What a difference a few days can make. In recent weeks, the
White House appeared to be gaining serious ground in its efforts to
cobble together an international consensus to confront Iran. Today,
however, Administration officials are desperately trying to put the
pieces of their Iran policy back together. The culprit is the
intelligence community’s new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE),
released publicly on December 3rd. That document offers a
dramatically different take on Iran’s nuclear development,
asserting that the Iranian regime currently is not in the business
of making nuclear weapons.
But is that contention, so damaging to U.S. efforts to contain
the Islamic Republic, accurate and sustainable? Closer examination
suggests considerable reason for skepticism on at least three
fronts.
First, the new NIE provides a misleading picture of the maturity
of Iran’s nuclear effort. Its centerpiece is the startling claim
that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” and
that such activity had not restarted as of mid-2007. Yet the report
also makes clear that its definition of this program excludes
“Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and
enrichment.” All of which is more than a little contradictory,
since nuclear materiel generated as a result of Iran’s civilian
nuclear development, if enriched to a high enough level, can be
used for military purposes.
Tehran’s work in this area, moreover, is both significant and
mature. This October, French officials went public with the
assessment that Iran could begin operating as many as 3,000
centrifuges by the end of that month. That estimate — based on
France’s interpretation of International Atomic Energy Agency
findings — was subsequently confirmed by Iranian officials
themselves, who disclosed in early November that their regime now
had 3,000 functioning centrifuges in operation. This represents a
critical milestone; according to nuclear scientists, that number of
centrifuges operating continuously for a year can generate enough
highly enriched uranium (HEU) for one nuclear weapon. As a
practical matter, this means that — barring technical malfunctions
or other unforeseen circumstances — Iran could have the raw
material for a nuclear bomb by sometime next fall. Once that
occurs, the regime will be able to weaponize it in a mere matter of
weeks, if it possesses the proper know-how. All of which roundly
contradicts the NIE’s predictions that “Iran probably would be
technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime
during the 2010-2015 time frame.”
Second, the new NIE provides an incomplete picture of Iranian
nuclear activities. The scope of its assessment of an Iranian
freeze in military nuclear work, the report makes clear, extends
solely to the domestic activities of regime entities and
affiliates. But nuclear weapons are not only made at home; they can
also be bought from abroad. The Iranian regime understands this
very well, which is why it is believed to have devoted considerable
time and energy to maintaining a presence on the nuclear black
market in the former Soviet Union over the past decade-and-a-half,
and why it has shown such interest in the clandestine nuclear
cartel of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. These inputs have
the ability to dramatically accelerate Iran’s nuclear program. At a
minimum, therefore, the intelligence community owes the American
public an accurate accounting of exactly what it does and does not
know about such secondary inputs into the Iranian atomic
effort.
The new NIE also needs to be understood in the context of past
assessments. The U.S. intelligence community does many things well,
but accurately gauging the maturity of foreign nuclear programs is
not one of them. Indeed, over the past half-century, U.S. agencies
have consistently failed to foresee significant nuclear events in
any foreign nation. They famously missed the nuclearization of the
Soviet Union in 1949, and that of China in 1964. India and
Pakistan’s tit-for-tat nuclear exchanges in 1998 similarly caught
them by surprise. More recently, so did North Korea’s abrupt
nuclear breakout in 2002. If the U.S. intelligence community now
has an accurate take on Tehran’s nuclear program, therefore, it
would represent something of a historical anomaly.
Perhaps most dangerously, the new NIE detracts from the American
public’s understanding of the nature of the Iranian regime itself.
Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and plays
an instrumental role in sustaining and bolstering the activities of
terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran is also active
in Iraq, where it has helped expand the lethality of the insurgency
against Coalition forces over the past two years. These activities
— and the radical expansionist ideology of the regime itself —
matter as much, if not more, than the current state of Iran’s
nuclear program.
As a practical matter, then, the intelligence community’s new
wisdom on Iran changes little. Even if all of the judgments
contained in the NIE are accurate, and there is ample reason for
skepticism on that score, they do little to diminish the
contemporary challenge to U.S. interests that is posed by the
Islamic Republic of Iran. What they do succeed in doing, however,
is significantly diluting American resolve in confronting that
threat.
