Of facts and wishful thinking in the Iran debate

can be collected by national technical means), there is no way to know whether in a lab somewhere there are fifty scientists with computers perfecting a war head design.

  • Since it is the easiest and cheapest element of the three nuclear-weapon related activities, it is also the easiest to stop and then restart when necessary. It is likely that if — if — the Iranian did halt their work on warhead design, it was because that work, being relatively easy (and made easier with the warhead blueprints they received from Pakistan and North Korea), had advanced much faster than the two much more demanding elements: enriching uranium and building accurate missiles. There was no reason not to halt such work in order to allow these two other elements to advance to a point at which it would make sense again to restart working on the warhead and its triggering mechanism.
  • Indeed, even the November NIE, which stated that that Iran had halted its warhead design in 2003, stated and offered evidence that Iran was moving full-speed-ahead on enriching uranium and building and testing missiles. 

    • Blair concluded that Iran will probably be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon at some point in the 2010-15 timeframe, although the State Department’s intelligence service sets the early date at 2013 “because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems,” he said.

    Our worry about Blair’s repetition of the 2007 NIE’s assertion is the same worry we had in late 2007: Taken out of the scientific context of a nuclear weapon program, the word “halt” (as in “halting” warhead design; “halting” weaponization) may sound as if it means much. This was precisely the problem with the November 2007 NIE: It dealt a body blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to strengthen and tighten the economic and political sanctions on Iran.

    An incautious and out-of-context repetition of the assertion about what the Iranians did or did not do in 2003 may have the same effect on the efforts by the Obama administration to try and stop the Iranian march toward the bomb by means short of war.

    It is not clear what our policy toward Iran’s emerging nuclear weapons capability should be: should we accept a nuclear Iran and try to build a deterrence regime with it such as the one which existed between the two superpowers during the cold war? Should we attack Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities? Should we encourage allies such as Israel to do the job? Can we prevent Israel from attacking Iran if we did not? What should be our approach if, in response to an Iranian bomb, Sunni regimes — Egypt, Saudi Arabia — were to embark on their own nuclear weapons programs?

    These and other questions are yet to be answered. As we grapple with these questions, though, we would do well to remember what John Adams said in his December 1770 “Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials”: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

    It is the same here: Facts may be unpleasant and inconvenient, but they are stubborn things. Whatever policies we choose to adopt toward Iran had better be based on the state of facts and evidence, not on wishes, inclinations, or passion.

    Ben Frankel is editor of HS Daily Wire