Methinks the government doth protest too much.

How long have the airwaves and the internet been saturated by political leaders and wannabe leaders trumpeting the danger of Iran being allowed to acquire nuclear capabilities? Every day on every channel we are being bombarded with doomsday scenarios that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons and that we, as the world's police, must stop them at all costs which of course has led to a call for what is, in effect a naval blockade. As I and many others have noted, this blockade has the potential for catastrophic consequences.

But if the Iranian nuclear program is so fraught with peril and one of the main points of contention is their secrecy surrounding their intentions, why in the name of your personal higher power are we helping fund it?

The funding comes from budgets allocated to the IPP, the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention program.

According to Iran Nuclear Watch:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many scientists and engineers with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) knowledge and expertise suffered significant cuts in pay or lost their government-supported work. The U.S. was concerned these scientists might sell their expertise to terrorists or countries of concern and established the IPP program under the Department of Energy (DOE) in 1994.

Lately, the GAO has been investigating the IPP and issued a report titled "DOE Needs to Reassess Its Program to Assist Weapons Scientists in Russia and Other Countries". Some of the issues raised in the report include:

DOE has overstated the number of WMD scientists receiving DOE support and the number of long-term, private sector jobs created. First, according to our analysis of 97 IPP projects involving about 6,450 scientists for whom we had complete payment information, more than half of the scientists paid by the program never claimed to have WMD experience. Furthermore, according to officials at 10 nuclear and biological institutes in Russia and Ukraine, IPP program funds help them attract, recruit, and retain younger scientists and contribute to the continued operation of their facilities. This is contrary to the original intent of the program, which was to reduce the proliferation risk posed by Soviet-era weapons scientists. For example, about 972 of the scientists paid for work on these 97 projects were born in 1970 or later, making them too young to have contributed to Soviet-era WMD efforts

The report goes on to say:

Furthermore, DOE has recently expanded the program to include new countries and areas. According to a senior DOE official, this expansion was undertaken as a way to maintain the IPP program’s relevance as a nonproliferation program. Specifically, DOE recently began providing assistance to scientists in Iraq and Libya and, through the IPP program, is working to develop projects that support the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)—a DOE-led international effort to expand the use of civilian nuclear power. DOE expanded the program’s efforts without a clear mandate from the Congress and suspended parts of its IPP program guidance for projects in these new areas.

While I am a big supporter of the axiom "idle hands are the devil's playground", is it really the taxpayer's responsibility to bribe every single scientist in the world who may or may not have the expertise to develop weapons? I would have thought that the powers that be would have anticipated this sort of thing if for no other reason than what we may have learned from Operation Paperclip. That's one of the problems with letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle; once any nation possesses the capability to annihilate another nation, it is in the vulnerable nation's best interest to acquire at least as powerful a weapon in order to not be rendered subjective to the more armed nation.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Iran, if I were in charge of that country I would be trying my damnedst to be as equally armed as any neighboring countries that had a hard-on against me; and questioning whether Iran's leader is mentally stable enough to possess weapons of such destruction seems a bit disingenuous considering there are legions of folks who have concerns about the people in power of the country with more nukes than any other country in the entire world.

But back to the IPP; again according to the article in Iran Nuclear Watch

Most significantly, nowhere in the report did the GAO mention issues of diversion of U.S. funds from Russia to support the Bushehr reactor in Iran. However, Michigan Representatives John D. Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak, chairman of that committee’s Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, are choosing to focus on this issue through letters, articles and hearings.

It is entirely possible that I am looking at this issue too naively; that funding arms to friendly nations (as we did with Iran during the Iran/Iraq war)that then turn into unfriendly nations thus requiring us to further arm their enemies (hoping these enemies of our enemies don't turn into our enemies) thereby requiring us to not only get involved in their battles, but also spend money taken from our citizens to buy off their (the previously friendly nations that are now our enemies) scientists so that they (the scientists) don't sell weapon-making knowledge to our enemies (at least the ones who don't have the knowledge supplied to us because they are still our friends, at least for now)...is a really, really peachy-keen policy.

But the absolute worst part of all this is that no matter what the lowly citizens of this country think about egging Iran into what some are already calling WWIII, (or being complicit in Israel egging them on) the power-hungry warmongering asshats in Washington will do what they want- from starting wars to funding what they themselves call rogue nations- and continue to do so because the very same lowly citizens keep voting them into office.

Is it asking too much for Iran, who sits on one of the world's largest deposits of oil, to pay for these scientists on their own dime? Or since Israel is so concerned about Iran getting nukes, perhaps we could kick in some money out of the estimated $133.132 billion in aid to Israel since 1949. Granted, it would still amount to taking money out of the pockets of US taxpayers and giving it to Israel, but that might give them reason to question why their only ally is bankrolling Iranian reactors under the auspices of proliferation prevention.

Frankly, I am tired of watching chicken hawks play "chicken" with the lives of my children and the lives of children around the world- I say it's high time for these bellicose world leaders to get in a ring and duke it out among themselves and spare the rest of the world; who want nothing more than to get by, pay their bills and see their children inherit a world better than the one they inherited from their parents.