US-Iranian Nuclear Talks Fail, Iran Has Enough Plutonium For 24 Nagasaki Size Bombs

Iranian Negotiator Mostafa Dolatyar has said in New Delhi that the talks between the United States and Iran have failed to progress at all. The United States has been demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium to a 20 percent level, a demand that Tehran says “doesn’t make sense”, according to Israeli intelligence site Debka.

Dolatyar further said:

“They [the world powers] have made certain connections with purely technical issues and something purely political. In so far as this is the mentality and this is the approach from 5 + 1 (the Six World Powers) – or whatever else you call it – definitely there is no end for this game.”

Mostafa Dolatyar is the head of the Iranian foreign ministry’s think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies, as well as a senior member of the Iranian team facing US negotiators. There is no doubt that if he made any type of comment about the negotiations it was approved by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni. It also sends a message to the West that any negotiations that entail Iran suspending enrichment will be considered a red line.

The negotiations mark a distinct departure from Iran’s typical playbook. Usually the Islamic Republic takes advantage of every negotiating session to drag out the negotiations and give them a chance to further their nuclear ambitions. This time Iran may be signaling to the West that they have reached a point of no return with their program and that they don’t feel the need to even talk about what the West wants.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Iran is in the possession of enough spent fuel rods and that their use “could have been a test run for the Iranians should they decide to reprocess those rods into weapons-grade plutonium..” the US and Israel have always maintained that processing weapons grade Plutonium from spent fuel rods was too expensive and technologically advanced for the Iranians but The Wall Street Journal begs to differ, saying “…experts tell us that the rapid extraction of weapons-usable plutonium from spent fuel rods is a straightforward process that can be preformed in a fairly small (and easily secreted) space.”

By Russian, Israeli and American expert suggestions Iran has enough spent fuel rods to produce 220 pounds of plutonium, or enough for 24 bombs the size of the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

Israeli intelligence officials are saying in the background that if Iran develops these bombs, which have a yield of 20 kilotons each, that the sanctions and other methods the West has been using to get Iran to stop their drive to nuclear capability has failed.