Israel National News reports: “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the Islamic Republic is not afraid of manufacturing nuclear weapons, but does not intend to do so.

‘If we do want to make a bomb, we are not afraid of anybody,’ Iran’s state television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Ahmadinejad’s statements come on the same day that five Russian scientists involved in designing Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant were killed in a Russian plane crash…” (A gigantic nuclear war is coming as Russia, China, and Arab Muslim nations join together with Russia and China for Armageddon – Revelation 16:16. When this war begins one third of the earth is burned and one third of humanity dies – Revelation 8:7; 9:14 – 18. See also the next two reports.)

YnetNews.com reports: “Iran has carried out secret tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload in breach of UN resolutions, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said.

Hague’s comments came a day after Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said they had fired 14 missiles in an exercise, one of them a medium-range weapon capable of striking Israel or US targets in the Gulf.

In a statement to lawmakers, Hague said: ‘Iran has also been carrying out covert ballistic missile tests and rocket launches, including testing missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload in contravention of UN resolution 1929.’

He said Iran had also announced plans to triple its capacity to produce 20% enriched uranium, adding: ‘These are enrichment levels far greater than is needed for peaceful nuclear energy.

‘We will maintain and continue to increase pressure on Iran to negotiate an agreement on their nuclear program,’ including sanctions, he said.

There was no immediate reaction from Tehran, which denies Western claims that it is pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of its civil atomic program…”

Guardian.co.uk reports: “A senior Saudi Arabian diplomat and member of the ruling royal family has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict in the Middle East if Iran comes close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, warned senior NATO military officials that the existence of such a device ‘would compel Saudi Arabia … to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences’.

He did not state explicitly what these policies would be, but a senior official in Riyadh who is close to the prince said his message was clear.

‘We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t. It’s as simple as that,’ the official said. ‘If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.’

Officials in Riyadh said that Saudi Arabia would reluctantly push ahead with its own civilian nuclear programme. Peaceful use of nuclear power, Turki said, was the right of all nations.

Turki was speaking earlier this month at an unpublicized meeting at RAF Molesworth, the airbase in Cambridgeshire used by NATO as a center for gathering and collating intelligence on the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

According to a transcript of his speech obtained by the Guardian, Turki told his audience that Iran was a ‘paper tiger with steel claws’ that was ‘meddling and destabilizing’ across the region…”