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Former CIA-director James Woolsey and other ex-officials:
The IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community have long been poor nuclear watchdogs. IAEA inspections failed to discover clandestine nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 1998, the intelligence community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” failed to warn that, just a few months later, Pakistan and India would overtly “go nuclear” with a series of nuclear-weapons tests. U.S. intelligence often underestimated nuclear threats from Russia, China, and North Korea. It is likely now doing the same with Iran.
Contrary to mainstream thinking:
As we warned five years ago, it is implausible and imprudent to assume that Iran refrained from making atomic weapons for more than a decade, when they could do so clandestinely:
Why has Iran not gone overtly nuclear, like North Korea? There are several explanations. For one, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer neighborhood, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support U.S. military options to disarm Pyongyang. In contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are far more likely to support air strikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible:
Moreover, Iran wants to preserve the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has derived far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to “go nuclear” than has North Korea from “going nuclear” overtly. Ominously, Iran may be forgoing the deterrence benefits of an overt nuclear posture because it is building toward surprise future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization.
Iran Probably Already Has the Bomb. Here’s What to Do about It
The IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community have long been poor nuclear watchdogs. IAEA inspections failed to discover clandestine nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 1998, the intelligence community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” failed to warn that, just a few months later, Pakistan and India would overtly “go nuclear” with a series of nuclear-weapons tests. U.S. intelligence often underestimated nuclear threats from Russia, China, and North Korea. It is likely now doing the same with Iran.Contrary to mainstream thinking:
- Iran can build sophisticated nuclear weapons by relying on component testing, without nuclear testing. The U.S., Israel, Pakistan, and India have all used the component-testing approach. The U.S. Hiroshima bomb was not tested, nor have been more sophisticated U.S. thermonuclear warheads during the past 30 years. Pakistan and India’s 1998 nuclear tests were done for political reasons, not out of technological necessity.
- IAEA inspections are limited to civilian sites, and restricted from military bases, including several highly suspicious underground facilities where Iran’s nuclear-weapons program almost certainly continues clandestinely. Imagery of one vast underground site, heavily protected by SAMs, shows high-voltage powerlines terminating underground, potentially delivering enormous amounts of electricity, consistent with powering uranium enrichment centrifuges on an industrial scale. So IAEA reports on Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile almost certainly are not the whole story.
- The U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran suspended its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is contradicted both by Iran’s nuclear archives, stolen by Israel in 2018, indicating Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program (reported at several sites in 2006, 2017, and 2019) and by Iran’s rapid resumption of enriching uranium to prohibited levels. This demonstrates an existing capability to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium. Reports from the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission elaborate these and important related issues.
- Most estimates assume Iran needs five to ten kilograms of highly enriched (over 90 percent) uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to make an atomic weapon, as with the first crudely designed A-bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But a good design requires only one to two kilograms. Crude A-bombs can be designed with uranium-235 or plutonium-239 enriched to only 50 percent.
- Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are not just indigenous, but are helped significantly by Russia, China, North Korea, and probably Pakistan.
- While the intelligence community uses an in-country nuclear test as confirmation that a country, including Iran, has developed a nuclear weapon, this leaves it wide open to deceiving itself, our leadership, and our allies. Iran and North Korea have close working relations, North Korea will do anything for Iranian oil, and Iranians have reportedly been present at some of North Korea’s nuclear tests. North Korea could easily have exchanged information with Iran and even tested Iranian nuclear weapons as well as their own — if there is any difference — without the U.S. and its allies knowing whose weapons were being tested. North Korean scientists are known to be in Iran helping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard “space program” that provides cover for developing ICBMs.
As we warned five years ago, it is implausible and imprudent to assume that Iran refrained from making atomic weapons for more than a decade, when they could do so clandestinely:
Why has Iran not gone overtly nuclear, like North Korea? There are several explanations. For one, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer neighborhood, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support U.S. military options to disarm Pyongyang. In contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are far more likely to support air strikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible:
Moreover, Iran wants to preserve the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has derived far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to “go nuclear” than has North Korea from “going nuclear” overtly. Ominously, Iran may be forgoing the deterrence benefits of an overt nuclear posture because it is building toward surprise future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization.
Iran & the Bomb: What to Do | National Review
www.nationalreview.com
