Nothing to See Here, Move Along
Posted by Keith_Indy on 13 Dec 2007 at 6:58 pm | Tagged as: Military Matters, Keith's Page, Foreign affairs, Domestic Politics
This is interesting:
The “Key Judgments” released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the “halt of the weapons program” repeatedly and without qualification.
The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components:
the ,
the development of missiles and
the building of warheads.
Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.
So sayeth uber-realist Henry Kissinger…
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