WASHINGTON, Aug 17, (Agencies): Israel has “eight days” to launch a military strike against Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility and stop Tehran from acquiring a functioning atomic plant, a former US envoy to the UN has said.
Iran is to bring online its first nuclear power reactor, built with Russia’s help, on Aug 21, when a shipment of nuclear fuel will be loaded into the plant’s core.
At that point, John Bolton warned Monday, it will be too late for Israel to launch a military strike against the facility because any attack would spread radiation and affect Iranian civilians.
“Once that uranium, once those fuel rods are very close to the reactor, certainly once they’re in the reactor, attacking it means a release of radiation, no question about it,” Bolton told Fox Business Network.
“So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr it has to move in the next eight days.”
Absent an Israeli strike, Bolton said, “Iran will achieve something that no other opponent of Israel, no other enemy of the United States in the Middle East really has and that is a functioning nuclear reactor.”
But when asked whether he expected Israel to actually launch strikes against Iran within the next eight days, Bolton was skeptical.
“I don’t think so, I’m afraid that they’ve lost this opportunity,” he said.
The controversial former envoy to the United Nations criticized Russia’s role in the development of the plant, saying “the Russians are, as they often do, playing both sides against the middle.”
“The idea of being able to stick a thumb in America’s eye always figures prominently in Moscow,” he added.
Iran dismissed the possibilities of such an attack from its archfoes.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Tuesday that “these threats of attacks had become repetitive and lost their meaning.”
“According to international law, installations which have real fuel cannot be attacked because of the humanitarian consequences,” he told reporters at a news conference in Tehran.
Iranian officials say Iran has stepped up defensive measures at the Bushehr plant to protect it from any attacks.
Russia has been building the Bushehr plant since the mid-1990s but the project was marred by delays, and the issue is hugely sensitive amid Tehran’s standoff with the West and Israel over its nuclear ambitions.
The UN Security Council hit Tehran with a fourth set of sanctions on June 9 over its nuclear programme, and the United States and European Union followed up with tougher punitive measures targeting Iran’s banking and energy sectors.
The Bushehr project was first launched by the late shah in the 1970s using contractors from German firm Siemens. But it was shelved when he was deposed in the 1979 Islamic revolution.
It was revived after the death of revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, as Iran’s new supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his first president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, backed the project.
In 1995, Iran won the support of Russia which agreed to finish building the plant and fuel it.
Iran warned on Tuesday that an attack on its first nuclear power plant would amount to an “international crime,” as the countdown started for the launch of the Russian-built facility.
“Attacking an international plant is an international crime as the consequences will not be limited to the hosting country but will have a global aftermath,” Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi told the state IRNA news agency.
Weapons
Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said on Tuesday that Iran will unveil next week an array of weapons, including missiles, speedboats and a long range drone, the ISNA news agency reported.
Two missiles, Qiam (Rising) and the third generation Fateh 110 (Conqueror) would be tested next week when Iran marks the annual government week, Vahidi said in reference to the Iranian week which starts on Saturday.
Iran will also unveil the long-range drone, Karar, he said using the nickname of revered Shiite Imam Ali.
On Sunday Iran launches its annual government week which runs until August 30 and is an occasion to showcase Tehran’s achievements.
Iran has previously paraded a version of Fateh 110 which has a travel range of 150 to 200 kms (90 to 125 miles), but the range of the surface-to-surface Qiam missile was not reported by ISNA on Tuesday.
Vahidi said production lines of two missile-carrying speedboats, Seraj (Lamp) and Zolfaqar (named after Imam Ali’s sword) would also be opened next week.
Vahidi said the unveiling of these weapons indicate that “sanctions have had no impact on us, but made us more experienced and self-sufficient.”
Iranian officials regularly boast about the Islamic republic’s military capabilities and Vahidi’s announcements come at a time when local officials have been warning against any attack on the Islamic republic.
Tehran’s archfoes, the United States and Israel have not ruled out a military strike against Iran to stop its controversial nuclear programme.
Last week a top commander from the Revolutionary Guards said Iran will mass produce replicas of the Bladerunner 51, often described as the world’s fastest boat, and equip them with weapons to be deployed in the Gulf.
Also on Aug 8, Iran took delivery of four new mini-submarines of the home-produced Ghadir class. Weighing 120 tonnes, the “stealth” submarines are aimed at operations in shallow waters, notably in the Gulf.
