{"id":15213,"date":"2012-05-27T18:55:56","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T02:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=15213"},"modified":"2012-05-27T18:55:56","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T02:55:56","slug":"the-ever-shrinking-burden-of-proof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/27\/the-ever-shrinking-burden-of-proof\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ever-Shrinking Burden of Proof"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Taking the &#8220;scary Iran story&#8221; angle to a new low, a new report today reveals that Iran <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2012\/05\/26\/us-nuclear-iran-uranium-idUSBRE84O0SN20120526\">could theoretically make 5 nuclear bombs if it took all of its civilian uranium and dedicated it exclusively to weapons production<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The bulk of Iran&#8217;s uranium is enriched to 3.5%, the level needed to power the Bushehr plant, with a smaller portion enriched to 20%, the level needed to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor. All of Iran&#8217;s uranium is under surveillance per IAEA safeguards.<\/p>\n<p>So to make those &#8220;five bombs&#8221; Iran would need to take every last bit of uranium they have, enrich it all to over 90% (weapons grade), figure out how to turn it into a weapon, test the weapon, and work out some sort of delivery mechanism.<\/p>\n<p>By the same token, Iran could be accused of having &#8220;enough bacteria&#8221; to make a lot of bioweapons, or &#8220;enough chemicals&#8221; that if they mixed a bunch of them together they could probably make a lot of chemical weapons. <\/p>\n<p>This is the level of &#8220;proof&#8221; people need these days. We saw a similar <a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2012\/05\/19\/three-suspected-nato-protesters-charged-as-terrorists\/\">narrative with the NATO3 last week, charged with terrorism on the basis of a beer-making kit that contained &#8220;enough empty beer bottles&#8221;<\/a> to theoretically make a lot of Molotov Cocktails. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Taking the &#8220;scary Iran story&#8221; angle to a new low, a new report today reveals that Iran could theoretically make 5 nuclear bombs if it took all of its civilian uranium and dedicated it exclusively to weapons production. The bulk of Iran&#8217;s uranium is enriched to 3.5%, the level needed to power the Bushehr plant, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15214,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15213\/revisions\/15214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15213"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}