Laura Rozen in Politico.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has abruptly canceled his plans to attend President Barack Obama's nuclear security summit next week, creating an embarrassing distraction on the eve of a high-profile meeting the White House has sought to carefully choreograph.

[...]

''In the last 24 hours, the Israeli government has learned of various reports from various sources on the intention of several states attending the conference not only to deal with the issue at hand, but to take the opportunity to make a point of grand-standing against Israel and the issue of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," the Israeli official said. "The prime minister was dismayed at this, and decided to stick to the Israeli policy that Israel is usually represented at these types of conferences at the professional-ministerial level."

The Leveretts write.

Tomorrow--Tuesday, April 6, 2010--the Obama Administration will proclaim, as a matter of declaratory policy, that the United States claims the prerogative to use nuclear weapons against the Islamic Republic of Iran, even as Iran remains a non-nuclear-weapons state. The Administration will make this declaration as part of its much anticipated Nuclear Posture Review, which will be issued two days before President Obama and Russian President Medvedev sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

Mark Hosenball on his Newsweek blog.

While U.S. and European officials are pleased that China has become "engaged" in United Nations Security Council discussions over new economic sanctions on Iran, their expectations are modest at best as to what those negotiations will actually produce.

The most the Security Council talks are likely to produce is "something quite limited," said a European diplomat, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive issue. Any new sanctions regime likely to meet the approval of China--a major Iranian trading partner which has long resisted the imposition of new sanctions on the ayatollah's regime--would likely be "more a political gesture" and less a series of measures likely to put a real bite on the Iranian theocracy, the diplomat said.

The Leveretts' latest article. Direct link to PDF.

Relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran need to be analysed and understood not only in terms of their bilateral dynamics, but also in their strategic context. Broadly speaking, the Middle East today is deeply divided between two camps --- a reality that some commentators describe as a new regional "Cold War".

Guardian report.

Barack Obama has urged Beijing to "ratchet up the pressure" on Iran over its nuclear programme after a breakthrough for the US administration in persuading China to agree to talks on fresh sanctions against Tehran.

Obama told CBS news that Iran was increasingly diplomatically isolated and that international unity was essential to ensuring it did not develop nuclear weapons.

wall Street Jornal report.

An Iranian firm closely linked to Tehran's nuclear program acquired special hardware for enriching uranium, despite sanctions intended to keep such equipment out of Iran, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.

In recent weeks, the officials said, an Iranian procurement firm obtained critical valves and vacuum gauges made by a French company that until December was owned by U.S. industrial conglomerate Tyco International. The French and U.S. firms said they knew nothing of the case.

Gary Sick points to this article in Haaretz.

The public discussion in Israel about a nuclear Iran is simplistic, inadequate, confused and confusing. It reflects to some degree our own biases. We come from a culture of national security in which nuclear opacity has been exploited to the hilt to create a specific model of deterrence. The result is that when we look at Iran we see ourselves: how we would behave in a similar situation. But Iran is not Israel exactly, and the Israeli experience does not necessarily reflect Iran's behavior. On the contrary, it leads to systematic errors when making assessments.

Washington Post story.

The United States test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads during a joint military exercise Wednesday with Saudi Arabia, a Western military official said.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich in Middle East Online.

Given that Washington denied all knowledge of Amiri for months after his disappearance, the State Department ought to facilitate a meeting between him and the Iranian authorities to reassure all concerned parties that Amiri has indeed defected of his own free will. This was a practice that the Americans obliged even at the height of the Cold War. When a Soviet nuclear physicist by the name of Artem Vladimirovich Kulikov defected in 1985, he met with officials of the Soviet embassy at the State Department to reassure the Russians that he was not being held against his will. Failure to do this will give credibility to the alternative.

This would be more plausible given that in 2009 Ynet news reported that with cooperation from the United States Israel has focused on eliminating key human assets involved in Iran's nuclear program. A few months later an Iranian physicist was killed in a bomb blast in Tehran. The eerie incidents bring back memories of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped and tortured by the CIA while serving in Iraq in 2007 - and denied.

ABC report.

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials.

The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, "an intelligence coup" in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran's nuclear program.

Luke Ryland on Boiling Frogs.

Is it possible that Grossman has been offering himself as a 'source' to various authors to spin the stories away from the truth?

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Under oath (PDF), Ms Edmonds stated that Marc Grossman was on the payroll of various players in the nuclear black market and that he actively hindered efforts by the CIA to penetrate and unravel the nuclear black market. Ms Edmonds said that, in 2001, Grossman alerted his 'business associates' that nuclear consulting company, Brewster Jennings, was actually a CIA front company which was investigating the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Grossman's outing of Brewster Jennings forced the CIA to shutter the company, doing untold damage to the anti-proliferation efforts, and putting many agents and sources in danger.

In short, Marc Grossman was actually a vital player in the so-called 'AQ Khan network,' and should be facing criminal charges.

Aljazeera article.

After year-long optimism that the three decade old US-Iran standoff might finally come to an accommodation, the two sides are ratcheting up their rhetoric and in the process risk new escalation with unpredictable consequences.

PressTV report.

Amid increasing Israeli and Congressional pressure, the White House's desperate struggle to win international support to impose tough United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran has forced the Western propaganda machine to move into high gear.

New York Times report.

In an interview with the Iranian Student News Agency, the official, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ordered work to begin soon on two new plants. The plants, he said, "will be built inside mountains," presumably to protect them from attacks.

New York Times article.

The government's own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution created its own in December. The results were provocative enough that a summary of them has circulated among top American government and military officials and in many foreign capitals.

Reuters report.

Deeply concerned as it is by the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel has never even hinted at using atomic weapons to forestall the perceived threat. But now a respected Washington think tank has said that low-radioactive yield "tactical" nuclear warheads would be one way for the Israelis to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment plants in remote, dug-in fortifications.