An Iranian air force jet crashed Tuesday in the southern province of Bushehr which houses a nuclear power plant, said a Mehr news agency report that added the two airmen on board ejected and survived.
The aircraft, a US-made F4 jet fighter that requires a two-person crew, went down about five kilometres (more than three miles) from the Bushehr Special Economy Zone, the report said.
The English-language Press TV channel’s website said the jet crashed near Shif island, about 40 kms (25 miles) north of Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr which the Islamic republic plans to activate on Saturday.
“Fortunately the two pilots were successful in ejecting themselves and have been taken to a hospital,” Bushehr emergency services chief Gholam Reza Keshtkar was quoted as saying by Mehr.
A separate report by Fars news agency, quoting provincial official Mohammad Hassan Shanbadi, said the two pilots “were in good condition.”
“They were flying from the city of Borzjan and the crash was the result of technical faults,” Shanbadi said, adding the jet went down in a desert area and “caused no problem to anyone.”
Bushehr is the site of an Iranian nuclear plant built by Russians and which officials have said will be launched on Aug 21 to eventually generate electricity.
Sanctions
The latest sanctions on Iran will harm trade with the United Arab Emirates, an Iranian business official said on Tuesday, as UAE authorities said the embargo must not hurt legitimate commerce.
“The reality is that this kind of sanctions on Iran will have a negative impact on the trade in the UAE, particularly in Dubai — there is no question about it,” said Morteza Masoumzadeh, vice president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai.
Because of the sanctions, “the cost of the business has gone up, the (shipping) insurance is a problem,” he said.
Sanctions do not apply to various types of export cargo from Iran, Masoumzadeh said, but insurance companies will still “say that we cannot cover a ship to go to Iran for loading cargo from Iran to outside.
“The market, it’s something like a panic when Iran and Iranian ports (are) coming into the picture,” he said.
Iran is a significant UAE trading partner, with trade volume between it and the emirate of Dubai alone estimated at about $10 billion  a year, mostly imports from the Islamic republic.
“I think it is extremely important to have that balance right, between our international commitments on the one hand and... the fact that a lot of the transactions that we do have (with Iran) are legitimate,” the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, was quoted as saying in Gulf News.
Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States, made a similar remark in The National newspaper.
“We do a significant amount of trade with Iran. It cannot be all illicit and it can’t be all illegal,” Otaiba was quoted as saying.
“What we’re trying to do is sift the good from the bad, and make sure nothing legitimate gets harmed by sanctions,” he said.
However, the UAE is implementing the UN sanctions “very openly,” said Otaiba.
“That is not something up for debate,” added the envoy, who was speaking at a conference in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.
Gargash said for his part that the United Arab Emirates was committed to “the global consensus that usually produces (UN) Security Council resolutions.”
Meanwhile, a scientist convicted of violating a trade embargo after his family in Iran sent him $3.4 million was sentenced Monday to 2-1/2 years in prison by a judge who noted that the defendant did not support terrorism or funnel money to Iran’s government.
Mahmoud Reza Banki, 34, winced when his sentence was announced, and numerous spectators among his more than 50 supporters cried openly or wiped tears.
Banki had faced up to 25 years in prison after he was convicted in June, but even federal prosecutors conceded that the unusual aspects of the case meant that Banki deserved a reduction from the more than five years in prison that sentencing guidelines recommended.
The case drew fresh attention to an informal banking system known as hawalas, which rely on wire transfers, couriers and overnight mail and the dangers they may pose to the US.
US District Judge John Keenan described Banki as a “highly educated young man” who was respected by his peers.
In a nod to a letter written on Banki’s behalf from 2003 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi, the judge said he was “certainly impressed that a Nobel Peace Prize recipient took the time to write.”
The judge minimized any suggestions of a threat to national security, saying Banki “did not support terrorism or the Iranian government.”
An Iranian activist is suing Nokia Siemens before a US court, accusing the firm and its parent companies of supplying the Iranian government with technology it used to spy on dissidents.
Moawad & Herischi, the Maryland firm that filed the suit Monday, said Isa Saharkhiz alleges “human rights violations committed by the Iranian government (were carried out) through the aid of spying centers which were provided by Nokia Siemens Networks.”
The firm said Isa Saharkhiz, an Iranian journalist and political dissident, was arrested “as a result of the surveillance and monitoring of his cell phone communications in the aftermath of disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran.”