Word: whether
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...That goal required Iran to give up exercising its right to enrich uranium. There's no sign of Iran moving in that direction, but if it shows new flexibility in negotiating further safeguards against weaponization of its nuclear output, that will create a new dilemma for the Obama Administration: whether or not the U.S. and its allies, particularly Israel, can live with an outcome that leaves Iran with "threshold" capacity, even under greater safeguards...
...than it is to heed the demands put forward by the U.S. and its key allies. (Neither Moscow nor Beijing believes Iran is building nuclear weapons, even if they're sympathetic to Western concerns over the need for greater safeguards against it doing so.) The question would then become whether the West is prepared to take Iran's less than satisfactory "yes" for an answer...
...that it should be prevented from even attaining the "know-how" to do so. But know-how is a milestone Iran passed long before Bush had even left the Oval Office, and enrichment has been a fact on the ground in Iran for the past four years. And whether that reality is, in fact, reversible, has increasingly come into question, even in Western capitals. The Iranians appear impervious to the sanctions already implemented, and as long as they cooperate with efforts to strengthen safeguards against weaponization, it's unlikely that there will be sufficient international support to significantly strengthen...
...West would prefer that Iran did not have the civilian nuclear infrastructure that would give it the option of building weapons, but the more likely outcome of a diplomatic process is one that strengthens safeguards against weaponization rather than reversing Tehran's existing enrichment capacity. And the question of whether that's acceptable to the West will ultimately be answered by a cost-benefit analysis of the available alternatives...
...decides Iran is making an atomic bomb - something IAEA inspections may determine later this month - it would complicate any Venezuelan plans to export uranium to the country, since it would be widely viewed as aiding and abetting a rogue nuclear-weapons program. "In that event, the world is watching whether Venezuela seems poised to cross any international legal boundaries," says Johanna Mendelson Forman, a senior associate for the Americas at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "But it's still too early to tell what Venezuela is really doing." (Read a story about the negotiations over...