Eye on Iran: China Warns North Korean Nuclear Threat Is Rising

Join UANI           Top Stories WSJ: "China's top nuclear experts have increased their estimates of North Korea's nuclear weapons production well beyond most previous U.S. figures, suggesting Pyongyang can make enough warheads to threaten regional security for the U.S. and its allies. The latest Chinese estimates, relayed in a closed-door meeting with U.S. nuclear specialists, showed that North Korea may already have 20 warheads, as well as the capability of producing enough weapons-grade uranium to double its arsenal by next year, according to people briefed on the matter... The Chinese estimates reflect growing concern in Beijing over North Korea's weapons program and what they see as U.S. inaction while President Barack Obama focuses on a nuclear deal with Iran... In Washington, some Republican lawmakers said the pending White House deal with Iran could mirror the 1994 nuclear agreement the Clinton administration made with North Korea. The deal was intended to halt Pyongyang's nuclear weapons capabilities, but instead, they allege, provided diplomatic cover to expand them. North Korea tested its first nuclear device in 2006." http://t.uani.com/1Gm8QiY AP: "Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday he is concerned that Iranian ships heading toward Yemen may be carrying advanced weapons for the Houthi rebels, and moving a U.S. aircraft carrier to the region gives the president options. Making his first public remarks on the Iranian cargo ships, Carter told reporters traveling with him that he is not prepared to say whether the U.S. would be willing to forcibly stop and board one of the Iranian ships if it tries to cross into Yemen. 'We have options,' he said when asked about the boardings. 'We're not at that point. We're at the point of trying to get the parties back to the table.' Still, he said the U.S. is making it clear to Iran that 'obviously fanning the flames or contributing to it by any party is not welcome to us.'" http://t.uani.com/1Ehc3Oq Reuters: "U.S. Under Secretary Wendy Sherman and Tehran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will resume talks about curbing Iran's nuclear program later on Thursday, Iranian media said. The latest round of nuclear diplomacy, being held in a luxury hotel in Austria's capital, kicked off with a bilateral meeting between Iran and the European Union on Wednesday. Iran's nuclear negotiator Hamid Baidinejad told Iranian state television that 'drafting the final deal has started,' declining to give further details." http://t.uani.com/1JxrtxN     Nuclear Program & Negotiations Free Beacon: "Repeated concessions by the Obama administration during ongoing nuclear talks with Iran have all but guaranteed that the Islamic Republic will emerge as a nuclear threshold state that could build a weapon with little effort, according to arms control experts who testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Stephen Rademaker, national security adviser for the Bipartisan Policy Center and former assistant secretary of state for arms control, international security, and nonproliferation during the George W. Bush administration, said during the hearing that the recent preliminary deal 'fundamentally signifies acceptance by the international community of Iran as a nuclear weapons threshold state.' ... 'What we're agreeing to here is a pathway, a process, but at the end of that pathway, 10 to 15 years, the football will be on the one-inch line,' Rademaker said. 'That close to having a nuclear weapon. That fundamentally is what is being agreed to here.' ... Charles Duelfer, former chairman of the U.N. special commission that investigated Iraq's weapons programs under Saddam Hussein, said the commission had more access to the Iraqi dictator's facilities and documents than anything that has been proposed so far regarding Iran. 'Yet we struggled after six or seven years and couldn't accomplish the task that was given us,' he said. 'Even with all that access we couldn't do that job.'" http://t.uani.com/1zQa1iW Sanctions Relief Press TV: "Switzerland's business representatives will be visiting Iran to explore the potential for trade, Swiss media has said. They will travel to Tehran on Sunday, led by former Swiss ambassador to Iran Livia Leu in order to determine economic opportunities as hopes rise for a final nuclear deal and lifting of sanctions on the Islamic Republic. 'We would like to find out how the Iranian government wants to proceed until negotiations are concluded, and after the sanctions are lifted,' said Leu who served in Tehran until 2013. Members of the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), the Swiss Business Federation, economiesuisse, and company representatives from different business sectors comprise the delegation. Quoted by SWI swissinfo.ch, Leu says it is important for business representatives to find out more about business culture in Iran and whether their products and services would have a future in Iran." http://t.uani.com/1JgAm2f Terrorism Al-Monitor: "A new congressional task force on terrorism financing immediately focused its attention on Iran at its inaugural meeting on April 22. Concerns that Tehran could gain access to $130 billion in blocked funds and use it to fund Hezbollah and other proxies dominated the hearing of the House Financial Services Committee panel, which has a broad mandate to help bankrupt the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations. Witnesses urged the panel to consider a host of measures, from blacklisting more Iranian officials to clamping down on front companies. 