The senior Israeli official’s tone was dire. In only a few years, the Iranians would be ready to launch a nuclear bomb. He minced no words. “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”
The year this apocalyptic prediction was made: 1995.
As we all know, Israel survived the year 2000. Iran did not get the bomb. And earlier this month, it was revealed that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s latest estimate has pushed that dreaded date back to 2013, when it posits that Iran will finally be able to produce highly enriched uranium, a key ingredient in any nuclear weapon.
Then again, the State Department could be as wrong as that Israeli official back in 1995. To listen to the drumbeat emanating from Tel Aviv, the Iranians are much, much closer. In March, Amos Yadlin, the head of Israeli military intelligence, announced that Iran had “crossed the technological threshold.” In only a year, they would be equipped with what they need to build some kind of crude nuclear device.
It’s hard to know how to make sense of all these divergent estimates. Though they have become more numerous and more conflicting since the beginning of this year, analyses of Iran’s nuclear capabilities have always been a matter of broad interpretation. From the moment that Iran announced in the mid-1980s its intention to launch a nuclear program, intelligence agencies in Israel and the United States — which analysts agree both look at the same raw data — have set and reset the nuclear clock over and over again.
Israeli intelligence, in particular, has announced a “point of no return” almost every year, a continually unfulfilled prediction that some say erodes the credibility of its analysts.
What some see as the fine point of when exactly Iran gets the bomb is not inconsequential. The time frame for both diplomacy and a military response that would have serious ramifications hinge on this question. It is for this reason, a wide range of independent observers agree, that politics has played the most central role in how intelligence on Iran and its nuclear program is interpreted and packaged for the public.
“Clearly the fact that some of these assessments seem to change rather rapidly has fueled the suspicion that much of it is actually politically motivated,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.
The problem, according to Parsi and others, is that the elements that make up any assessment of Iran’s actual progress can be read differently.
From a technical standpoint, there are a series of steps on the path toward making a bomb, each of which can be interpreted as the menacing “threshold.” Beginning with building large quantities of centrifuges to producing low-enriched uranium and then more highly enriched weapons-grade uranium to finally having a device to launch a bomb, the red lights could start flashing at any point.
By all accounts, Iran has managed to produce low-enriched uranium, possibly enough to make a crude bomb. Low-level enrichment for civilian nuclear uses is legal under international law. But based on its incomplete answers to the International Atomic Energy Agency, world leaders, neighboring countries and many security analysts are deeply concerned that this is not all Iran has in mind. The question of Iranian nuclear weapons development remains murky. According to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Iran stopped all work on a nuclear weapons program in 2003. But this piece of intelligence is also disputed.
“This is one of these cases that where you stand determines to a large extent what is your assessment,” said Shlomo Brom, a former Brigadier General in the Israeli Army and now senior research fellow and director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “If you are at the possible receiving end of this thing — and that is the feeling of most Israelis — then you don’t want to take chances. You look at the worst possible scenario. It’s only if you’re in an institute somewhere in the Western world then you can make sober analysis and make predictions based on the more probable assumptions.”
Further underlining the degree to which politics plays a role in these predictions is the long history of unrealized Armageddon scenarios — and it is not Israeli intelligence alone that has sounded the alarms.
In 1992, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, pointedly upended conventional thinking about Iran’s nuclear progress when he gave a much shorter time span for attainment of the bomb. “Is it a problem today?” he asked at the time, “probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.”
Another rash of predictions arrived in 1995. When Israeli government officials were quoted in American newspapers talking about a five-year timeline, officials with the Clinton administration quickly countered with qualifications and their own counter predictions. The small conflict led to a meeting in Jerusalem between William Perry, the defense secretary and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They emerged from their discussions to announce that they were in agreement — Iran would get the bomb in seven to 15 years (next year, that is, at the latest).
Much of the speculation about Iran throughout the 1990s had to do with the possibility that its nuclear program was being boosted with outside help, from Russian loose nukes to technical help from North Korea. At least one of these outside elements did evade American intelligence, the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan who is known to have aided the Iranians in advancing their program at least twice, in the late 1980s and mid 1990s.
This unknown variable of outside help also allowed for a wide range of timelines.
Throughout the last decade, the warnings have become more dire at the same time that it has become harder to see into what David Albright, a physicist who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, called “the black box of Iran’s decision making.” This further unknown — what Iranian leaders intend — is one more fluid element that gives both the skeptics and alarmists an opportunity to project their own thinking and come up with independent predictions.
Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, for one, views Iran’s leadership as “a messianic apocalyptic cult” who will not be deterred by Israel’s own nuclear weapons capability. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran,” he told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in May.
