I noted with some concern an item in the Wall Street Journal this morning, with the following lead:
The Bush administration and Western governments are voicing renewed fears that advanced nuclear-weapon designs may have been provided to Iran and North Korea through the smuggling network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
This does not raise fresh concerns in my mind about Iran and North Korea’s nuclear capability. This “news” has been known by the US government since 2006, and the public has known the essentials of it for well over a year. My concern is about the increase in rhetoric targeting Iran, both from government and established media, eerily reminding me of the 2002 runup to the Iraq War.
If the US is to attack Iran before President Bush leaves office, the CIA’s last National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program must be discredited. As you may recall, the NIE, released December 3, 2007, asserted with high confidence that “that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003.”
A month before its release, investigative journalist Gareth Porter reported that the NIE had been been “held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.”
In a news conference the day after its public release, President Bush downplayed any apparent conflicts between the NIE and the goverment’s recent statements about the the threat from Iran. And, one day later, the Wall Street Journal (and others) criticized the report’s authorship and significance. President Bush may never have accepted the NIE conclusions. As reported on NPR’s Morning Edition in January 2008:
In an interview with Fox News, the president was asked if he believed the NIE. Bush shrugged and said he believed the professionals who prepared the NIE, were “very sincere in their analysis.” But then he gave his own view of the Iranians’ intentions, and it was not quite consistent with the NIE.
“I believe they want a weapon,” he said, “and I believe that they’re trying to gain the know-how as to how to make a weapon under the guise of a civilian nuclear program.”
But if the NIE did not change the opinions of President Bush or Vice President Cheney, it did have an impact on public opinion, and talk of an attack on Iran disappeared from the headlines. Recently, attempts to undermine the NIE and to put fear of Iran front and center in the news have been gaining steam again.
Today’s “news” stemmed from a story reported yesterday by the Washington Post, among others. Joby Warrick’s article was based on a report, expected to be published later this week, by David Albright, a former IAEA inspector. The new report reveals that a nuclear weapon design that was more sophisticated than the one sold by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan to Libya may have been shared with other countries. The significance is that this particular design may have been ready-made for missile deployment, perhaps reducing the time necessary for a country to develop usable nuclear weapons technology. The blueprints in question were discovered in 2006 by Swiss authorities on computers owned by 3 Swiss businessmen who are believed to have been part of A.Q. Khan’s illicit network. The information, including the blueprints, was shared with both the IAEA and the United States.
I am anxious to see the actual report, on which this entire issue is based. Already Google reports 471 news articles about it, and the report hasn’t even been published yet, to my knowledge.
Our intelligence agencies had access to these blueprints before the publication of the NIE, and had an opportunity to evaluate their significance. The public has been aware of some of A.Q. Khan’s efforts to proliferate nuclear information to other countries for at least two years. Now, we learn that the designs available on the black market were perhaps more viable than we originally thought. And although we don’t know whether these designs were distributed to anyone, they might have gone to Iran. It is on this basis that the Wall Street Journal and others draw conclusions such as:
The Bush administration and Western governments are voicing renewed fears that advanced nuclear-weapon designs may have been provided to Iran and North Korea through the smuggling network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
