They have recently announced plans to buy their own notionally peaceful nuclear capabilities — plans that might later provide a hedge to keep weapons options open, or to encourage the United States to shield them.
In March, US President Barack Obama said he had offered Iran a "practical solution" if it truly sought peaceful nuclear capabilities rather than weapons.
Policymakers in Washington, therefore, decided that the best chance of stalling Indian nuclear proliferation was to offer American power reactors that could help demonstrate the peaceful nuclear capability of the democratic Asian country, in sharp contrast to the military capability of the authoritarian Chinese communist state.
Russia would feel it had weakened Islamist rebels, given Mr. Assad a dignified exit and stopped Washington's unilateral assaults on Mideast regimes; Iran would secure formal American acceptance of its regional significance and its right to a peaceful nuclear capability and an end to the sanctions against it.
An Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility has been killed in a bomb explosion, the latest in a series of assassinations and attempted killings linked by the country's authorities to a secret war by Israel and the US to stop the development of what Tehran insists would be a peaceful nuclear capability.
Local NATO headquarters would be among the last to withdraw from a newly peaceful area, since their capabilities for command, communications and training might be the last to be developed by the Afghans themselves.
Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted that the kingdom is developing nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes such as medicine, electricity generation, and desalination of sea water.
Iran must be supported, without prejudice, as it endeavours to provide peaceful nuclear knowledge and capability for future generations.
— Shannon Kile, head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute "It is time for an unequivocal declaration that we will stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability by peaceful means if we possibly can, but with military force if we absolutely must".
In the closing weeks of 2007, the report by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEAandand the US National Intelligence Estimate made it clear Iran's nuclear activities have nothing to do with military programmes but are motivated by a desire to preserve peaceful nuclear knowledge and capability for future generations.
