Iran - The Nuclear Football Keeps Moving Down Field

Iran update - earlier in the month I said about the Iran situation "its only going to get ugly from here...", well it's not looking any better and this roundup sounds familiar.

First the US through the UN tries to pressure Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program (e.g. Atomic bomb program) and actually gets Russia and China to sign on. From Time Mag:

But in the end, it took U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice personally working the phones, and ceding a little ground, to seal the deal — which gave Iran 30 days to suspend its uranium enrichment activities or face as yet unspecified consequences.

Iranian reaction is as predictable as ever "Iran refuses to suspend U-enrichment: Official" excerpt:

LONDON, March 31 (IranMania) - Iran refused to suspend uranium enrichment and said a UN Security Council deadline to abandon the process was "a bad move," ratcheting up the stakes in the standoff over its nuclear program, AFP reported.

Of course the U.N. Atomic Energy chief Mohammed ElBaradei is still talking about how countries should use "Restraint in Response to Iran". From the LaTimes:

ElBaradei, speaking in Doha, emphasized that Iran is not "an imminent threat" and urged countries to "lower the pitch" in their effort to stop Iran's nuclear work.

ElBaradei appears to be concerned again about the rhetoric that comes from the West. But, we all know that creative rhetoric and dreamy corollaries such as "The Mother of All Battles" and "The Last Helicopter" are reserved for Middle Eastern despots and terrorists.

In other news, the "U.S. Military is to Test a Huge 700 Ton Conventional Bomb" in the desert of Nevada. Washington Post:

"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.

Now I wonder which "potential adversaries" the Pentagon is specifically thinking about?

Iran has invested too much money, time and effort to just roll over on this. Besides another nuclear weapon would go a long way in curing that Middle Eastern "inferiority complex" that has people dancing in the streets each time a terrorist murders innocents, as if that is some kind of great victory.