Nuclear accord heralds new era of scientific ties between Iran and the West

 First published   …  July 30, 2015, Press TV,  Tehran

[ Editor’s Note:  This news has been leaking out in bits and pieces but got lost in the drama of the last year of nuclear negotiations. We still don’t know the full scale of the “talks” going on with Iran and Western countries, but I had written soon after the interim agreement was signed that as “unsigned” deals were made and longer range plans were discussed, that export hungry Western business lobby would push hard for a final agreement.

I was basically right, as I had not really included the US as I knew the NeoCons would never give up their Iran bogeyman toy.

A sleeper item during the last five years has been the huge amount of patent filing Iranians have been doing. Their highly trained people were getting ready for a brighter future.

Whereas “the leader” does not want to negotiate anything else with the US,  who he says cannot be trusted, the Iranian government has openly stated that it wants to do business with US oil companies. I was confused by that initially because they had a good number of other Western countries to get that from.

But things became more clear in the past week when Iran publicized that a large majority of its oil reserves are not recoverable. What they want are the new extraction technologies, where US companies are leaders,  as that production is all found money for them.

You can fill in the blanks on the number of areas Iran would be willing to do similar cooperations not only forgettingits economy cranked up to fully employ all of its engineering talent, but to also create pro-Iranian domestic lobbies to guard against the more NeoCon fear porn mongering in the future.

Rouhani has put a six month time period for getting all the sanctions off. In response the NeoCons keep exaggerating the “terror funding windfall” the Iranians are supposed to get. They started with an easy to remember number, pulled out of their butts, $100 billion. Then that got pumped up to $150 billion. Iran says its really about $36 billion in frozen assets.

But the important number censored from US media is that the Iran government owes its own banks and is behind on paying its domestic bills to the tune of $66 billion.  So Iran is going to have a lot of demands for any cash that gets freed up. Hence, their big push to throw doors wide open to foreign investors. They just don’t have the money to rebuild the country, which is their top priority, as without economic security you don’t really have any other kind that counts… Jim W. Dean ]

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First published   …  July 30, 2015, Press TV,  Tehran

Prominent science journalist Richard Stone says the agreement between Iran and six global powers over Tehran’s nuclear program heralds a new era of cooperation between Iranian and Western scientists.

He made the comments during a seminar on science journalism and diplomacy, organized by the Iranian Association for the Popularization of Sciences, in the capital Tehran on Wednesday.

Stone noted that the relations between Iranian and Western scientists are growing more rapidly than the diplomatic ties following the conclusion of talks between Tehran and the P5+1 countries.

He added that there is a good prospect for a closer scientific relationship between Iran and the United States in the post-sanctions Iran, and expressed hope that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and its Iranian peers would help connecting the scientists in the two countries.

Prior to his visit to Iran, Stone had written in article for the Science that the nuclear accord would see scientists from Iran and abroad team up in areas as diverse as fusion, neutrino astronomy, and cancer therapy using radioisotopes.

The agreement also calls for “facilitating” Iran’s participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, the world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor being built adjacent to the Cadarache facility in the south of France, he wrote in the July 14 article.

He also said that Robert Rosner, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois and former director of Argonne National Laboratory, believes Iranian and US nuclear scientists have much to learn from each other.

“Iran has world-caliber scientists and engineers, and they have been in the thick of doing that. I can imagine which way information may flow… When scientists get together, differences always fall away,” Stone quoted Rosner as saying.

Professor Stone is the international news editor of the Science Magazine and largely oversees coverage of stories pertaining to science and science policy in Asia, Russia, and the Middle East.

The Science is published by the AAAS, a non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists and supporting scientific education around the globe.

Iran and the P5+1 — the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China plus Germany — managed to finalize the text of the JCPOA in Vienna on July 14. Under the JCPOA, limits are put on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a set of commitments by the P5+1, including the removal of all economic and financial bans against the Islamic Republic. According to the pact, nuclear research and development activities on all types of centrifuges, including advanced IR-6 and IR-8 machines, will continue.

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Jim Davis

Jim Davis is the son of USMC MGySgt. Lesley Davis (Ret.) who passed away on April 24, 2006, from ALS caused by Agent Orange. His dad’s mission before he passed on was to ensure all veterans, spouses, children, and widows all received the benefits, medical care and attention, and proper facilities from the VA.

Because of the promise made to his dad to carry on the mission, in May 2006 Davis began as a one-man show sending out 535 letters every single week to all members of Congress requesting and politely demanding the fulfill their promises made over the past decades to care for life those who wore the uniform and their families.

Veterans-For-Change was born in August 2006 with a very small membership of 25 people composed of veterans, spouses, widows, family members, and friends and to date continues to grow.