Despite the deliberately deceptive efforts of the Barack Obama administration (a continuation of deliberately deceptive efforts of the Bush and Clinton administrations before), it seems to be increasingly well understood that the US's nuclear dispute with Iran is over the American idea that Iran, for Israel's benefit, must be prevented from having technology and capabilities that are legal under the NPT and that multiple countries have, for example Japan.
I just want to point out Tony Karon's contribution to this understanding:
And, it's a lot harder, outside of Washington, to present Iran as a "grave and gathering danger" when what it's doing is using the ambiguities of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to put the nuclear weapon option within reach -- as Japan, for example, has done -- but not yet exercising that option. Indeed, even while Iran resists cooperating with a number of IAEA inquiries, its production of nuclear fuel, while in defiance of Security Council resolutions, is undertaken under the scrutinty of IAEA inspectors, who continue to certify that none of it has been diverted into any covert program.
Then I want to point to an editorial by European former Ambassadors to Iran (Richard Dalton - United Kingdom, Steen Hohwü-Christensen -Sweden, Paul von Maltzahn - Germany, Guillaume Metten - Belgium, François Nicoullaud - France and Roberto Toscano - Italy) saying about the same thing:
Today, a majority of experts, even in Israel, seems to view Iran as striving to become a "threshold country," technically able to produce a nuclear weapon but abstaining from doing so for the present. Again, nothing in international law or in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty forbids such an ambition. Like Iran, several other countries are on their way to or have already reached such a threshold but have committed not to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody seems to bother them.
This is not new information. This is a subject the Bush and Obama administrations like to dance around and lie about because it really is not a defensible position.
