energy needs and not depend solely on diminishing oil reserves.

Tehran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signatories are permitted to develop their own nuclear fuel production system, as Iran is now doing. But Washington and its allies are working overtime to change this. The imperialist powers insist that Tehran dismantle its nuclear fuel production facilities and instead depend on imported fuel to power nuclear plants.

“There is no doubt that Iran continues to defy the will of the international community,” U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told the press April 13. “When the Security Council reconvenes, there will have to be some consequence for that action and that defiance, and we will look at the full range of options available to the Security Council.”

U.S. state department spokesman Sean McCormack said April 14 that these actions could include “asset freezes resolutions, Chapter 7 resolutions; it would include, potentially, sanctions; it would potentially include restrictions on the ability of some members of that regime to travel.” McCormack was referring to Chapter 7 of the UN charter, “Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression.” It was under this statute that the Security Council passed resolutions that helped provide rationalizations for the 1990-91 and 2003 U.S.-led assaults on Iraq.

Meanwhile, recent news articles and editorials have begun an open discussion aimed at winning public support in the United States for possible military attacks against Iran.

“The burden of proof ought to be on those who favor accommodating a nuclear Iran,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the April 24 issue of the conservative magazine Weekly Standard. “Those who are unwilling to accommodate it, however, need to be honest and admit that diplomacy and sanctions and covert operations probably won’t succeed, and that we may have to fight a war—perhaps sooner rather than later—to stop such evil men from obtaining the worst weapons we know.”

“Tactically, eliminating Iran’s nuclear sites, experts say, would require 600 to 1,000 air sorties to make sure that underground sites were destroyed,” the New York Times reported April 12. Citing current and retired senior military officers and Pentagon officials, the Times added, “The military options against Iran range from a limited overnight strike by cruise missiles or stealth bombers aimed at nuclear-related activities, to a much larger series of attacks over several days against not only nuclear-related sites, but also other government targets, including the country’s Revolutionary Guard and its intelligence headquarters.”

An editorial that appeared the same day in the Wall Street Journal, headlined “Iranian Bomb Scare,” said that “a priority should be developing the so-called bunker buster bomb, a low-yield nuclear weapon capable of destroying deeply buried targets. Much of Iran’s nuclear program is thought to be buried, and while the U.S. has conventionally armed bunker busters, they might not be as capable as low-yield nukes.”

In an article published in the April 17 issue of the New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh claimed that preparations for such an assault are well under way. Hersh said that U.S. Naval tactical aircraft have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions since last summer “within range of Iranian coastal radars” and “teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.”

While these threats are escalating, Tehran has announced advances in developing its nuclear energy industry.

“The nuclear fuel cycle at the laboratory level has been completed and uranium with the desired enrichment for nuclear power plants has been achieved,” Ahmadinejad announced April 11.

“All Iranian power plants are now generating electricity from fossil fuel such as gas, gasoline, and mazut [heavy fuel oil] but they cannot meet the country’s future demands,” Iran’s energy minister, Parviz Fattah, told the media April 17, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. “We are duty-bound to generate electricity and for this reason we have to meet our demands by making use of nuclear energy.”

Iran’s population has doubled since the revolution in 1979, when working people toppled the U.S.-backed regime of the shah. But the country’s oil production is now 70 percent of the 1979 level. Two-thirds of the residents of the 30,000 smallest rural villages in Iran’s countryside do not have access to electricity today.  
 
 
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