These opening lines from this UK TELEGRAPH article speak for themselves:
Russian diplomats believe it is now "highly probable" that North Korea will officially join the nuclear club by carrying out its first underground test of an atomic device.
Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, is said to have made clear his intention to explode a device during recent talks with Russian and Chinese officials in Pyongyang.
Given the the joint international nature of North Korea's nuclear program, Iran will have an arsenal of tested nuclear missile warheads for its ballistic missile arsenal of Chinese design and North Korean construction in 30-90 days after that test.
President Bush's rhetorical gauntlet, thrown down in recent speeches, for taking military action to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear arsenal has just gotten a very short time limit. Assuming Iran doesn't already have operational nukes, as some Israeli intelligence officials believe.
This is about far more than Iran. I said this previously here on Winds about the international nature of Iran's nuclear program:
The government’s assumption that an American bombing campaign, no matter how successful, will slow down Iran’s nuclear program enough to buy time for a nonsensical regime change by revolution concept (no one outside the desperate-to-believe in fairy-tales idiots in D.C. believes the U.S. intelligence community can foment a successful revolution in Iran) would be laughable if so many lives were not at stake. Iran’s nuclear program is not a NATIONAL PROGRAM. It is an INTERNATIONAL ONE. As long as North Korea serves as an invulnerable sanctuary supplying ballistic missiles and nuclear fissile material to Iran in exchange for oil, Iran will get nukes.
The insanity of the official prediction that Iran is 5-10 years away from building its own nuclear weapons is shown by what happened to the 1999 National Intelligence Estimate that Libya would not have nuclear weapons until 2015. This was changed in December 2001 to a prediction that Libya would have them in 2007, all due to the discovery of the A.Q. Khan proliferation network’s effectiveness. If Libya could have nuclear weapons next year, Iran can have them now.
Iran's nuclear break out is very much about the cancerous spread of nukes to kleptocratic tyrannies worldwide.
Our enemies are cooperating to spread nuclear weapons world wide as a counter to American power. Much of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is located in North Korea just as that of Iraq’s under Saddam Hussein was located in Libya.
If America allows Iran's successful acquisition of nuclear weapons to stop it -- like the Clinton Administration did with North Korea -- every two bit 3rd world kleptocrat will buy nukes so they can be as nasty as they want to be, to whomever they want to be.
A world of 20-30+ unstable nuclear-armed 3rd world tyrannies is less than a 15 years away, maybe as little as seven, if Iran succeeds in its goal of becoming a nuclear power.
Unless Iran's Mullah regime is removed before this comes to pass, on September 11th, 2021, we may be commemorating another ground zero in N.Y. City.
One that is not located at the WTC and that is of nuclear origin.
Update Note:
Text was updated to reflect a data provided by Tom Holsinger in the comments below.