THE GRIM REALITY – AT 8:37 A.M. ET:  This has just come in, and there are few details, but it is disturbing.  From the Jerusalem Post:

Iran will join the global nuclear club within one month, according to the deputy research chief of the Islamic republic’s Atomic Energy of Iran (AEOI).

Fars on Tuesday quoted Behzad Soltani, who also serves as the secretary-general of the AEOI’s Scientific Cooperation Council, as saying that “no country would ever think about attacking Iran” once the nuclear threshold has been crossed.

It is not clear from the story exactly what that "nuclear threshold" is.  I would, though, take this seriously.  No one doubts that the Iranian program is moving forward at a quick pace. 

"We do not intend to use the peaceful nuclear energy merely for generating electricity and energy, rather our next step would be expanding use of this technology,” Soltani reportedly said. Radiation, he said, can ensure that “foodstuff, proteins and vegetables are preserved for a longer time and with a higher quality.”

Soltani added that construction work on a large-scale nuclear powerplant and a smaller research reactor in the Iranian city of Arak is nearing completion and is now at 70 percent.

COMMENT:  An Iranian bomb would be a major blow to American foreign policy and prestige, although some of the mainstream media would probably go into spin mode and minimize it, the better to serve the administration it helped put into power. 

There is absolutely nothing on the horizon, including so-called sanctions, that will stop the Iranians.  Regime change might do it – the success of the democracy movement – but Obama will do nothing to help the Iranian freedom fighters. 

And, of course, there is military action.  But the Iranians calculate, probably correctly, that the Obamans would never attack because it might "offend" the Muslim world, and that they will make it impossible for Israel to attack.

If I were an Iranian mullah today, I'd be mulling victory.

April 13, 2010