The
New York Times is reporting today that the Iranians were offered by Mr. A Q Khan's representatives "a package of (atomic bomb) technologies - for a price that ran from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a European diplomat - including the difficult-to-master process of casting uranium metal."
It goes on "Still, European and American officials said they considered the offer as some of the best evidence to date that Iran sought to assemble the technologies needed to build a nuclear arsenal. It joins with accounts that have portrayed an elaborate Iranian effort to keep I.A.E.A. inspectors from finding centrifuges and other equipment and sites critical to producing both commercial and weapons-grade uranium."
The only problem? The offer was made
eighteen years ago. If Iran really had wanted the atomic bomb, you would have thought that even they could manage it in eighteen years particularly by purchasing an atomic-bomb-by-numbers kit possibly including "the blueprints for a Chinese-designed nuclear weapon".