Iran claims that it has enriched uranium. Wow! The price of oil skyrockets, panic grips the populace, people start building bomb shelters again.
My own reaction? Ho-hum. So what else is new?
I could argue, along with many knowledgeable folks, that this is not a crisis, that Iran is three to ten years away from an explodable nuclear device. (A runaway pile a la Chernobyl, now that might be another question ...) But I have an even more basic question:
Who cares if Iran has nuclear weapons?
Well, but could the government of Iran (under Ahmadinjezad, or however he spells his name) be trusted with nukes? True, Iran's current president has evinced a desire to see Israel (or, more accurately, the "Zionist government" of Israel) be driven into the sea, but that doesn't automagically translate into a willingness to drop a forty-kiloton fission device on Tel Aviv, an act that would certainly earn Tehran a quick and effective slum-clearance program on the part of Israel or even the United States. There are governments out there (including that of Israel) that have had nukes for years and that I wouldn't have cared to trust with them; yet so far nothing untoward has happened. In fact, in the entire history of nuclear weaponry only one nation in the entire world has shown that it cannot be trusted not to use these devices on innocent populaces, and that nation was not Iran.
Of course, Iran might conceivably turn such weapons over to terrorists like Al Qaeda (probably not – Al Qaeda is a Sunni group, and the Iranians are Shi'ites) or maybe Hezbollah, which is apparently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tehran. Really? Can you imagine any government, anywhere, delivering such weapons of mass destruction to some non-official group of loose cannons which was not completely, thoroughly and micromanagerially under that government's thumb? Giving such weapons to the Iranian military, yes, that I can imagine; giving them to Hezbollah – nonsense. (This is pretty much what Kim Jong-il was going to do with North Korea's fissile weaponry, but that seems not to have happened, either.)
If the Iranians want the bomb, let them build it, as their nearest neighbors to the east (Pakistan) and their feared enemy to the west (Israel) have already done.