Iran's nukes

Seymour Hirsch has an article in the New Yorker this week questioning whether Iran is intent on building a nuclear bomb. The implication is that Iran is another Iraq: no (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction here.

Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There’s a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh#ixzz1O8Wqb5cr

(You need a subscription to read the entire article. Admittedly, the excerpt is more controversial and supplies less context than the whole thing; read the fuller version carefully and you'll realize the real question among intelligence analysts is not necessarily intent, but how close the Iranians are to succeeding, which is a matter of intense debate. Still, the excerpt not only shows the gist of the piece but probably what most people will get out of it.)

Reading the article, you kind of wonder what sort of evidence it would take to convince some people that Iran DOES want a bomb - will only a nuclear cloud do?

Truly, if you want to know how serious Iran is about its nuclear weapon program, you don't need access to classified information about centrifuges and viruses - all you really have to do is look at the work Iran is doing on delivery systems - aka, missiles. There is a great deal of information available, a surprising amount of it unclassified. Contrast that to the (also) publicly available information about Iraq's delivery systems just before the Gulf War - intel that should have tipped the CIA off - and then decide what they're up to.

But I guess that's all for the new postal system they're planning.