As recently as a few months ago, ostensibly serious people could be heard to claim that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons. Not any more:
Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb.
In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran’s “development of a nuclear weapon” before correcting himself to refer to its “pursuit” of weapons capability.
Obama’s nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. “From all the information I’ve seen,” Panetta said, “I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”
The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.
(Via Tigerhawk, via Instapundit.)
This is progress, of a sort, but too late. Those lost months were a disaster.
What is particularly maddening is that the vaunted NIE didn’t actually say that Iran had ended its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Here’s what it did say:
We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
ASIDE: Did anything happen in 2003 that might have changed Iran’s calculation of the wisdom of its nuclear efforts? Hmm.
Anyway, the NIE had only “moderate” confidence that Iran’s effort was entirely halted, only “moderate” confidence that it hadn’t been resumed by mid-2007, and no assessment at all after mid-2007:
Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program. . .
We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
Also, this “halt” was of a peculiar sort; during it they were still running uranium centrifuges and bringing more on-line:
We assess centrifuge enrichment is how Iran probably could first produce enough fissile material for a weapon, if it decides to do so. Iran resumed its declared centrifuge enrichment activities in January 2006, despite the continued halt in the nuclear weapons program. Iran made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz. . .
Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing.
(Emphasis mine.) Finally, the NIE explicitly disclaimed the idea that Iran had given up for good:
We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult. . . In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible.
Despite all this nuance in an easily read document just over two pages long, the press reported the NIE as a categorical statement that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons. Why did they do that? Even with an opinion of the media as low as mine, it’s hard to understand that kind of fecklessness.
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