Netanyahu Draws Red Line: Next Spring, Iran in Final Nuclear Stage

Local Editor

As part of his escalated rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, "Israeli" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Thursday that "the world has until next summer at the latest to stop Iran before it can build a nuclear bomb."

Netanyahu flashed a diagram of a cartoon-like bomb before the UN General Assembly showing the progress Iran has made, saying "it has already completed the first stage of uranium enrichment."

Then, he pulled out a red marker and drew a line across what he said was a threshold Iran was approaching and which "Israel" could not tolerate - the completion of the second stage and 90 percent of the way to the uranium enrichment needed to make an atomic bomb.

"By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage," he said. "From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb."
"The battle is between modernity and the medieval forces of radical Islam," he said and noted that "deterrence would not work against Iran as it had with the Soviet Union."

"Deterrence worked with the Soviets, because every time the Soviets faced a choice between their ideology and their survival, they chose survival," he said. But "militant jihadists behave very differently from secular Marxists. There were no Soviet "suicide bombers". Yet, Iran produces hordes of them."
"I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down. This will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program altogether," the "Israeli" top official said. "
"Red lines don't lead to war, red lines prevent war," he added.

In response, Iran's deputy UN ambassador took the floor at the General Assembly to categorically reject ""Israel's" entirely baseless allegations."
Eshagh al-Habib accused Netanyahu of using "an unfounded and imaginary graph to justify a military threat against Iran."
"Iran is strong enough to defend itself and reserves its full right to retaliate with full force against any attack," he said.

Al-Habib urged the international community to exert pressure on "Israel" to end its irresponsible behavior and to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon party and put all its nuclear facilities under US safeguards."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org