He confirmed that a U.S. analyst had provided a logical explanation: “South Korea was engaged in maneuvers with its ally, the United States. The worst thing about this event – one which is very difficult for the United States to admit – is that it was them who sunk the sophisticated South Korean vessel. Forty-six men died….A boat like that could only have been blown up with a mine. And they did it.”

Fidel said that he was convinced that if this situation with Korea had gotten out of hand then, it would have been a very dramatic situation, and he recalled what the Koreans had said: “There will be a sea of fire, of flames.” He acknowledged that “this was what I had thought initially, that the problem was going to break out there, because the (Security Council) resolution on Iran had not yet been passed.”

When it was passed, “It became evident that conflict would first be unleashed against Iran, and then in Korea. The people who should pay most attention to what happens in Iran are those in North Korea.”

OBAMA’S MOST SERIOUS CRISIS

Fidel commented on recent statements by U.S. political scientist Noam Chomsky, who confirmed that the U.S. position on Iran “is the most serious foreign policy crisis that the Obama administration is facing.”

“Iran is the big apple of discord,” stated Fidel, “because it is a certain fact that they will not be able to carry out their inspections. Thirty-one years ago, when they launched their chemical war against Ayatollah Khomeini who managed to overthrow the Shah of Iran without the use of weapons, there was no army, they just had the Revolutionary Guards.”

Fidel added, “Ahmadinejad is not an improviser – you may or may not be in agreement with him – but he is not an improviser. To make a calculation on the basis that the Iranians are going to come running out to ask the yankis for forgiveness is absurd.”

He argued that the Iranians “have spent 30 years preparing themselves, with industrial development, acquiring planes, radars, anti-aircraft weapons…The Russians committed themselves to providing them with S-300 missiles, but they are taking their time and have not handed them over. All the planes that they have been able to buy, they have bought. They have Russian weapons. They have hundreds of rocket launchers alone. The Army also has its forces, in the air, on land and sea. The Navy also has air, land and sea capability. Soldiers – just the Revolutionary Guards alone – there are more than one million of them. They are training everyone above 12 years of age and younger than 60. And there are 20 million Shiite Muslims. Who is going to sympathize with that enemy who wants to destroy everything and announce it as well?”

Fidel stated that the nuclear powers jointly possess some 20,000 nuclear weapons and the pretext used against Iran is risible: “This problem that has been created is risible, as are all the resolutions (of the UN Security Council). The risk is that Iran could develop or manufacture two nuclear weapons within the next two or three years. Where is the logic? This whole problem is because of this.”

In the opinion of the Comandante en Jefe, the real cause is “the control and the influence that the state of Israel has over the United States. A country that has become a nuclear power in the space of a few years.”

He affirmed that Cuba understands the nuclear experience very well: “We have lived under the threat of being attacked. During the Reagan government, they carried out a nuclear test in the ocean. In a boat. We guessed that because we had troops on their way to Namibia.”

Via Israel, “they provided the South Africans with 14 nuclear weapons, more powerful than those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This situation is nothing new. We were there (Angola) with 60,000 men advancing. And we had already felt the threat of a nuclear experience.”

He recalled the moment when the Soviets installed their nuclear rockets in Cuba; “From then on they didn’t like us, because when we made this Revolution, we didn’t have any alliance with the USSR.” That alliance “came to us at a very opportune moment, because when (the U.S.) took away our oil, (the USSR) gave it to us. We are not talking without having lived through that experience: we went through it in ’62 and in ’70 and a bit, on an internationalist mission. And we adopted all the measures; advancing and going underground. We couldn’t take any chance. Everything had been confirmed. Not even Mandela knew what they did with those weapons. I asked him: ‘I don’t know,’ he said. They took them away. They have never acted cleanly.”

“Could they be playing around with this?” he added. “If you’re talking about a hypothesis, you’re not going to convince anybody. There is no need to dramatize, because the events are dramatic enough in themselves.”

The leader of the Revolution provided a new analysis on these dangerous events for humanity in his Reflection published on the CubaDebate website on Sunday, July 11.