The lack of solid analysis by the traditional media is a definite hinderance to understanding how immediate, or not immediate, the "crisis" there is.
Today's incremental development is that the EU has made an offer of nuclear technology to Iran, with the major string attached that it would use the technology only for peaceful purposes.
As we discussed yesterday in examining the slow ramping up of India to the "nuclear club," these things not only take time, but they develop a dynamic of their own that seems to favor a push for a very expensive nuclear capability. (Cont'd)
In the book India's Nuclear Bomb, by George Perkovich (Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, 1999), we learn that even though India had the technical expertise, it still took quite a while for them to develop it to the point of an explosion, officially labelled a "peaceful nuclear explosion," ostensibly for digging canals, water reservoirs, and the like.
Even with expertise, the explosion around 1974 may have been less than expected. The bomb dropped by the US at Hiroshima was 12 kilotons, and India claimed an explosion in the range of 12-15 KT, yet the book examines arguments that India may have only exploded a 4-6 KT device, thus one-third to one-half of the Hiroshima device. In this section, the author outlines some of the non-explosive-test ways that Indian scientists appeared to use to remedy the technical problems encountered in their first test.
The book on the Indian bomb development makes it clear that countries often have to accept a major trade-off--between feeding and clothing their poor, or building up their nuclear defenses. In the case of India at the time, the poor were suffering from a drought that made life a lot worse for 180 million of its residents.
The key point to take away from this section of the book (p. 118-183 or so), is that countries going nuclear have to take a lot of aspects into account. In India's case, China's successful testing of a nuclear device helped change official policy more toward going nuclear.
It also emphasizes that for all practical purposes, there is very little real distinction between peaceful uses and military uses, as nuclear can relatively quickly become dual-use technology.
Thus, newspapers do little public service by scare headlines making it seem as though Iran will be imminently a member of the nuclear club, especially if other countries are not transferring military technology. In addition, newspapers do little good by maintaining the fiction that transfers of "peaceful nuclear technology" will keep countries from achieving the goal of a nuclear bomb.
There are any number of diplomatic ways to promote nuclear non-proliferation. Newspapers do not make clear that by going nuclear, regimes may well be shortchanging their people of food and economic development, as well as raising the threat of nuclear war.