NIE’s have been wrong before
Iran is putting a lot of firepower into protecting its “peaceful” nuclear reactor at Bushehr, including the Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) and a rumored deal involving the S-300. IBD wonders why and notes, regarding the current NIE, that such reports have been rather dramatically wrong in the past:
Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel’s 1981 strike against Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor. That’s an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program…
The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet…
The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead.
“At any time while it is loading the fuel,” he told the Washington Times, “Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons.”
A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor — enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel…
National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, “the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba…would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”
The strangeness of the current NIE, so completely at odds with the previous NIE, combined with the Bush administration’s rather passive attitude towards it, continue to confound and confuse us.