In January 1979…27 years ago…the American-backed Shah of Iran was forced into exile. Later that years Ayatollah Khomeini called the US the Great Satan. This was the signal for the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran when 52 hostages were taken and held for 444 days. Perhaps it was no accident that this is .666 of 666 days.

In April 1980 the Americans tried the Rambo approach and sent the helicopters in to rescue their hostages only to scurry back home with their tails between their legs and eight servicemen dead. After this the stand-off continued until November 1986 when the Reagan Administration was all but engulfed by the Ollie North Affair and the Iran-Contra Scandal involving the sale of arms, bibles and birthday cakes to Iran and dodgy goings-on in Central America in return for freeing hostages in Lebanon. Nobody has ever really got to the bottom of all this.

Next in July 1988 a US warship shot down an Iranian airliner killing all 250 onboard. They did this by mistake…but friendly fire it was not. Officially Iran and America were still not on speaking terms. Anything official was passed through Swiss diplomats. The name-calling reached school playground level in January 2002 when George Dubya Bush declared in his State of the Union address that Iran…along with Iraq and North Korea…were an Axis of Evil.

This War of Words escalated further this year when Iran’s newly-elected President Ahmadinejad reminded America of Iran’s long-standing policy to destroy Israel. Americans are unpredictable when rattled so this name-calling must be reined in. Cold War era brinkmanship is bad news when Russia and China are big traders with Iran.

That is the background. Events started hotting up on Bank Holiday Monday. I was chatting to the boss of Mahavi’s …an Information Technology lecturer, fluent in four languages and brought up in Tehran. He was in a state of shock after watching Iranian Television in his lunch break with its official announcement that Iran had exploded a nuclear device. Returning home to the boat in the evening after two days in West St Leonard’s I found that the rain had got into my electricity supply and tripped the switch so I missed the BBC News. No electricity meant waiting for the morning papers where I assumed the Iranian atomic bomb test would be front page news.

Instead the most I could find in Tuesday’s newspapers was a couple of column inches tucked away on the inside pages of The Times reporting that Iran had ‘said it had conducted research into nuclear fusion, which can be used for nuclear weapons.’ Sadat Hosseini of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation was reported as saying that the first research was done five years ago but that was it. Unusually for The Times the piece was not sourced…no (AP) or (Reuter).

The next mention in The Times were two further column inches on Wednesday under the headline Iran nuclear talks agreed. It seemed that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany were to meet the next day in Vienna to discuss a proposal to end the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. These few lines were sourced to China’s Foreign Ministry by way of Foreign Staff at The Times...an improvement of sorts.

Finally on Wednesday evening the BBC admitted something was afoot when reporting that the US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice had offered to enter into talks with Iran. An Iranian Spokesman promptly let it be known that ‘given the insistence by Iranian authorities on continuing uranium enrichment, Rice’s comments can be considered propaganda moves’. Just so. But after 27 years of belligerence I would say that Bush’s Neocons are rattled.