Bolton’s “Eight Days” Highlight Obama’s Iranian Failure

Conn Carroll / August 18, 2010

Former US envoy to the United Nations John Bolton made headlines Monday when he told Fox Business News that Israel “has to move in the next eight days” or else Iran will bring its first nuclear reactor online August 21 with help from a Russian nuclear fuel shipment. “Once that uranium, once those fuel rods are very close to the reactor, certainly once they’re in the reactor, attacking it means a release of radiation, no question about it,” Bolton said, adding that without a military strike, “Iran will achieve something that no other opponent of Israel, no other enemy of the United States in the Middle East really has and that is a functioning nuclear reactor.”

This echoes the analysis from Heritage’s Ariel Cohen earlier this week: “From the moment the first drop of fuel is loaded, the plant will be considered a nuclear-energy installation as defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the ayatollahs will have the potential to produce the plutonium necessary for an atomic bomb, experts say. (more…)