Flying Pink Unicorns

Now that some of the dust has settled, I have finally gotten around to posting about what the revised National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding Iran's nuclear program means.

You will recall that a few weeks back our intelligence community posted its overall analysis of Iran's nuclear intentions/capabilities. I ASSUME for purposes of this post that the revised NIE represents a good faith attempt by the Intel agencies to give their best intel on Iran, as opposed to a hit job to prevent a rush to war. I realize that's a simplistic assumption, guaranteed to be neither right/wrong nor useful, but I have to start somewhere.

The press reported widely at the time that our intel community concluded that they were wrong and that Iran is NOT pursuing nuclear weapons. Don't you believe it!!! If you read the report carefully, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf,, the NIE really said no such thing. Bear with me.

1) By far the most difficult part of an atomic/nuclear bomb is the weapons grade material, plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU). This is not exactly secret. In other words, if you gave Osama some of this stuff there's every chance he could get a working nuclear device given some time and money, whereas if you gave him everything else except for the HEU/Plutonium, he'd still have to acquire it from a state, and would likely have some real difficulties. So, crudely, Bomb = A (HEU/Plutonium) + B (everything else-- weaponization, fitting on missle, delivery, etc).

2) Everyone, including the NIE, agrees that Iran is still actively working on processes which could result in HEU. Even Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA (No Bush stooge!) agrees with this, and has publicly said since the NIE revisions that he wouldn't go that far as the US intelligence community has. (We've now become less anti-Iran on nukes than ElBaradei, which does NOT give me the warm and fuzzies). So, Iran is still working on weapons grade materials, and doing so in a way that makes little sense in the context of a civilian program. To list one simple example, they are enriching uranium without having anything civilian to DO with said uranium.

3) Iran has largely ceased efforts for now on the B portion of my above, highly simplified (yet useful) equation. This is the one and only valuable part of the NIE's analysis. I don't think it means anywhere NEAR as much as the lazy mainstream press thinks it means, for reasons I discuss below.

4) Should Iran acquire/produce HEU, there's little doubt they can, in a discreet number of years, perhaps even mere months, overcome the hurdles in the B portion of my equation.

5) (repeating)-- HEU is the most important/difficult part of this whole enterprise; therefore

6) Whether Iran has ceased efforts on the B portion of my equation may well effect the precise TIMING of when they get the bomb, but not whether. Should Iran enrich enough uranium (and the amount of uranium sufficient for 10 bombs could be hidden in an 18 wheeler with plenty of room for fruits and vegetables), it can, with at the absolute most a few years delay, acquire a bomb.

7) So the revised NIE, accepted as true, tells us AT MOST that Iran has voluntarily delayed by a short time the amount of time it will need to have the bomb. This hardly qualifies as what the press reported, namely that Iran truly stopped its efforts towards having a nuclear weapon.

8) Notwithstanding anything I have said, everyone agrees that Iran WAS working towards a nuclear weapon (both the A and B parts of the equation above) until 2003. And of course lying through its teeth about it.

Iran is still a grave threat to Israel's national security, and a real threat to regional stability in the middle east.