Risk of Israel/U.S. Strike on Iran has Tripled; Israel Stole Weapon-grade Uranium from U.S.
Bible prophecy describes the battle of Armageddon as a coalition of nations that will almost certainly include China and Russia and several Muslim nations of the Middle East. Every day, the evidence mounts that China will be tightly leagued with Russia and many of the Islamic nations in a powerful anti-Israel political and military alliance from which the 200-million-man army described in the book of Revelation (Rev. 9:16) will ultimately come. - The Sixth Trumpet War of Revelation 9Risk of Israel/U.S. Strike on Iran has Tripled: Barclays Capital
The chance of a military strike on Iran has roughly tripled in the past year, the senior geopolitical risk analyst at Barclays Capital said on Thursday.
New York-based analyst Helina Croft, writing in a note titled 'Blowback: Assessing the fallout from the Iranian sanctions', said even increased sanctions without an all-out military strike was increasing the risk of a spike in oil prices.
"We still contend that the risk of either an Israeli or US strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities remains low, but it has risen, in our view, from 5-10 percent last year to 25-30% now," Croft said.
"In terms of supply-demand balances for the oil market, an oil embargo or sanctions on the Iranian central bank would essentially lead to a dislocation in trade flows, rather than lost outright production... However, the effect on oil prices could be significantly different."
Croft said increased sanctions from the U.S. and European Union targeting Iran's oil sector and central bank would likely, initially, have the primary effect of driving its oil exports east to Asia.
"If EU sanctions on Iranian oil were aimed at significantly reducing the flow of revenues to Tehran, they would perhaps seem no more likely to be successful than U.S. sanctions have been since 1988," the note said.
"An inevitable knock-on effect of an EU embargo would be to push more Iranian oil eastward, without removing Iran's ability to market all its crude available to export. In other words, the concentration of Iran's buyers would increase, but the total volume would not be affected."
Croft and Sen argued European refiners in the Mediterranean would be hardest hit by an increase in sanctions as they would be forced to scramble to find alternative sources of crude. Greece, in particular, has found the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) one of the few suppliers willing to provide it with crude on "open credit".
On Thursday U.S. President Barack Obama said the United States was considering all options on Iran and would work with allies, including Israel, to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Iran says its nuclear program is only to meet energy needs, and is not aimed at acquiring nuclear weapons.
Israel Stole Weapon-grade Uranium from U.S., Report Will Show
Daily StarDecember 8, 2011
A U.S.-based research institute will soon publish what it says is “indisputable” evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania.
The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s.
Grant Smith, the director of IRmep, told The Daily Star that the report would include a broad range of newly declassified and un-redacted government documents from various agencies – including the Department of Energy, Atomic Energy Commission, FBI and CIA – that prove that nuclear material was diverted from Numec to Israel.
“The story at this point is that there is no one smoking gun; there are many smoking pistols lying all over the place that we’ve painstakingly collected,” Smith told The Daily Star.
