Eilat our southernmost resort town also offers the tourist a number of out of town attractions. Evrona a salt harvesting installation just north of the town is one of them. Evrona has historical associations; however the evaporation pools are a fairly recent innovation. They form part of a commercial salt extraction plant set up in 1990. Sea water from the Eilat bay area is pumped and piped 10 km to the pools. The first stage of the production involves progressive evaporation and salt concentration. The brine coming out of the Evrona pools is three times as concentrated as sea water. It is then pumped back through an underground pipe to pools situated further south, near Eilat.. When the salt concentration reaches 30% it starts to crystalise. The salt is further processed to remove impurities and the water is drained from the pools and piped back to the sea. The Evrona pools would have remained a part of a seemingly unremarkable industrial plant were it not for the flamingos. It appears that soon after the salt plant began operating a bevy of flamingos discovered the pools and opted to include them in the itinerary of their traditional migration route. The flamingos at Evrona are without a doubt an impressive addition to the landscape. However, they are only a small tangential part of the great migration from Africa to points further east.
Lake Urmia, a salt lake in northwestern Iran is one of the preferred flamingo destinations.
You probably think this preamble describing salt pans and flamingos is just a roundabout way of introducing the Iran dilemma.
Well you’re wrong; it's a "red herring" thrown in to distract you This week the Iranian connection is far more circuitous.
Visitors to the Beit Shean national park, whether they are wandering around on their own or viewing the archaeological site with a tour guide usually miss the Roman arched bridge across the Harod stream by the town's northern entrance.
The lower part of the piers on which the bridge's arch rests are made of concrete! Not a simple burnt lime and sand aggregate, but a mix that contains an exact proportion of Pozzolana.
Pozzolana is a fine, sandy volcanic ash and in this case it was probably mined in Italy. It’s a siliceous and aluminous material which reacts with slaked lime in the presence of water. This forms compounds possessing cementitious properties at room temperature. Furthermore the aggregate possesses a unique property; it sets underwater, making it ideal for building river bridges. The Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, better known as Vitruvius was a prolific writer and is best known for the fifteen volumes he wrote on Roman architecture. In one of his books he devoted a whole chapter to concrete. The Romans perfected the use of concrete, revolutionising the construction industry in the ancient world. Many of the concrete structures they built have survived the ravages of time, the elements and in some places major earthquakes. Roman engineers were the first, and until the industrial revolution, the only ones to construct bridges with concrete.
Few people, however, would think of concrete as a dual-purpose technology. But it can be. One country—as it happens, one that is very interested in enriching uranium—is also good at making what is known as “ultra-high performance concrete” (UHPC).
Iran is an earthquake zone, so its engineers have developed some of the toughest building materials in the world. Such materials could also be used to protect hidden nuclear installations from the artificial equivalent of small earthquakes, namely bunker-busting bombs.
Once again we encounter the old familiar confrontation. The assailant develops powerful weapons to penetrate his enemy's defences.
Once, besieged towns and fortresses had to contend with the adversary's battering rams and efforts to undermine the walls protecting them. Today the contest is between thick layers of UHPC and bunker busting bombs.
In a recent feasibility assessment defence secretary Leon Panetta admitted that US’s new bunker-busting bomb, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator needs an upgrade to take on the deepest Iranian bunkers. But even that may not be enough to breach the concrete protecting the Iranian underground nuclear facilities at Fordo near Qom.
The Iranian UHPC like regular concrete is based on a sand and cement aggregate. In addition quantities of powdered quartz and various reinforcing metals and fibres are combined with it to produce an extremely impregnable product.
It would appear that the Iranians are sitting pretty with their centrifuges snugly tucked under a thick UHPC shield at the bottom of a mountain. Despite doubts about the penetrating effectiveness of available bunker busting bombs Israel Military Industries (IMI) has produced an upgrade of a standard middleweight U.S. bunker busting bomb. According to Defence News, "The improved precision, bunker-burrowing weapon is the latest in a series of operational upgrades." The 500-pound upgrade known as the MPR-500 is a laser-guided projectile that can penetrate double-reinforced concrete walls or floors without disintegrating.
