The sub attack was a warning to Washington not to go through with searches of Iranian ships for prohibited freights.

When the Russian President Demitry Medvedev said Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity, he was not disapproving, but argued that it was not a violation of its international underatkings.. He expects the forthcoming nuclear dialogue next month to take Iranian uranium enrichment as a given and ...

Moscow and Tehran have announced that the nuclear reactor Russia is building Iran at Bushehr has completed all its test-runs and will be up and running in early September - ahead of schedule.
debkafile's military sources have repeatedly reported that the Iranian reactor at Bushehr is not just a power plant but also has military applications. Chief among them is the reuse of its fuel rods to produce plutonium as atomic weapon fuel. 

CIA director Leon Panetta admits Iran has enough low-enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs that could be built in two years. In an interview Sunday, June 27, he virtually admitted that every effort to halt Iran's drive for a nuclear bomb had failed. Asked whether sanctions would work, he said: "Probably not." debkafile's military sources: Iran has reached this advanced stage largely because Israel's leaders have allowed Washington to hold them back from military action.

The low value of the sanctions against Iran adopted by the UN Security Council Wednesday, June 9 was undeniable. But its passage in New York found US, French and British bombers in a unique exercise simulating a marine force attack on ground targets with close air support. The Canjuers training facility near Toulon stood in for an Iranian location.  "Interoperability" was demonstrated by US and French bombers taking off from each other's carriers.

White House and Kremlin efforts to paper over their mounting discord wore thin under the strain of Iran's nuclear machinations. As DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals in its coming issue out next Friday, the debut of a nascent anti-American "third world" in Tehran showed Moscow's fingers secretly pushing the buttons.

Washington is reacting by deploying a large naval-air-marine armada in the Middle East and turning back to Israel. Track these epic trends with our specialists. 

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While Russia backs the US on watered-down UN Security Council sanctions for Iran, debkafile's military sources report Iranian Revolutionary Guards crews are surreptitiously training at Russian bases for operating advanced S-300 interceptor-missile systems, which are capable of fending off a potential attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

After its softening by Russia and China, the new sanctions motion does not ban the consignment of this weapon to Iran.

Iran is rid of harassment over its nuclear program thanks to the deal clinched in Tehran Monday, May 17 by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva "Lula" and Turkish prime minister Reccep Erdogan, whereby Iran will export some 1,200 kilograms of its lightly enriched uranium to Turkey for reprocessing to 19.5 percent grade.
debkafile's military sources: The deal, backed by Moscow, is a fraudulent piece of diplomatic trickery - firstly, Turkey has no enrichment facilities.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Iranian sources reveal that high-ranking Revolutionary Guards generals are engaged in intense turf wars to see which sections of Iran's WMD programs under their command reach the finishing line first.
Our latest issue out last Friday elaborated on the state of those programs. It also offered an up-to-the-minute guide to the war preparations afoot on Israel's explosive northern borders.

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Iran introduced its nuclear program much earlier than previously believed. Ex-foreign minister Velayati now discloses that in 1986, he brought the first centrifuges from Pakistan to Iran aboard the private plane of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Revolution or Iran. DEBKA intelligence and counter-terror sources add that the centrifuges came with the first Pakistani technical specifications for building a bomb and designing missiles for their delivery.
 

The Obama administration appeared torn by internal debate when Wednesday, April 21, US deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy said: "The US has ruled out a military strike against Iran's nuclear program any time soon " - only to be contradicted a few hours later when the Pentagon spokesman denied the United States had dropped its military option.
Iranian officialdom believes the debate is a trick to put them to sleep, while the US gradually builds up its Persian Gulf forces to peak in two or three months.

The New York Times Sunday, April 18, reveals a secret memo from US Defense Security Robert Gates determining that the White House has no effective policy for dealing with Iran's steady progress towards nuclear capability. This confirms what debkafile has been saying for more than a year, while also exposing the hollowness of the assurances of Israeli leaders, current and past, that it was safe to line up behind US strategy for preventing Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

This warning, along with an announcement that Iran would join the world's nuclear club within a month, struck at the heart of President Barack Obama's Nuclear Security Summit which opened Tuesday, April 13. The statement run by the Iranian publication Kayhan said: "If the US strikes Iran with nuclear weapons, there are elements which will respond with nuclear blasts in the centers of America's main cities."  
debkafile: It was the first time Tehran had threatened America with nuclear terror.

In addition to developing a "third generation" centrifuge for speeding up uranium enrichment, Iran is close to activating its Bushehr nuclear reactor and completing its Arak heavy water plant - both providing easy access to weapons-grade plutonium for smaller, lighter and more easily deliverable nuclear warheads. Plentiful new uranium deposits have also been discovered in central Iran.

Scenarios of a potential Israeli attack on Iran - usually without US assent - abound in Washington in the last 24 hours. They contrast sharply with the impression Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is conveying that he and President Barack Obama were of one mind on Iran when they met last week.  Two CSIS researchers cite the belief in some US military circles that Israel, lacking a one-off capability for striking Iran, will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.  
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