Has Iran Already Crossed The 'Red Line' For Nuclear Development?

This comes from WND and hasn't been repeated in any other news outlets (yet), but this is very interesting information if true, and could represent yet another approaching tipping point:

Evidence That Iran Has Crossed The Nuclear 'Red Line'

Iranian scientists are working on nuclear warheads – and trying to perfect them – at an underground site unknown to the West, according to a high-ranking intelligence officer of the Islamic regime.

The officer, who has been assigned to the Ministry of Defense, not only provided the coordinates to this vast site but also details of its operation.

The site, approximately 14 miles long and 7.5 miles wide, consists of two facilities built deep into a mountain along with a missile facility that is surrounded by barbed wire, 45 security towers and several security posts.

The new secret nuclear site, named Quds (Jerusalem), is almost 15 miles from another site, previously secret but exposed in 2009, the Fordow nuclear facility. The power to this site comes from the same source as Fordow – the Shahid Rajaei power plant – with high power towers surrounding the site.

Construction of the site started about the same time as Fordow, and in the second half of 2010 all industrial tests were completed. The site became 60 percent operational in 2011.

Gen. Ahmad Vahid Datjerdi, who works in the supreme leader’s office to protect the regime’s information and counterintelligence, manages the site. His deputy, Hojatolislam Ramezani, was appointed to the protection of intelligence at the Defense Ministry after several leaks about the country’s nuclear operations.

Quds, built about 375 feet under the mountain and accessible by two large entrances reinforced with concrete, has 12 emergency exit tunnels and spreads around the mountain.

One chamber is specifically allocated to laser enrichment research and development, and Iranian scientists have seen great progress, the source said.

The most significant information provided by the source is that the regime has succeeded in not only enriching to weapons grade but has converted the highly enriched uranium into metal.

Moreover, the source said, successfully using the metal in making a neutron reflector indicates the final stages for a nuclear weapons design that would be a two-stage, more sophisticated and much more powerful nuclear bomb.

Regime scientists are also working on a plutonium bomb as a second path to becoming nuclear-armed, the source said, and they have at this site 24 kilograms of plutonium, which is sufficient for several atomic bombs.

The scientists are at the last stage of putting together a bomb warhead, he said, and the scientists in their design for a plutonium bomb are using polonium and beryllium, which would serve as the trigger and the tamper, respectively, for the bomb.

Iranian scientists, aided by North Koreans, are also working on new ways to have more miniaturized and more powerful atomic bombs, he said.

Adjacent to the Quds facility is another facility dubbed “Martyr Mughniyah” after the Lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyah, the source said. Personnel at this site work on missiles and warheads.

The regime is building its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles there using compressed composite carbon material, which originated at an American company, he said. The company manufactures advanced composite materials and structural parts. Iran purchased the carbon material through an intermediary in Turkey, the source said. The material makes it possible to have a longer missile range with larger warheads.

The regime is working on 17 Shahab 3 missiles in preparation of arming them with nuclear warheads, the source said. The operational and technical aspect of the delivery system is 80 percent completed, he said

The regime, aided by North Korea, is also working on neutron warheads that could be used as super EMP weapons for electromagnetic pulse attacks.

Overhead images clearly show this site has over 380 missile depots and launching pads, facilities that can house large ballistic missiles, most likely Shahab 3 and possibly North Korean Taepodong II (ICBMs). The source added that this missile site is the center of the regime’s defensive and offensive strategies and supports other missile sites: the Imam Ali near the city of Khoram Abad in the Lorestan province and the one in Tabriz in the province of East Azarbaijan – to be used in any attack on Israeli and U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

This facility provides the missiles for Hezbollah, the source said, and, with the help of North Koreans, is mass producing a new generation of napalm bombs to be shipped to the terrorist group while at the same time working on white phosphorus bombs to be used for terrorist acts.

The images also show a military airfield for the sole use of officers at this facility.

“The newly discovered underground complex looks like the kind of enormous complexes built by the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War and by Russia today,” Pry said. “Heavily hardened and fortified and supplied with huge amounts of electric power, by what appear to be 765-kilovolt electric power lines, the imagery suggests a top-priority military site. Nuclear-weapons programs consume vast amounts of electricity.”

“The source claims Iran now has all the materials for building nuclear weapons, such as weapons-grade uranium, plutonium as well as polonium and beryllium,” he said. “One can infer from the descriptions some design characteristics of parts for making implosion plutonium weapons and two-stage atomic weapons. The latter is a design far more sophisticated than the Hiroshima bomb that could have a much higher yield and possibly produce an explosion 50 times greater than Hiroshima,” according to Dr. Pry.

Fritz Ermarth, who served in the CIA and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, reviewed the imagery. “There is much work to be done by imagery analysts on the photos Reza (Kahlili) has produced,” he said. “For example, is spoil from the tunneling visible? Does it tell us how extensive the tunneling is? 

