AP report.

Imposing more sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program is not the best option, but it cannot be excluded, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday.

John Kampfner in the Guardian.

The most important motive for the nuclear deal is the signal it seeks to send to the "great proliferators", notably Iran. The Obama-Medvedev signing ceremony will be followed by two international conferences, on nuclear security and non-proliferation. Welcome though the deal is, the Americans and Russians are unlikely to make much immediate progress with the Iranians.

George Monbiot in the Guardian.

Let's begin with the sovereignty issue. When I once made the mistake of stepping into a Blockbuster video shop, I found myself walking past aisle after aisle of Hollywood movies. Then I came across a tiny section labelled "foreign", which contained about a dozen European films. Either Hollywood's hegemony was such that the US was no longer perceived as another country, or Blockbuster had adopted the US definition of foreign and imported it 4,000 miles into the UK. The same confusion governs this country's defence policy. The other side of the Channel is forrin. The other side of the Atlantic isn't.

New York Times report.

The Pakistani government has filed a petition in the nation's High Court seeking to investigate Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who has confessed to running the world's largest nuclear proliferation network, over recent reports about his ties to Iran's nuclear program, a government lawyer said Monday. The petition was filed on Monday hours before a court in Lahore was to announce a verdict on Mr. Khan's petition to have his travel restrictions relaxed.

The Leveretts comment.

While many of those now advocating containment as the optimal U.S. strategy toward the Islamic Republic see this as the moderate (and superior) alternative to preventive war and/or coercive regime change, such an approach would be inherently unstable. In all likelihood, the pursuit of a containment strategy by the United States vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic would ultimately lead to a U.S.-Iranian military confrontation.

Wired story.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the '50s through the early '70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, the US government in the '60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors -- in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Gary Sick comments.

It turns out, the move in and out is a routine operation of no strategic significance that requires about half an hour. The material is now back underground, so the NYTimes can relax its maximum alert status.

What a total farce!

Reuters report.

Iran has moved a stock of enriched uranium back underground after drawing what it needed to refine the material up to 20 percent purity, Tehran's envoy to the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

BBC report.

Iran is not co-operating with the UN nuclear watchdog's investigation into the country's nuclear programme, the new head of the agency has said.

Iran's insistence its nuclear programme was peaceful could not be confirmed, Yukiya Amano told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Mr Amano is taking a much more critical line than the organisation has done before, correspondents say.

Michael O'Hanlon and Bruce Riedel in the Financial Times.

The strike option, however, lacks credibility. America is engaged in two massive and unpopular military campaigns in the region. Given Iran's ability to retaliate against the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is simply not credible that we would use force in the foreseeable future. Tehran, Moscow and Beijing know this.

Novosti report.

There is no hard proof that Iran is working on nuclear weapons, but Tehran has to clarify several key issues on its nuclear program to avoid fresh international action, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

Reuters report.

Washington's clout over its Middle East ally is under scrutiny after Israel's veiled threats to attack Iran preemptively if international diplomacy fails to rein in Tehran's uranium enrichment, a process with bomb-making potential.

Ynetnews report, quoting AFP.

The top US military officer said Monday that any military strike against Iran would not be "decisive" in countering its nuclear program.

"No strike, however effective, will be in and of itself decisive,"Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news conference, adding that he supported using diplomatic and economic pressure against Iran.

McClatchy report.

With diplomacy failing and precious intelligence just received about two new secret Iranian nuclear facilities, Israel launches a pre-emptive strike against Tehran's nuclear complex. The strike is successful, wiping out six of Iran's key sites and setting back its suspected quest for a bomb by years.

But what happens next isn't pretty.

Nafeez Ahmed comments.

But we now know that the "alleged studies" are an intelligence fabrication. US national security journalist Gareth Porter has recently confirmed from senior US and German intelligence officials that purported evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme -- including the IAEA's 'alleged studies' as well as an alleged Iranian 'neutron initiator' document unearthed by the Times -- was forged.

[...]

To understand the Iran nuclear stalemate, just as with the Iraq-WMD fiasco, we need to look beyond official western platitudes, threats and narratives about Iran-WMD to explore the wider geopolitics and pressures emerging in the context of an increasingly strained global hydrocarbon energy system, in which access to the world's largest strategic oil and gas reserves and domination of the world's fast-emerging nuclear market are increasingly urgent problems.

Julian Borger on his Guardian Global Security Blog.

Why would a regime that is normally so paranoid about its LEU leave itself so vulnerable? One possible explanation, being mused on by British government analysts, is that the regime is deliberately inviting an Israeli air strike with the aim of creating a crisis, and using that crisis to crush dissent even more brutally than it is doing currently.

It is a terrifying idea, but not the only possible explanation. It may be, as David Albright at ISIS suggests, that the Natanz technicians were in a hurry to fulfil President Ahmadinejad's orders to enrich to 20%, and it was quicker to drive the whole cask of enriched uranium hexafluoride up the ramp to the pilot plant, than try to decant it into small containers.

A third possibility is that Iran is playing poker, bringing out its trump in an attempt to get the international community to fold, and agree to supply Iran with fuel rods to the TRR without Iran having to export its LEU in advance as it initially agreed to do in Geneva last October. Tehran may believe that the danger of an Israeli air strike is minimal because the repercussions in the Gulf would be so devastating.