Very curious, very odd.

As mentioned in the previous post, Iran announced today that they could enrich uranium “over 80 percent”, which is close to or perhaps is weapons grade. That is apparently the ’surprise’ they promised.

The response from the US? We don’t believe it, so we don’t have to pay any attention to it. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs curtly dismissed the announcement by saying it was “based on politics not on physics.”

Yet Reuters says that the main technical challenge is reaching a level of 3.5 percent , which the US accepted and IAEA inspectors were invited to witness. Reuters goes on to say that scaling up to  80 percent, is “relatively easy” after that.

The truth? I’m no nuclear scientist, so I don’t know.

Curiously, The Jerusalem Post website (more…)

It has been very difficult to connect with ‘alternate’ news sources in the Middle East this morning. I got the Mossad-sponsored site up earlier, but cannot repeat it. Iran’s official website is nowhere to be seen. So whatever is happening is not yet clear.

The bits and pieces I’ve been able to gather is that the ’surprise’ that the Iranians announced today via a speech their president made to a large crowd of supporters, is that Iran is now capable of enriching uranium to “more than 80 percent purity”. Which is perhaps another way of saying the 90 percent purity needed for a nuclear device.

Yet Iranian president Ahmadinejad reiterated once again that if “one day we wanted to build nuclear bombs”, the Iranians are brave enough to come right out and say it. But they don’t believe in having nuclear weapons.

On the other hand… the threat of being able to build a nuclear device is implicit in the way he said it.

Whatever the truth of it is, I’m pretty sure the West will take it as a bright red flag.

The question is what will the US or Israel, or both… do about it. Will Europe agree and the French launch a strike off the pride of their fleet, the nuclear powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle?

Or will everyone just make noise and do nothing? The stock market seems to be paying no attention to any of this. They are more concerned with the monetary crisis in Greece