In the wake of the last week’s revelation that Iran has a clandestine facility designed to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs, the New York Times has an interesting look at the ongoing debate between American and her allies over Iran’s nuclear program.
There are at least a couple of problems with this. First, as I noted last week, the 2007 NIE defined Iran’s nuclear weapons program as including both its “weaponization” efforts (i.e. designing a warhead) and its clandestine uranium enrichment efforts. (Oddly, the development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead was left out of the NIE’s definition of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.) The American spooks who are referenced by the Times may want to pretend they limited the 2007 NIE to only Iran’s weaponization efforts, but their definition back then clearly included Iran’s “covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work.” That part of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” did not come to halt. The mullahs continued pressing forward, as the Obama administration itself now says. So, the 2007 NIE is entirely meaningless. It was always a dubious piece of analytical “tradecraft.” That American intelligence officials are standing by the 2007 NIE – even after senior intelligence officials such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell walked away from it – suggests they are still infected with a particularly close-minded myopia, despite telling the Times they are “open-minded” when it comes to Iran’s burgeoning nukes. Second, notice that America’s allies dispute what our spooks are saying about the other piece of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, as defined by the 2007 NIE: the mullahs’ weaponization efforts. The Israelis think it was restarted in 2005. The Germans don’t think this component ever really came to an end. Needless to say, this is a pretty wide variance in judgments. It does not inspire confidence that anyone knows with any great deal of precision exactly what is going on. Indeed, we should keep in mind what the Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005: “Across the board, the [U.S.] intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago.” This assessment undoubtedly included Iran. Are there good reasons to think much has changed in the four years since? It is doubtful. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking…
