Do you remember those rather infamous drawings of mobile bio-weapon laboratories Colin Powell presented to the United Nations Security Council as "proof" for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
The guy who drew those is back:
An image said to come from inside an Iranian military site shows an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests that U.N. inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted at the site. Iran denies such testing and has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such a chamber.
The image was provided to The Associated Press by an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program who said the drawing proves the structure exists, despite Tehran’s refusal to acknowledge it.
The official said he could not discuss the drawing’s origins beyond that it was based on information from a person who had seen the chamber at the Parchin military site, adding that going into detail would endanger the life of that informant. His country, a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is severely critical of Iran’s assertions that its nuclear activities are peaceful and asserts they are a springboard for making atomic arms.
A former senior IAEA official said he believes the drawing is accurate. Olli Heinonen, until last year the U.N. nuclear agency’s deputy director general in charge of the Iran file, said it was “very similar” to a photo he recently saw that he believes to be the pressure chamber the IAEA suspects is at Parchin.
Yeah! sure! But that image the AP's dubious anti-Iranian sources delivered looks like a fifteen minutes training exercise for Google SketchUp newbies and I can easly provide a better and more real one.
This is a detonation tank to create nanodiamonds, not a nuclear device.
In the late 1990s the Iranians had a contract with an Ukrainian scientist who had earlier worked at a Soviet research facility that was also involved with nuclear weapons. But that scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko, is a lifelong expert in creating nano-diamonds by detonations in closed, bus-sized water filled explosion chambers. He is NOT a nuclear scientist.
In a recent write up on Iran's nuclear program even the prestigious CSIS analyst Anthony H. Cordesman admits that much:
The [IAEA] Agency has been able to verify through three separate routes, including the expert himself, that this person was in Iran from about 1996 to about 2002, ostensibly to assist Iran in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra-dispersed diamonds (“UDDs” or “nanodiamonds”), where he also lectured on explosion physics and its applications.
Furthermore, the Agency has received information from two Member States that, after 2003, Iran engaged in experimental research involving a scaled down version of the hemispherical initiation system and high explosive charge referred to in paragraph 43 above, albeit in connection with non-nuclear applications. This work, together with other studies made known to the Agency in which the same initiation system is used in cylindrical geometry, could also be relevant to improving and optimizing the multipoint initiation design concept relevant to nuclear applications.
There are civilian applications for nearly all technological fields one needs to build nuclear weapons. Many things could be used in a nuclear weapons program and that includes knifes and forks. That means that any decently industrialized country is likely to have all these technologies available. It is therefore then "nuclear capable" which means that it could make nuclear weapons if it wanted to. That is the case for the Netherlands just as much as it is for Brazil and Japan and Poland and Iran and several dozen other countries.
Instead of that SketchUp exercise of some junior Israeli disinformation agent AP should just publish the picture of the detonation chamber Danilenko build for his own Ukrainian company to create nano diamonds. We are pretty sure that it is much more similar to the one in Parchim, Iran, than that rough computer graphic the AP is using here to spread disinformation onto the public.
