Posted by Bismah Mirza (PYM)

WASHINGTON/TEHRAN (AFP) - Israel has “eight days” to launch a military strike against Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility and stop Tehran from acquiring a functioning atomic plant, a former US envoy to the UN has said.

Iran is to bring online its first nuclear power reactor, built with Russia’s help, on August 21, when a shipment of nuclear fuel will be loaded into the plant’s core.
At that point, John Bolton warned Monday, it will be too late for Israel to launch a military strike against the facility because any attack would spread radiation and affect Iranian civilians.
“Once that uranium, once those fuel rods are very close to the reactor, certainly once they’re in the reactor, attacking it means a release of radiation, no question about it,” Bolton told Fox Business Network. “So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr it has to move in the next eight days.”
Absent an Israeli strike, Bolton said, “Iran will achieve something that no other opponent of Israel, no other enemy of the US in the Middle East really has and that is a functioning nuclear reactor.”
But when asked whether he expected Israel to actually launch strikes against Iran within the next eight days, Bolton was sceptical.
“I don’t think so, I’m afraid that they’ve lost this opportunity,” he said.
The controversial former envoy to the United Nations criticised Russia’s role in the development of the plant, saying “the Russians are, as they often do, playing both sides against the middle.”
“The idea of being able to stick a thumb in America’s eye always figures prominently in Moscow,” he added.
Dismissing the possibilities of such an attack on its first nuclear power plant from its arch-foes, Iran warned that any strike would amount to an “international crime”, as the countdown started for the launch of the Russian-built facility. “The consequences of this will not be limited to the hosting country but will have a global aftermath,” Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi told the state IRNA news agency. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman dismissed a possible Israeli attack on the Bushehr plant.
“These threats had become repetitive and lost their meaning,” Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters on Tuesday.
“According to international law, installations which have real fuel cannot be attacked because of the humanitarian consequences,” he said.