'What capabilities do we have ... to intercept the transfer of these funds and the use of these funds that would clearly be diverted [to terrorist groups]?' asked Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., the panel's vice-chairman." http://t.uani.com/1yWFCET Human Rights IHR: "Execution of alleged drug traffickers continue in Iran. More than 50 drug convicts have been executed during the last 10 days. Most of the executions have not been announced by the official sources." http://t.uani.com/1IMpV2U Opinion & Analysis Andrew McCarthy in NRO: "I respectfully part company with my colleagues who write, in today's NR editorial, that the bill sponsored by Senator Bob Corker, which purportedly enables Congress to approve or disapprove President Obama's elusive Iran deal, is 'better than nothing.' It is worse than nothing as the deceptive appearance of opposing something one is actually enabling always is. The editors concede that the Corker bill is a 'weak measure.' That is putting it mildly. The Iran deal is of significant enough national security consequence that it should be treated as a treaty, subject to the Constitution's condition precedent of supermajority approval (two-thirds) before it can be ratified. To be sure, a practice has snowballed over the last century under which international understandings are treated as executive agreements not subject to the Constitution's treaty process. This has happened largely because the number of international arrangements has increased, and most of them (though not all of them) are uncontroversial. Nevertheless, this practice has not repealed the Constitution's treaty clause. There is no enforceable legal test for when an agreement must be treated as a treaty. As I noted in an exchange with the Lawfare Blog's Jack Goldsmith yesterday, it is a political issue to be worked out by the political branches. That's unfortunate since we are currently saddled with historically feckless leadership in the Republican Congress, which has preemptively surrendered to the president by expressly forfeiting the powers the Constitution provides to rein in executive overreach and lawlessness. (As I recount in Faithless Execution, during the debates at the 1787 convention, when presented with a hypothetical about a president who tried to rig the Constitution's treaty procedure so that only friendly senators would vote on it - it being inconceivable to the framers that a president would altogether ignore the Treaty Clause - James Madison remarked: 'Were the president to commit any thing so atrocious ... he would be impeached and convicted.') But here is a good rule of thumb: an international pact must be treated as a treaty when Congress insists that it be treated as a treaty. We always seem to default to a discussion of the president's powers. But that is not the be all and end all here. It is not like the Senate is asking Obama for a favor: the power to review treaties is a prerogative the Constitution explicitly vests in the Senate. When the Senate insists on exercising its indisputable prerogative, it should be irrelevant that, under some circumstances, presidents have legitimately proceeded without Treaty Clause compliance. As I argued in a column this weekend, the Corker bill undermines the Treaty Clause. The latter puts the onus on Obama to find 67 votes to approve his deal. The Corker bill puts the onus on opponents to find 67 votes to disapprove the deal. The supermajority approval requirement for treaties is in the Constitution because we should not be making lasting agreements with other countries, even allies, unless there is a strong consensus that the arrangement is in the national interest. Corker's bill turns that presumption on its head, requiring supermajority disapproval for an arrangement with an enemy regime that is plainly not in the national interest... The Corker bill is thus worse than no bill. Congress should demand that Obama's Iran deal be submitted to the Senate as a treaty. It should enact sense of the House and Senate resolutions that the deal will have no binding legal effect and that countries that act in reliance on it do so at their peril because the United States reserves the right to cancel the deal at any time." http://t.uani.com/1aV6OIj Daniel Henninger in WSJ: "The Democrats now own Iran-lock, stock and smoking centrifuges. It isn't just the Senate compromise on the Corker bill that made the Iran nuclear deal the party's exclusive political property. The Democrats own Iran's entire penetration in the region-Yemen, the Gulf of Aden, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon-pretty much anywhere Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants to take them. Senate Democrats, attempting a magical illusion on American voters, say the Iran nuclear threat and the Iran terror threat are separate realities. Before the Senate's recent 'compromise' vote on Sen. Bob Corker's Iran review bill, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons and other Senate Democrats, at the White House's insistence, said while they abhorred Iran's support for terrorism, it had to be separated from the historic arms deal. Meanwhile Ayatollah Khamenei, a more unitary thinker, has been surging Iran's military across the Middle East. With the U.S. on the doorstep of a presidential election, Iran is beginning to look like the Democrats' Bermuda Triangle. The last time the party's fortunes went missing in Iran was during what history generally describes as 'Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis.' After the Iranian hostage crisis had ground through the news for nearly a year, with 52 Americans held in Tehran, Mr. Carter's competence as president became a campaign issue, which naturally Ronald Reagan exploited. Reagan won 489 electoral votes to President Carter's 49 in 1980. A Who's Who of famous Senate Democrats got wiped out: George McGovern, Frank Church, Herman Talmadge, Mike Gravel, Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Magnuson. Let it be noted that the Iran hostage analogy is unfair to Jimmy Carter. Back then, the Iranians grabbed the Americans. This time, the U.S., or at least its president, has grabbed the Iranians and won't let them go." http://t.uani.com/1OKD3r6 Aaron David Miller in FP: "On April 2, Iranian diplomats and representatives of six world powers reached a framework for a deal on Tehran's nuclear program. And Wednesday, April 22, the talks resumed with the aim of reaching a firm and final agreement by June 30. That seems like a lot of time to scuttle such a contentious subject. Think that the mullahs will overplay their hand and sink the nuclear deal? Hoping that President Barack Obama's administration will toughen up and fight for a bargain Tehran can't accept? Wishing that Congress will play spoiler in the eleventh hour? Don't hold your breath. The gods of negotiation have spoken and have bestowed their blessings on the interim framework agreement - and what will come after it. The sun, moon, and stars are now aligning in favor of an accord (especially one favorable to the Iranians). Here's why." http://t.uani.com/1K95e2d          Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.