At the end of October, Mohammed ElBaradei, chairman of the IAEA, told CNN:
Today the AP reports quite a different story:
So the Iranian’s actually have blueprints for building a nuclear weapon–blueprints that the IAEA had been unable to get them to turnover until now (they don’t have photocopiers in Tehran?)–but ElBaradei would only describe this as “maybe” some studies about “possible” weaponization? So what’s the real story here? Basically, the IAEA back in 2005–in the course of investigating Iran’s nuclear activities–stumbles upon blueprints that show how to build a nuclear warhead. The Iranian response to this little discovery is to claim that the blueprints must have been “accidentally” given to them by the Pakistani nuclear smugglers, when they were secretly buying enrichment technology from them several years ago (but strictly for peaceful purposes!). Oh, and, by the way, the IAEA wasn’t allowed to take the blueprints back to Vienna. But this is the man the left would describe as having “poured water over Vice President Cheney’s confident declaration last week that ‘Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.'” So they have the reactor, the centrifuges, the blueprints, and soon the nuclear material, but according to the IAEA and Think Progress, they aren’t “pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.” Right.
