Of facts and wishful thinking in the Iran debate

intelligence agencies estimate that Iran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities in late 2003 and that Tehran had not resumed them as of mid-2007. “Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon” because of difficulties in acquiring or producing the fissile material necessary, but could obtain enough as early as 2010, Blair said. The agencies, however, cannot “rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad or will acquire in the future a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon.”

There are three things that worry us about Blair’s repetition of the 2007 NIE’s assertion about Iran’s halting its weapon design activities in 2003:

• We cannot say too much about the first reason for worry because it relies on information which is not entirely public. Suffice it to say that we are dealing with computer disks mysteriously — and conveniently — found that tell a story which is supportive of the Iranian assertions. A word to the wise: it was a mistake — a grave mistake — to base U.S. intelligence assessment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities on a fabricator named Rafid Ahmed Alwan (aka Curve Ball), and it is a mistake to give the information on that mysterious disk too much credence when it comes to Iran’s weapons activities.
• Second, Blair himself says that the “halting” of Iran’s weapon design activities, if such halting indeed took place, occurred between 2003 and mid-2007. The assessment that Iran has not resumed weapon design activities during the past two years, that is, since 2007, is not based on as strong an evidence (if, indeed, “strong” is the right adjective here) as the evidence that it had stopped these design activities between 2003 and 2007.
• Third, and most importantly, whether Iran did or did not halt its weapon design activities in 2003 does not matter, for three reasons:
  • There are three elements to nuclear weapons programs: creating fissile material; designing and testing delivery vehicles; and designing a warhead. Of the three elements, the last one — the one Iran supposedly “halted” in 2003 — is the easiest, cheapest, less demanding, less labor- and testing-intensive, and most difficult to detect. There is no way to know — again: there is no way to know — whether Iran has halted its warhead design or not because there is no way to detect such work. Unlike missile tests and enriching uranium, two activities which are impossible to hide (missiles can be observed in their flight; uranium enrichment emits ions into space which