As Cairo smoulders, it’s easy to forget about one of the most combustible ingredients in
the Middle Eastern cocktail – Iran. Yet the threat still exists, as Tony Blair and
Liam Fox have been keen to remind us. James Kirkup reports that the Defence Secretary has warned a Commons committee that Iran could have a nuclear
device as soon as next year.
Fox isn’t the first to make the 2012 claim. The director of the CIA did so last year. And a recent article by the former UN weapons inspector David Albright and Andrea Stricker – which
I arrived at via Jeffrey Goldberg – explains just how Iran
might pull it off, in spite of recent setbacks:
“Technically, Iran could decide to build a nuclear weapon now using the Natanz enrichment plant. The United States has estimated that Iran could produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb in about one year.
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