Unless we act now Iran will be a nuclear military power in months

Somewhere deep underground at a place called Fordow in Iran you can be assured the gas centrifuges are whirring around the clock enriching Uranium isotopes into weapons-grade product. Atomic bombs for Iran.
The lightning collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s filthy regime in Iran’s near neighbour Syria is just the latest in a series of catastrophes for the religio-fascist dictators in Tehran. They are on the back foot, weakened and humiliated in ways which would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. Nuclear capability – and fast – is seen as the only way out of the mess.
Many experts believe Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hated theocratic regime, which has ruled over the beleaguered people of Iran with a rod of iron since the revolution of 1979, will be the next Middle East dictatorship to fall. If it does, the downfall will be entirely of Khamenei’s own making.
Through the extra-territorial arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard known as the Quds Force, Iran has been arming, training and bankrolling its proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthi movement for decades. (Amazingly, Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper still refuses to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation.)
Tehran, of course, is believed to have masterminded the murderous October 7 Hamas attack on Israel’s Nova music festival which saw Hamas monsters slaughter 1,200 men, women and children and take 250 hostages. The attack was seen by many as a desperate attempt by Khamenei to deflect from critical domestic problems and the deepening resolve of the people of Iran to overthrow the mullahs.
Indeed, there have been five major uprisings since 2017 – the last one, in 2022, shook the regime to its foundations. But the Iranian leader’s grotesque gamble has proved to be a terrible miscalculation.
After years of largely sucking-up provocation from Hamas and Hezbollah Israel has responded on a scale, and with a jaw-droppingly deadly efficiency, few saw coming. Hamas is on its knees, Hezbollah all but wiped out, and the toppling of Syrian coward Assad – a man loathed and hated by his own people – is a direct result of Israel’s resolve.
The Israel Defence Force has even eradicated most of Syria’s hideous arsenal of Geneva Convention flouting arms – including chemical weapons and barrel bombs – so they can never fall into the wrong hands – as no one, absolutely no one, knows how the future of Syria is going to be shaped.
The fall of Syria, by the way, and the resultant weakening of the Tehran theocracy – which really could facilitate regime change – also serves to undermine fellow fascist Vladimir Putin who has been using thousands of Iranian-supplied drones to rain hell on Ukraine’s civilian population.
The world should be thanking Israel for doing its dirty work, not piously sanctioning the one truly democratic state in the Middle East. Israel has also made precision strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But Tel Aviv stopped short of using US-supplied super-powerful bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities – leading atomic experts to predict weapons-grade enriching will be happening at speed and at pace right now.
They suggest with the Mullahs in turmoil and Trump likely to sanction Israel’s use of bunker-busters in the near future the nuclear threat is all Iran has left. And it is no empty threat.
Iran has routinely flouted nuclear agreements which allowed it to enrich uranium to just under four percent for use in nuclear reactors. In April 2021, Iran began enriching uranium to 60 percent at its Natanz facility, then, in November 2022, it began enriching to 60 percent at the underground military facility at Fordow.
Uranium enriched to 60 percent can very quickly be boosted to weapons-grade 90 percent. Indeed, in February 2023 UN inspectors discovered uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent at Iran’s Fordow nuclear site, just shy of Atomic Bomb grade.
Iran claimed it was an accident. But you don’t enrich uranium to 60 percent or 83.7 percent by accident. US experts believe Iran will have three operational nuclear missiles by the end of 2025.
In Europe we are largely wringing our collective hands over Khamenei and Iran’s clear and present nuclear danger – but in the US they see things differently.
Incoming President Trump is considering American attacks on all nuclear facilities because, as Sam Brownback former US ambassador for international religious freedom pointed out: “It’s not just now or never, it’s now or nuclear.” But neither the US nor Israel are considering any form of external regime change – and thank goodness for that, but there is a solution to hand.
Iran is not like Syria where an awful power vacuum with an awful lot of unknowns beckons – a second Iranian revolution has been quietly (and not so-quietly) building since the murder of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, killed by morality police for not wearing a hijab, and with it a legitimate alternative political (and democratic) infrastructure.
Young people – especially women – took to the streets in 2022 united under the banner “Women, Life, Freedom”, a slogan which, critically, later morphed into “Women, Resistance, Freedom”. Resistance Units grew and affiliated with the main Iranian resistance movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
Now, the word mojahedin tends to make the hairs on the back of the neck of any westerner with a long memory stand up. But this Mojahedin is the key component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a fully-formed Government-in-waiting, with a female president, Maryam Rajavi and a 10-point plan to bring democracy to Iran for the first time, which has the approval of huge swathes of the US and UK governments.
And so it should. The mullahs are facing endgame – they know the gig is up. Iran’s youth have had enough of oppression and violence and no longer believe the Ayatollah tropes about the US being the Great Satan and the West being the enemy of Islam.
They, like the rest of the human race, just want to live in peace and prosperity. Rajavi’s to-do list is a true blueprint for a building a new democracy based, astonishingly, on the separation of church and state, as well as:

• The ballot box as the only criteria for legitimacy
• Equal rights and freedoms for women
• The autonomy of ethnic groups
• Equality between Shia and Sunni Muslims and followers of other religions
• A non-nuclear Iran

Addressing the US Senate on Thursday she said: “A year ago, Khamenei turned to war in the Middle East to divert attention from domestic issues and to prevent another nationwide protest in Iran. Such wars are the last resort of dictatorships on the brink of collapse.
“There should be no doubt that the Revolutionary Guards and all other oppressive forces in Iran will not be able to stand against the anger of the Iranian people and their nationwide uprising.”
If we in the West truly believe in democracy, we should surely get foursquare behind this courageous woman.

https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1988979/iran-nuclear-military-power-paul-baldwin