One of the drawbacks with bunker busting bombs is the weight factor. America's most formidable bunker buster, the GBU57, capable of penetrating 61 metres of reinforced concrete, weighs 14 tons and is more than 6 metres long. Due to size and weight limitations only B2 and B52 bombers can carry the giant bunker buster. The much lighter MPR-500 is a projectile bomb and doesn't rely on gravity for accelerated delivery.
So far most military analysts estimate that a successful attack on Iran would set back its nuclear programme by 1 to 6 years.
Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker reporting in the New York Times this week claimed that a recently played out U.S. War Game concluded that an Israeli strike against Iran would be perilous. The participants in the exercise could have saved time and energy. Ever since the military option was first placed "on the table" detractors have pointed out the negative repercussions of any attack on the Iranian nuclear installations.
US and Israeli decision makers have no doubt made damage assessments. They have considered whether setting back Iran's nuclear programme temporarily justifies incurring the damage of an Iranian counter attack.
The Israeli government has clearly indicated that if it is faced with an existential threat it will launch a preemptive attack on Iran.
News media critics have taken Israeli sabre rattling to task claiming that ratcheting up belligerent rhetoric is tantamount to "brinkmanship."
On the other hand Michael Singh managing director of The Washington Institute says that threatening to attack Iran has an intrinsic value.
Reviewing the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed on Iran, Singh says,
"So will these new, robust sanctions be the means by which the United States finally achieves its goals of compelling Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium and enter into serious talks aimed at quelling international concerns over Tehran's nuclear activities? Despite Iran's on-again, off-again talks with the so-called P5+1 powers -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as Germany -- the United States currently seems unlikely to meet these goals. It is not merely the toughness of sanctions or the sincerity of American overtures that will determine the outcome of U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, success depends on whether key allies -- notably China and Israel -- deem supporting the U.S. approach to advance their national interests, and whether Iran sees continuing its confrontational policies as potentially disastrous to its own."…
“The current U.S. strategy is therefore incomplete. To achieve its goals, the United States must clearly articulate what its red lines are in terms of Iranian behavior and credibly threaten Iran with military action should it cross those lines.” Concludes Singh.
In an articled entitled “The Iranian Decision on the Production of Nuclear Weapons” published today in Insight by the National Institute for Security Studies at Tel Aviv University,
Dr. Ephraim Asculai highlights some unknown aspects of the Iranian nuclear programme.
“It is generally assumed that Iran has all the necessary components for an implosion nuclear explosive device. At the same time, the status of fitting the nuclear explosive device on to a missile warhead is uncertain. Finally, the Iranian government has not given the go ahead for enriching uranium beyond 20 percent at its declared and inspected facilities.
This last statement is undisputed by both US and Israeli intelligence agencies and the respective governments. What, then, is the source of the apparent disagreement between them?
The first disputed issue is technical in nature: can the Iranians produce a workable nuclear explosive device. According to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iran stopped work on the development of this system in 2003, and it is uncertain whether it restarted this work. On the other hand, it may have an old Pakistani workable design, and it may have restarted the project after 2007. The New York Times reported on March 18, 2012 that some US assessments are that there is a high probability that Iran has not restarted this project.
Herein lies the big difference in the estimates of the situation. While there is little doubt that the Iranians can, if the technicians receive the order to do so, quite quickly produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) for the first core of a nuclear explosive device, the US thinks that there would still be enough time to do something about it, since it would discover this in time. The same NYT article, however, also outlines US difficulties in gathering intelligence in Iran, so that there are some doubts about the efficacy of timely intelligence gathering and the wisdom of depending on the timely warning that would be given by the intelligence agencies. If the intelligence is encountering so many difficulties, how can one be sure of the intelligence-based estimates?”
Well that should set your mind at rest. Our immediate worries are far more tangible. Our youngest daughter Anat is flying to Brazil tomorrow. Like many parents we worry too much and tend to be over-protective. Hopefully she will find a travelling companion during her 2-3 month backpacking tour of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay.
On Saturday we too will go on tour, but only in our neck of the woods.
First we will go to see the wild lupines near the Arab village close by. After that we will drive along the Gilboa scenic route to see the wild poppies and the purple Gilboa Irises.
Have a good weekend..
Beni 22nd of March, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment