RUTHFULLY YOURS

Summary

Based on documents in the Iran Nuclear Archive, seized by Israel in early 2018, Iran’s Amad Plan created the Shahid Mahallati Uranium Metals Workshop near Tehran to research and develop uranium metallurgy related to building nuclear weapons. Figure 1 shows this site as it looked in 2002 and 2003, when an existing workshop was renovated and brought into operation. The facility was intended as a pilot plant, aimed at developing and making uranium components for nuclear weapons, in particular components from weapon-grade uranium, the key nuclear explosive material in Iranian nuclear weapon cores. The site was meant to be temporary, until the production-scale Shahid Boroujerdi facility at Parchin was completed.1 However, the Shahid Mahallati facility was capable of making the first cores of weapon-grade uranium, in case Shahid Boroujerdi was unfinished when weapon-grade uranium would have had become available.

The sidebar shows the Amad Plan’s pathway to nuclear weapons, based on information in the Nuclear Archive. Highlighted is the role of Shahid Mahallati in that process of making nuclear weapons.

The Amad Plan was downsized in late 2003 before this plant processed any weapon-grade uranium, although it did process a considerable amount of a non-uranium surrogate material into weapon components. The use of a surrogate material allowed Iran’s nuclear weapons program to learn and practice the fabrication of key nuclear weapon components.

Analysis of commercial satellite imagery confirms the location of the Shahid Mahallati site based on comparison with exterior ground photos, and a chronology of the site’s status is included in this report. The key building of the site, the uranium metals workshop, was apparently gutted and abandoned between late 2010 and early 2011. This action may have been triggered by the Western discovery and exposure in late 2009 of the secret, deeply buried Fordow enrichment plant, formerly called the Al Ghadir project under the Amad Plan (see sidebar).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15857/poland-hungary-czech-republic-sovereignty

The ruling effectively removes the sovereignty of EU member states to make their own decisions regarding the keeping of public law, order and national security in the case of EU migration policies, if those decisions conflict with EU obligations.

In addition, the ruling of the court goes against evidence that migration flows into Europe do indeed constitute a real security danger that has cost European lives.

How national authorities are supposed to distinguish between actual “war refugees” and terrorists impersonating war refugees is not suggested by the Court, which appears curiously uninterested in dealing with the reality of migration.

The Court’s ruling does not only contradict facts and common sense. It sends the distinct signal to foreign regimes, such as that of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that sending migrants to the continent for whatever purpose, even political blackmail, will be successful, because European institutions, such as the EU Court of Justice, will do their utmost to ensure that even the most rebellious EU member states, such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, will be forced to receive them.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke EU law when they refused to take in migrants under the European Union’s September 2015 relocation agreement. During the 2015 migrant crisis, EU leaders agreed to relocate 160,000 migrants and refugees EU-wide, assigning each EU member state a fixed quota from the camps in Italy and Greece, where migrants and refugees were arriving in record numbers. However, the Czech Republic accepted only 12 of the 2,000 refugees assigned it, while Hungary and Poland took in none.

In 2017, the EU took Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over that refusal to take migrants. On April 2, 2020, the CJEU ruled against the three countries. The ruling followed the October 2019 recommendation by the Court’s Advocate General, legal advisor to the Court, which said that EU law must be followed and that the EU’s principle of solidarity “necessarily sometimes implies accepting burden-sharing”.

In its judgment, the Court dismissed the three countries’ argument that they were entitled to refuse the relocation scheme based on concerns for the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security. The Court agreed that those concerns constituted legitimate reasons to derogate from obligations of EU law[1]. However, the Court ruled that EU member states refusing to take in migrants under the relocation scheme could only legitimately do so if they proved, “following a case-by-case investigation, on consistent, objective and specific evidence that provides grounds for suspecting that the applicant in question represents an actual or potential danger”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15867/china-russia-relations

Russia, nevertheless, has had to pay for the Chinese support. Virtually every analysis of the relationship concedes that China is the rider and Russia the horse, to use Bismarck’s metaphor for alliances.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that, “the main struggle, which is now underway, is that for global leadership and we are not going to contest China on this.”

Consequently, Russia’s greatest gain is China’ support — both material and otherwise — for Russia’s economic and military probes against the U.S. and its allies. In this manner, Russian hopes to gain Western acceptance of Russia as a great global power and to have it negotiate with Russia as an equal.

However, the coronavirus crisis ends, one can expect that Russia, with China’s support, will continue to behave as aggressively as it can against the U.S. its allies, its values, and its interests. It will be doing so not only for its own benefit but for China’s benefit.

To confront that threat we need to see this alliance between Russia and China for what it is—a unique but so far durable — alliance that will continue into the foreseeable future seriously to threaten the United States, the Free World and the West.

The Trump Administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy predicted an approaching power rivalry. A key finding of the report was that China was America’s greatest adversary with Russia right behind it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-twin-contagions-facing-latin-america/

Central and South America must contend not with just coronavirus, but also with the resurgent temptations of socialism and Communism.

Latin America is facing the simultaneous onslaught of two potent viruses: one biological, the other ideological. Many Latin-American nations lack efficient health-care systems and preventive measures to fight the former: coronavirus. The latter virus, totalitarianism, is not new to the region, but equally menacing.

The economic consequences of the worldwide economic stoppage will be especially harmful to a region that depends, in many cases, on tourism, services, and primary-product exports.  Nevertheless, the region can learn from democracies with a relatively low death rate to date from coronavirus: In Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan, the unity between the public and private sectors, clear and transparent information, social distancing, and other measures adopted by the populations and enforced by the government have so far prevented widespread deaths from the virus.

Latin American democracies concurrently face the resurgence of a familiar, yet lethal, virus.  Across the region, the ideological disease of collectivist totalitarianism still infects the unprepared or those looking for simple solutions. With the regional epicenter of the ideological contagion in Cuba, the influence of totalitarian tendencies is felt throughout the region.