Good morning on this Saturday, August 21st. Last week I wrote about Iran's activation of its nuclear reactor. Today is the day that with Russia's provided nuclear fuel, the actual fueling is to begin. It will take approximately two weeks to complete the fueling and two months for the nuclear power plant to begin generating electricity. There has been much speculation that Israel or the U.S. would do what was required to "kill" this nuclear site because of the risk of Iran taking the next step of developing a nuclear warhead to attack its enemies. The New York Times reported this week that the United States had dissuaded the Israelis from launching an attack on the reactor site because our best intelligence indicates that Iran is at least one year away from being capable of delivering a nuclear attack. In order to complete the process of making of a nuclear bomb, one of two paths would need to be followed. Either the Iranians would need to extract plutonium, which could be used to make atomic weapons, from the spent reactor fuel, or they would have to enrich enough uranium on their own to make a nuclear weapon. The Russians have insisted that as part of their agreement to provide the fuel to Iran, that they will retrieve all of the spent nuclear fuel so plutonium may not be extracted. But there are serious doubts about the certitude of this process. Additionally, there is great concern that the Iranians intend to build 10 enrichment sites within protected areas of the mountains. If either through the extraction of plutonium from spent fuel or its own enrichment process, Iran obtains the essentials for a nuclear weapon, they will be capable of a nuclear strike soon. They are now much closer to that reality than before. Future developments could unfold quickly and could be of critical importance to our understanding of future events.
Tomorrow's sermon is a tutorial about how to have meaningful personal worship. I hope you'll be able to be there.
Mel Brown