By Steve Hynd
According to Newsweek, a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program is to be finished soon.
Three U.S. and two foreign counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK that, as soon as next month, the intel agencies are expected to complete an “update” to their controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Tehran “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003 and “had not restarted” it as of mid-2007. The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information, say the revised report will bring U.S. intel agencies more in line with other countries’ spy agencies (such as Britain’s MI6, Germany’s BND, and Israel’s Mossad), which have maintained that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Yet two of the U.S. sources caution the new assessment will likely be “Talmudic” in its parsing. They say U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed “research” on nuclear weapons — theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb — but that Tehran is not engaged in “development” — actually trying to build a weapon.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds sounds the gleeful tone of rightwing response to the news, immediately aiming to politicize any differences between this and the 2007 one.
As I noted before, the purpose of the National Intelligence Estimate was to paralyze us until after the elections. It worked. Some . . . searching inquiry into how that came about, however, might be worthwhile.
Meanwhile, Ron Rosenbaum’s demand for pundit apologies is likely to remain unanswered.
But, as Matt Duss notes, the new N.I.E. is simply agreeing with previous statements by senior intelligence professionals.
It’s interesting to read this in light of an interview published Tuesday with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, in which Burgess stressed that there is still no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons:
Burgess says the key finding that Iran has not yet committed itself to nuclear weapons, contained in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), is still valid.
“The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” he said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”
General Burgess says it is difficult to ascertain the intentions of Iran’s leaders or the level of political infighting among the country’s leadership.
...Whether one terms them “Talmudic” or just “appropriately rigorous given the stakes,” these kinds of distinctions — research vs. development, design vs. build, nuclear weapon vs. weapons capability — will be really important to the debate going forward. As there was with Iraq, there is a highly organized movement afoot to pretend that none of this matters, that “the mullahs” have always intended to get their hands on a nuke, and that we should therefore prepare to bomb the hell out of Iran do what is necessary.
That's perfectly in keeping with the findings of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) earlier this year.
It discusses the acquisition of technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for the year 2008 and repeats the assessment of a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran “had been working to develop nuclear weapons through at least fall 2003, but that in fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities, and its covert uranium conversion- and enrichment-related activities.”
“We do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,” the report states, a tacit acknowledgement that there is little or no evidence that Iran today is pursuing a weapons capability.
Iran “is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons by continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons,” the report adds, “if a decision is made to do so.”
And a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee by Obama's Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in March.
"the intelligence community agrees ... that Iran has not decided to press forward... to have a nuclear weapon on top of a ballistic missile," adding that "Our current estimate is that the minimum time at which Iran could technically produce the amount of highly enriched uranium for a single weapon is 2010 to 2015."
Actually, Matt's wrong in accepting the right's framing so easily - this new N.I.E. doesn't really contradict the 2007 one at all, as the Bush administration were at pains to point out that stopping the nuclear weapons program wasn't the same as stopping research into nuclear weapons capability.
The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”
That's exactly what everyone else always thought too, even in 2006.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it.
As I wrote shortly after the 2007 NIE was made public:
The [Bush] White House, of course, are concentrating on saying that Iran is still developing the "capability" to have nuclear weapons.
Well of course they are, along with every other nation with nuclear power and any kind of reprocessing on enrichment capability. That includes Canada, Holland, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Japan...
The NIE says that even if Iran reopened it's weapons programs and used it's "capability", it could not develop a nuke before 2013, and quite possibly after 2015.
But say it with me, wingnuts - Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
That's still the case. A "virtual deterrent" is a very different thing from an actual weapon-in-being, and the intent to develop the capacity to quickly surge to that deterrent is very different from an actual nuclear weapons program, requiring a very different response - i.e. negotiation, not sanctions or airstrikes.
However, even if the new N.I.E. says again that a virtual deterrent is all Iran seems to be interested in, the Obama administration's hawks will ignore it just as they ignore the 2007 N.I.E. And neoconservative hawks will continue to call for pre-meditated aggressive nuclear war on Iran.
Plus ca change...
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