And Obama joked with this monster

Hugo Chavez's Iran Uranium Offer: A New Security Threat?
Time.com

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By TIM PADGETT Tim Padgett – 23 mins ago

When Venezuela's Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz walked into a televised Cabinet meeting this week, President Hugo ChÁvez impishly asked, "So how's the uranium for Iran going? For the atomic bomb." ChÁvez was joking, but few were laughing outside Caracas and Tehran. Ever since ChÁvez announced last month that he was seeking Russia's help to develop nuclear energy in Venezuela - and especially since Sanz turned heads a couple of weeks ago by disclosing that Iran is helping Venezuela locate its own uranium reserves - the South American nation and its socialist, anti-U.S. government have become a new focus of anxiety over regional if not global security.

But how big a concern should Venezuela be? ChÁvez delights in getting a rise out of the U.S., and his alliance with Iran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is largely a calculated affront to Washington - his version of Cuba's Cold War partnership with the Soviet Union. It's little coincidence that Sanz made his announcement the same day the U.S. and its allies called Iran on the existence of a secret nuclear-fuel plant near the Iranian city of Qum. The U.S. and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) fear that Iran is on the verge of bolting the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and developing not just nuclear energy but a nuclear weapon, a charge Tehran denies. Venezuela's ties to the Islamic Republic, as a result, have taken on dimensions beyond just tweaking Uncle Sam's nose. (See the 10 worst-dressed world leaders.)

That suits ChÁvez's fondness for the international spotlight. Still, security experts say he's flirting with something more serious than anti-yanqui bravado. ChÁvez, who recently agreed to sell Iran 20,000 barrels of gasoline a day, backs the country's claim that it's enriching uranium only for peaceful purposes. But if the international community 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 Iran's nukes.)

A recent intelligence report put out by the government of Israel, which considers Iran's nuclear program a direct threat to its security, said Venezuela was already supplying Iran with uranium. But experts say it's hardly certain Venezuela even has much, if any, uranium to provide Iran or anyone else. Officials there have long estimated the country is sitting on 50,000 tons of the radioactive ore, concentrated mostly in western Venezuela and in the Roraima Basin along the country's southeastern border with Brazil and Guyana. (The U.S. has uranium reserves of about 340,000 tons.) It may be high grade, says James Otton, a uranium-resources specialist at the federal U.S. Geological Survey, a reference not to its quality but to the "tremendous quantities of uranium in a given volume of rock" found in places similar to Roraima, a virtual Lost World of Precambrian geology.