In contrast, Anthony Cordesman, a widely respected Middle East strategic analyst who has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations, and Abdullah Toukan, an adviser to the late King Hussein of Jordan, present an Iran that is a rational, if hostile, actor, influenced by concrete geopolitical perceptions of its own. These include “unfriendly neighbors surrounding them, including nuclear tipped Pakistan” just to Iran’s east; the “grave threat to its security” that Iran sees in America’s military presence in Iraq immediately to its west and the presence of the American Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf waters lapping its south, the two men wrote in a recent study. This is seen also in the context of what was, until recently, America’s declared policy of “regime change,” they note. Finally, say Cordesman and Toukan, Iran’s fear of “Israeli intentions to destabilize Iran and attack its nuclear facilities,” drive it to develop its capabilities all the more.
“The Israelis always like to posit that Iran is one year away,” Albright said. “There is an honesty to these assessments because they do have technical analysts in Israel who are looking very closely. They could be talking about a certain number of centrifuges built, a certain type of covert facility, various other things, but it’s always one year away.”
Many American analysts think these Israeli nightmare scenarios are distracting from what might be the most plausible explanation of Iran’s intentions.
Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. He believes that Iran has been slowly engaged since the 1970s in building a peaceful civilian nuclear program that has what he called “surge capacity” of 18 months. That is the amount of time it would take for Iran to boost low-enriched uranium for power plants and other non-military uses to highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium and deploy this as an atomic bomb, Sick said.
According to Sick, this interpretation is shared by many other analysts and backed up by statements from those who began the program under the Shah in the 1970s. But others warn that Iran may be developing a nuclear weapon capability secretly that it could deploy much more quickly.
Either way would mean that Iran is seeking a kind of nuclear ambiguity. It wants to be threatening without actually publicly introducing another nuclear weapon into the Middle East — a clear turning point likely only to set off a race by its neighbors to obtain nuclear weapons of their own. It is a position not dissimilar from the one now held by Israel, which still does not publicly disclose that it has the bomb.
Asked why this more nuanced scenario — one that would do nothing to assuage or discredit Israeli fears — is not more widely discussed, Sick answered, “It doesn’t sell newspapers.”
Contact Gal Beckerman at beckerman@forward.com
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Somehow I get the feeling that the Forward would like to see Israeli policy on Iran's nukes influenced by Peace Now and J Street. And to allay any concerns over Israel's security, we only need to recall that Hillary Clinton said that if Iran nuked Israel the U.S would react with great force or something to that effect. This should suffice to allay all the concerns of all the 'progressive' Jews in the U.S.
As a progressive Jew, I fully support Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, and call upon progressive organizations to join my support of this. Only a nuclear armed Iran can check Israel and the US hedgmonic designs on the Middle East. As for the zionist inspired election unrest in Iran, it was grossly exaggerated and peacefully extinguished. Get used to is-Mahmoud AHmedinejad is a charismatic man of peace, and I hope Mr Ahmadinejad and Georg Soros get a Noble Peace Prize soon for standing up to zionism
Norman How do I know that you are not a forgery? Despite your rude remarks, you are welcome to daven in my shul in San Francisco
No more wars for Israel ... enough lives have been lost already. It seems that some Israelies cannot find any room for other people to progress and to advance their civilization beyond the most rudimentary levels of modern development, such as nuclear power can provide. Enough of this constant drum-beat for more war in the Middle East.
Well Israel's got around 200 nuclear weapons. Who's at the likely receiving end of those? Shouldn't they be terribly worried? How about taking out Israel's nukes? That would serve peace! Can't really have 200 nukes in Israel and squeal about evil Iranians! Besides the Iranians need nuclear energy, oil's running out.
Why shouldn't Cuba have nukes? After all, the US has embargoed them for nearly 50 years, and has even tried to kill Castro on a number of occasions. Or Chavez of Venezuela? He was nearly deposed in a US inspired coup. Or Mexico? After all, the US essentially stole half of Mexico's territory before 1847.
The reason why Israel has nukes is because the US did not give Israel a formal treaty of alliance back in the early 1950s, and put Israel under the nuclear umbrella as it did with Germany and Japan and other countries in NATO, ANZUS and other formal alliances. Most Americans don't realize that there is no formal treaty of alliance that obligates the US to come to ISrael's aid, or vice versa. Constantly threatened to be wiped from the map by 21 Arab states, as well as some of the other 56 Muslim states, I don't know of any other country that has more right to a nuclear deterrent than Israel. Who is invading the US these days? WHy does the US need thousands of nukes? Israel absolutely needs nukes, and also has the right to keep its mortal enemies from acquiring them as well. ANyone who doesn't get this, is either being disingenuous or just hoping to see the Jewish nation finally destroyed.