But taken as a package, this imagery strongly suggests that Iran is working on what we used to call an ‘objective force.’ That is the objective of a deployed force of nuclear weapons on mobile missiles, normally based in deep underground sites for survivability against even nuclear attack, capable of rapid deployment. … They do suggest that Iran is working the problem of becoming a nuclear weapons power in a serious way, not just playing around for a few nukes on the shelf.”

Ambassador Henry Cooper, the former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator on nuclear and space treaties with the Soviet Union, said, “Iran’s apparent interest and investments in underground systems are clearly coupled with its programs to develop and potentially employ weapons of mass destruction in the face of armaments that may be deployed against them, whether by Israel (‘the little Satan’) or the United States (‘the Great Satan’). Most notable is the fact that Iran has already demonstrated its ability to launch satellites into low earth orbit. When they also gain confidence in their nuclear weapons, they can then use those launchers to place nuclear weapons in earth orbit and detonate them over wherever they wish, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could level its strategic playing field with all of Western civilization. This is perhaps their ultimate asymmetric weapon. Far-fetched? I wouldn’t bet (against) it.”

If this is true, and the photos attached to this article prove to be as ominous as suspected, then we are rapidly approaching the point of no return. 




Also in the news today:




Syrian Rebels Take Towns Near Israel Ceasefire Line Near Golan Heights



Hundreds In Ramallah Protest Obama's Visit



Kassam Barrage Fired At Israel - Damage Reported



Cyprus Expected To Vote On Plan B Thursday As Bailout Hangs In The Balance






Why The World Economy Is Doomed: The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers


Open this article and look at the actual numbers, which are presented first and are stunning. Below the numbers is the commentary. 

The following is the global financial pyramid scheme by the numbers...

-$9,283,000,000,000 - The total amount of all bank deposits in the United States.  The FDIC has just 25 billion dollars in the deposit insurance fund that is supposed to "guarantee" those deposits.  In other words, the ratio of total bank deposits to insurance fund money is more than 371 to 1.

-$10,012,800,000,000 - The total amount of mortgage debt in the United States.  As you can see, you could take every penny out of every bank account in America and it still would not cover it.

-$10,409,500,000,000 - The M2 money supply in the United States.  This is probably the most commonly used measure of the total amount of money in the U.S. economy.

-$15,094,000,000,000 - U.S. GDP.  It is a measure of all economic activity in the United States for a single year.

-$16,749,269,587,407.53 - The size of the U.S. national debt.  It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.

-$32,000,000,000,000 - The total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).

-$50,230,844,000,000 - The total amount of government debt in the world.

-$56,280,790,000,000 - The total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system.

-$61,000,000,000,000 - The combined total assets of the 50 largest banks in the world.

-$70,000,000,000,000 - The approximate size of total world GDP.

-$190,000,000,000,000 - The approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.  It has nearly doubled in size over the past decade.

-$212,525,587,000,000 - According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States.  But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.

-$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 - The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Why is the global economy in so much trouble?  How can so many people be so absolutely certain that the world financial system is going to crash?  Well, the truth is that when you take a look at the cold, hard numbers it is not difficult to see why the global financial pyramid scheme is destined to fail.  In the United States today, there is approximately 56 trillion dollars of total debt in our financial system, but there is only about 9 trillion dollars in our bank accounts.  So you could take every single penny out of the banks, multiply it by six, and you still would not have enough money to pay off all of our debts.  Overall, there is about 190 trillion dollars of total debt on the planet.  But global GDP is only about 70 trillion dollars.  And the total notional value of all derivatives around the globe is somewhere between 600 trillion and 1500 trillion dollars.  So we have a gigantic problem on our hands.  The global financial system is a very shaky house of cards that has been constructed on a foundation of debt, leverage and incredibly risky derivatives.  We are living in the greatest financial bubble in world history, and it isn't going to take much to topple the entire thing.  And when it falls, it is going to be the largest financial disaster in the history of the planet.

The next wave of the economic collapse is quickly approaching.  A full-blown economic depression has already started in southern Europe.  Unemployment is at record highs and economic activity is contracting rapidly.

The major offshore banking centers in Cyprus are on the verge of collapsing.  It was just announced that they will now be closed until Tuesday, but nobody really knows for sure when they will be allowed to reopen.  And there is already talk that when they do reopen that there will be strict limits on how much money people can take out.

And now the IMF is warning that the three biggest banks in Slovenia are failing and that a billion euros will be needed to bail them out.

The dominoes are starting to tumble, and the United States won't be immune.  In fact, the greatest financial problems that the United States has ever seen are on the horizon.

But you can just have faith that Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress know exactly what they are doing and will be able to save us from the coming financial collapse if you want.

The mainstream media will provide you with all of the positive economic news that you could possibly want.  They are giddy about the fact that the Dow keeps hitting all-time highs and they would have us all believe that we are in the midst of a robust economic recovery.  You can listen to them if you want to.

But when you are tempted to believe that everything is going to be "okay" somehow, just go back and look at the numbers there were posted above one more time.

There is no way that the global financial pyramid scheme is going to be able to hold up for too much longer.  At some point it is going to totally collapse.  When that happens, will you be ready?