Today, Bibi Netanyahu made a major address showing a ton of documents obtained by Israeli intelligence showing that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program, which had been denied by all of Iran’s top leaders. These documents were squirreled away in a secret site when the Iran nuclear deal was coming together.
While I can’t claim to have watched every minute of his presentation, it seems pretty clear to me that the overt point of the speech was to show that Iranians had lied about the nuclear weapons program they had from the late 1990s to 2003, and the implicit point was that the Iran nuclear deal was therefore faulty.
I’m not following why this is news.
In 2007, the US intelligence community declassified a report that concluded:
We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons;
We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years;
We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons;
We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon;
Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.
I’m just not seeing that the new, smoking gun evidence of #1 really has any bearing on #2-5. Because of this, it seems like Netanyahu is just providing covering fire for Trump to scrap the Iran nuclear deal (while Trump seeks to get North Korea to sign up to the exact same deal in the coming weeks.
So the debate is: am I right, or am I totally and completely balls-on right?
I always assumed that’s why we wanted the deal with Iran. They wanted nuclear weapons, had a secret program to develop same, and we wanted them to stop. Hence, the deal.
If Trump blows up the deal, I think we can assume Iran will go back to developing nuclear weapons again.
Well, there was a bit about moving the secret archives and he also claimed that there is evidence that after the 2015 agreement they continued development work, though I didn’t see any actual evidence of the later (he showed some pictures of the archives moving but frankly I was falling asleep a bit during that part).
I honestly don’t know what to think of this. He seemed convinced that this was earth shattering, and certainly evidence that they continued development work after 2015 would be both interesting and disturbing, but I really need to see more before I’m in complete freak out mode. Like you I’m wondering what, if anything I’m missing here.
IMHO, pretty high. Because the controls on the whole fuel cycle are pretty robust that Iran would have be extraordinarily smart to start a secret fuel enrichment program that would not only evade those controls, but also not be noticed by all the intelligence services that are watching them very carefully.
I’m trying to understand Bebe’s logic in offering this narrative.
If he doesn’t want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, why would he want to blow up the current nuclear deal? He may think it doesn’t go far enough, but he has no assurance that a new deal will be forthcoming or significantly better. Why take this chance? Does he think Iran is continuing to develop a nuclear weapon?
Even if that’s true, it doesn’t say anything about the agreement, or Iran’s compliance with it. (I know XT touched on that already.)
So Iran lied about their nuclear weapons program before 2003, what does that mean for today? In many cases, I’d say that a country is under no obligation to disclose or be truthful about security and military matters, but Iran was a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. They were found to be in non-compliance, and I suppose that does reflect poorly on their credibility in complying with the more recent, more specific agreement. I don’t think that’s grounds for pulling out of the treaty entirely, but caution and inspection are warranted. If those inspections turn up violations, then we can talk.
That will come into play later when Israel is in a position to destroy Iran’s program and probably kill a shit load of their scientists. Judging from what Israel got, it sounds like Iran had a complete security breakdown, or Israel burned its Iranian networks. But this is a smoking gun to play later. Real or fake, history will decide.
If Israel can get it to be an accepted fact that Iran has an active weapons program, they can attack it militarily and claim self-defense. They bombed an Iraqi site in 1981 with with a similar rationale.
The thing is, the whole subject is shrouded in so much secrecy the public will never know for sure what was being worked on. Are they three weeks away from another Hiroshima, or is it a reactor purely for research purposes? It depends on who you choose to believe. But the more Netanhayu can control that narrative, the more he can try to justify whatever actions he wishes to take.
Bibi really, really wants the US to go to war with Iran. That would be terrible for the US and Iran, and IMO also Israel in the long term, but I’d presume it would help Bibi politically in the short term.
Wait, the Prime Minister of Israel is complaining about someone having a secret nuclear weapon program? Does that avoid hypocrisy on the grounds that Israel’s secret nuclear weapon program isn’t very secret?
Isn’t this the whole point of having the deal? That the USA thought Iran was not being completely truthful about its nuclear program? There’d be no point in a nuclear deal with a country one thought was not trying to obtain nuclear weapons. Otherwise it would be like that tiger repellent joke.