A new U.S. intelligence review concluding Iran stopped developing an atomic weapons program in 2003 is a “declaration of victory” for Iran’s nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.
Russia’s foreign minister, meanwhile, indicated that the U.S. report’s findings undermined Washington’s push for a new set of U.N. sanctions against Iran.
The U.S. intelligence report released Monday concluded that Iran had stopped its weapons program in late 2003 and shown no signs since of resuming it, representing a sharp turnaround from a previous intelligence assessment in 2005.
“This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue,” Ahmadinejad told thousands of people during a visit to Ilam province in western Iran.
Sad to say, but I have more faith in the Weather Bureau* than the Intelligence community. This feels like a Peter Sellers movie — now that the CIA has said that they have high confidence Iran is using Nukes for peaceful purposes, I’m waiting for the mushroom cloud.
[*This morning we had a snow warning lifted, then it started snowing hard and the warning was re-instituted. Of course, the snow stopped.]
Nuclear technology is a general application technology. Where this report’s news items fail to inform us is on the subject of how the particular bomb designs were or were not stopped. Is it possible to say that the production of highly enriched uranium was stopped, but that the bomb design efforts were also? I doubt it, but this type of news coverage says nothing on the latter issue. In fact, the IAEA inspections were monochromatic on this subject: El Baradei was only interested in one cueing factor, the supply of weapons grade uranium. That makes sense as the industrial footprint for the centrifuges is massive. But with patience, the uranium can be made or bought. What cannot be bought as easily is a working design.
So Iran got a diplomatic victory, courtesy of the same folks who brought you the great intel on Iraq and multibillion dollar satellite system overruns (the FIA debacle). But this story proves nothing, other than the fact that the US has put it’s fool’s mask on again.
This – http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2007/12/019196.php – is worth a look regarding the genesis of the NIE.
In re #3’s citation:
“The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw’s twist of one.”
is precisely the point I was trying to make in #2, with more details.
If we learned anything from the past decade, we should have learned that our intelligence services aren’t providing much reliable intelligence. They didn’t know about the 9/11 plot, and their pre-war estimates of the amount of chemical and biological weaponry still in Iraq proved woefully inaccurate. So, do we believe the 2003 estimate, or this one? I don’t know. Ahmadinejad says they’re working on nukes; do we believe him?
Dick Morris said yesterday that the 2003 stoppage of work by Iran was born out of the same reason that Libya stopped its nuclear bomb program … the US invaded Iraq. Only, Iran was even closer to Iraq than Libya. That would not be surprising if it were true. But then once US became bogged down in Iraq and it began to be stated by the news media (truthfully or not) that no second front could be opened by our military, Iran once again began rattling its sabres regarding a nuclear bomb program.