Another See, I Told You So

Assuming that I am incorrect in my suspicion that Iran already has nuclear weapons, the mullahs have now publicly (if implicitly) confirmed that they're no more than nine months away from churning out a nuclear warhead:

Iran has achieved a landmark with 3,000 centrifuges fully working in its controversial uranium enrichment program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.

Ahmadinejad has in the past claimed Iran succeeded in installing the 3,000 centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Wednesday's claim was his first official statement that the plant is now fully operating the 3,000 centrifuges.

"We have now reached 3,000 machines," Ahmadinejad told thousands of Iranians in Birjand in eastern Iran, in a show of defiance of international demands to halt the program believed to be masking the country's nuclear arms efforts.

The three thousand threshold is only the beginning, says the Admiral:

The Iranians don't plan on stopping at 3,000, either. Despite their rhetoric about only desiring peaceful applications for their nuclear program, they built Natanz to run the much larger, industrial-size 54,000-centrifuge cascade. Their one uncompleted reactor at Bushehr would have no need for the kind of output produced by such a cascade for the less-enriched uranium used in power plants, but it would allow them to start cranking out nuclear weapons on a much more regular basis than once every nine months.

Try every two weeks. Do the math for yourself.

In fact, I just did a little more math, based upon the Iranians reaching three thousand centrifuges in nineteen months. If they keep adding centrifuges at that rate, the accompanying rapidity with which they can construct nuclear warheads increases not linearly, but exponentially:

1 nuke - August 2008
2 nukes - January 2009
3 nukes - April 2009
4 nukes - June 2009
5 nukes - July 2009

By September of 2009, the mullahs will be turning out a warhead every month. By January of 2010 they'll have ten of them; twenty within three years from now; forty by a year after that. Shall I continue? Or should I figure in the outflow from that inventory in addition to the inflow?

So, to borrow Hulk Hogan's trademark catch-phrase, "Whatcha gonna do, Mr. President? Let the mullahs ignite Armageddon, bow the knee to the Global Caliphate, or invade Iran now while we (hopefully) can still do so and keep the conflict conventional? Because I will guarantee you, those are our only choices.

UPDATE: Or do we even have the capacity to just bomb them into submission?

UPDATE II: Rick Moran is an optimist. In a literally life-or-death situation like this, optimism leads to complacency. And that is something we cannot afford, and dare not invite.

What's that old saying? "Better safe than sorry". I can live with four years of Hillary if I know that I can live through those four years at all (her Alaska gulag not withstanding...).