Iran’s “nuclear success celebration” takes place in first 10 days of February – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares Tuesday

He was reacting to recent statements by Israeli leaders. Monday, prime minister Ehud Olmert and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu stated during visits to the US that Iran must not be allowed to pass the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability.
The first days of February are the “Ten-Day Dawn” period annually marking the victory of the Islamic Revolution which established the Shiite Islamic Republic in 1979. According to Ahmadinejad, the next celebration in three months will mark “the Iranian nation’s success in mastering the fuel cycle.”
The US and its allies have finally agreed to live with a nuclear Iran, with an Iran possessing nuclear fuel cycle, he said.
He was saying in a word that the Israelis and Americans are too late. While they were talking about ways of halting Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic had sailed past and was on the way to attaining all its nuclear goals, including a weapons capability.
debkafile‘s Iranian sources: Iran has clearly made dramatic progress in its nuclear endeavor largely thanks to help from China and North Korea, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly disclosed on Nov. 10. But the big question is: Have they overcome all the technological obstacles towards transforming their capabilities into operational weapons. Ahmadinejad conveys the impression that they have. According to our intelligence information, the answer is negative.
Despite success in operating several hundred advanced P2 centrifuges for enriching uranium, the Iranians have not so far managed to master the necessary tens of thousands for operation at the requisite speed to produce a sufficiency of weapons-grade enriched uranium. Iran has still not built and activated 60,000 centrifuges.
Ahmadinejad’s boasts Tuesday may therefore be nothing but an attempt to shout down and deter the United States and Israel by declaring that any attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities will be futile since the Islamic Republic has already attained all the technological attainments it aspires to.
debkafile‘s intelligence and military sources cite another possibility, which has not been mentioned by either the Americans or the Israelis: Iran may purchase some technology and nuclear devices too off the shelf, without going to the trouble of full home-production. The Iranian government has many billions of petrodollars to burn for shortening its race to the world’s nuclear club. It has at least one potential vendor, North Korea.
For the moment, no evidence of such a transaction has reached Western or Israeli intelligence, but it is not ruled out.
Tehran is evidently troubled enough by the words of Israeli leaders to lodge a protest with the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna quoting deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh’s words as evidence of Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Last week, Sneh said Israel must stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb at all costs.