Maybe Halted But Not Dismantled: The Threat From Iran’s Nuclear Program Remains
December 11, 2007 by pulkit
Many might have quailed at the NIE report and its dramatic entrance from the blue. It has given a clean chit to Iran over its nuclear issue by claiming that the country halted its contoversial nuclear program four year ago. It has sparked a huge debate over its credibility. Even if it has just a wee bit of veracity, it still fails to answer some very important questions.
It has very little details of the events or circumstances leading to the freezing of the nuclear program in 2003. The Iranians couldn’t have whimsicaly put that dream in cold storage, which they had been chasing for two decades. It talks about international pressure as one possible reason for the 2003 halt, but fails to specify exactly what sort of pressure. It is important to identify the exact kind of pressure that led Iran into prostration. Iran has come under a lot of international pressure in the last year and has been loathed by many countries but it has managed to be defiant. So what were those pressures par endurance under which a usually pugnacious Iran wilted. The answer remains nakedly absent from the report and derides its credibility.
Even if the nuclear program had been halted in 2003, it doesn’t relegate the threat posed by Iran, for halting and dismantling are two different things altogether. The NIE report also alludes to this difference, though implicitly. This is what it has to say:
Given “Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons,” the NIE concludes, reasonably if tautologically, that “only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons–and such a decision is inherently reversible.” [source]
The phrase “Inherently reversible” makes the 2003 halt seem only a halt, which might have lost effect by now. The intelligence agencies might resort to the tried and tested intelligence-failure excuse, if it is established that the program is going along unabated, or if something catastrophic happens. But what will you do? How will you excuse yourself from your devastating ignorance? How will you face yourself in the mirror, if something goes wrong? Will you remain in the aftermath?
