Once again, we’re being subjected to the near-impossible task of trying to figure out what to believe about Iran’s nuclear weapons programs:
Iran has not produced the highly enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon and has not decided to do so, U.S. intelligence officials told Congress yesterday, an assessment that contrasts with a stark Israeli warning days earlier that Iran has crossed the “technological threshold” in its pursuit of the bomb.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said that Iran has not decided to pursue the production of weapons-grade uranium and the parallel ability to load it onto a ballistic missile.
“The overall situation — and the intelligence community agrees on this — [is] that Iran has not decided to press forward . . . to have a nuclear weapon on top of a ballistic missile,” Blair told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “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.”
The five-year spread, he explained, is a result of differences in the intelligence community about how quickly Iran could develop a weapon if it rekindled a weapons program it suspended in 2003.
This follows report less than a month ago from the United Nations and the United States alleging that the Iranians were further along on a nuclear weapons program than previously thought and fifteen months after a National Intelligence Estimate said that previous estimates of the extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program were widely over-blown.
In other words, we’ve heard so many different assessments of what’s going on in Tehran that it’s hard to know who, or what to believe.
I don’t really know what’s going on and, based on the reports, neither to do those in charge. Regardless of what the real answer is, that fact alone should concern everyone.
