Nuclear Iran: Tehran’s defense minister says the terrorist state will produce a massive explosive used to detonate atomic bombs. Obama’s Iran deal is increasingly delivering the opposite of its promises.
Why would Iran want to produce the nuclear weapons detonator Octogen, also known as HMX, or “high melting point explosive,” if it doesn’t have its eyes on becoming a nuclear weapons power?
Moreover, why is Tehran seeking HMX only three months after official implementation of the nuclear pact that the West negotiated with it (without Iran signing it, though)? Clearly, pursuing Octogen earlier would have been a red flag indicating that Iran’s claims of not seeking nuclear weapons were false.
Iran’s military “has put on its agenda the acquisition of the technical know-how to produce Octogen explosive materials and Octogen-based weapons,” Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan announced on Wednesday at the formal opening of an explosives production plant in Tehran.
Iran having HMX weakens deal proponents’ persistent argument that the agreement’s “one year or longer breakout timeline” for approximately 10 years means the pact makes the world safer. Having a nuclear detonator ready to go means Iran becoming a nuclear weapons power faster.
A December 2015 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear “watchdog,” concluded that “exploding bridge wire” detonators “developed by Iran have characteristics relevant to a nuclear explosive device” and that Iran was conducting nuclear weapons research all the way into the first year of the Obama presidency.
HMX isn’t exclusively used for nukes, but the seriousness with which the IAEA takes it was on full view early during the Iraq War.  As the New York Times reported regarding the disappearance of hundreds of tons of HMX from the Saddam Hussein regime’s huge al-Qaqaa facility in 2004,” Mr. Hussein’s engineers acquired HMX and RDX (rapid detonation explosive) when they embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980s. . . . Weapon inspectors determined that Iraq had bought the explosives from France, China and Yugoslavia, a European diplomat said.”
And in February 2003, “nine days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented his arms case to the Security Council,” then-IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, “reported that the agency had found no sign of new atom endeavors” by Iraq, “but ‘has continued to investigate the relocation and consumption of the high explosive HMX,’ ” the Times story noted. “Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is ‘extremely concerned’ about the potentially ‘devastating consequences’ of the vanished stockpile.”
The newspaper also pointed out that HMX’s “benign appearance makes it easy to disguise as harmless goods, easily slipped across borders,” and that it is “used in standard nuclear weapons design.”
So not only is HMX of grave concern regarding Iran’s own nuclear weapons ambitions; it could help any of the many terrorist groups Iran finances in their atomic aspirations.
It was already known that Obama’s deal was defective on the issue of nuclear detonators; the HMX announcement makes it clear Tehran is taking full advantage.