Name? Behrouz Kamalvandi
Westphalian identity? Iranian
Age? Initial research (30 seconds on Google) did not end fruitfully…we assume in his sixties?
Why is he in the news? Today we have seen the third major explosion in Iran in the past three weeks. Since this story has mostly gone under the radar, there is no real leader we can look at. The only one explaining anything is Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
Why do we care? He said it’s fine, no reason to worry. Indeed, while there is no immediate reason to worry, there was already a cyber tit for tat between Iran and Israel we wrote about in April. Experts argue that the past three explosions have been the continuation of that initial cyber conflict.
Why should you care? Israeli diplomats have repeatedly brought one item onto the international agenda in the past few weeks: The continued development of the Irani nuclear program. While nuclear weapons are no immediate threat to anyone but rather an anchor of stability, they remain a matter constantly in the international sphere.
Who else cares? The Israeli’s; in person of Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi who said that Israel would not hesitate to take pre-emptive defensive action against Iran. But, he also claimed that Israel had nothing to do with any of this…
Any further comments? First, Kamalvandi said that while the detonations will throw Iran’s nuclear development back a couple of months, they were not too serious. Later he called them devastating. Meanwhile, a member of parliament denied the explosion last night all together. To sum this up, we have had three explosions in Iran all in proximity to facilities capable of nuclear development. The Iranians denied them, downplayed them, investigated them and fixed them; all while the Israelis know nothing about it. The only one missing in this equation is the Donald. What does he think about this mess?