Jgarbuz why should a nation or entity of possibly 6 or 7 million persons have nuclear bombs? Get real will you!
There is no way that Israe, a tribe of 6 million, could possess hundreds of nukes and be able to afford them without massive US support. Again get real. Israel has these nukes and American citizens pay for them. How did a small nation like Israel get hold of expensive nukes ... again the US supplied them of course. Those zionist traitors in Washington will face the gallows some day ... the Evangelicals are falling from power as we speak and Israel will face their just destiny alone. It is pure insanity for the most powerful nation on earth to support and arm a small tribe of interlopers in the Middle East who practice the most severe form of discrimination found on earth. Israel does not deserve one more life to protect her selfish ambitions in the Middle East. After she is gone, then the good Israelis can learn once more to live among the nations of the earth in peace and tranquility.
lavon affair,uss liberty,pollard.what sort of nation bites the hand that feeds it.billions in aid yet they spit in our face and play games on settlements.the biggest enemy of israel is israeli gov't.
Does the Forward receive any Soros money?
Get used to it. Iran already has the bomb. They are illuminating the same cat and mouse game we have seen from Israel, for the past 40 plus years, in respect of their Nuc programme. If you wish to see Iran disarming, why not take them up on their offer of making the Middle East a "Nuclear Free Zone".
Do take into account that, it was the Iranian's who freed the Jews from slavery in the first place!The reason for all the contempt towards the Zionists is that they have always turned against those who help them to exercise their rights as human beings. No wonder Ahmadinejad wants to put them out of their misery.
I accept that we made a mistake, in releasing the Jews from the bondage and slavery in the first place. But why not try to re-educate them in the art of how to stop in spreading rumors through the media and assimilation with the rest of the world, as well as, a sincere effort in removing the idea of them being "the chosen people!" and therefore the false sense of bing on the path/right at all times, out of their customs and culture.
The Forward continues to attract comments from anti Jewish bigots but even that serves a purpose. These bigots expose their blind hate and unlimited ignorance. It is important that the rest of us never forget what lurks out there.
This article did little to enlighten about Iran's nukes. It should have raised some relevant questions as follows: 1. How come the U.N. is not allowed to fully inspect what Iran is doing so we do not have to guess and speculate? 2. Is Iran developing nukes elsewhere such as in Syria (U.S. knew nothing) or in Sudan? Saddam Hussein had a WMD program in Libya and the U.S. knew nothing. 3. How come it is taking Iran far longer than any other nuclear power to build its nukes? It has ample funds and access to technology from A. Q. Kahn and North Korea. Is this seeming delay a ruse? 4. Did Iran buy any of the suitcase nukes that went 'missing' from the former Soviet Union? 5. Wouldn't it make sense for Iran to play for time and first acquire an ample supply of nukes and delivery systems BEFORE going public with its ultimatums?
Instead of idle speculation we should try to get answers to the relevant questions.
There is no evidence whatever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Yet American and Israeli politicians have continually made political hay by claiming that there is one, and that production of an Iranian nuclear bomb is "one year away." This has been going on every year since the early 1990's. Additionally, the Mujaheddin-e Khalk (MEK or MKO), a U.S.-certified terrorist group dedicated to the overthrow of Iran's government continues to curry favor with the west by supplying dubious information about Iran's nuclear intentions. This masquerade needs to be exposed. Gal Beckerman points out the chicanery in these claims, and the venal motives of those who make them. This article needs to be widely read--especially by those commentators who still assume without foundation that Iran is making a bomb, or that Iran would launch some first strike on Israel for no reason whatever. There is no evidence for either. No evidence!
We as people from all nations shoud want peace. We all come from the G-D of All That Is, the G-D of Mankind. for it is written....Jeremiah 32 "I am the LORD, the G-D of All Mankind. Is anything too hard for Me?"
All nations are under G-D not just U. S. or Israel. even if they seem to want it taken off, not all -----but-----their are those who want G-D off everything. These are the people that want control, and have created their own rules, and laws for the world, they worship the creature they created for them selves. And not the G-D that created them.
Abraham it is written of him...."The seed of Abraham My friend". Abraham is the aspect of love. Isaac, symbolize, fear, strength, for it is written...."And By the arm of His strength". Jacob G-D named him after Himself ---Israel, Jacob, turned and became the miror image of G-D, for it is written...." So Elohim created man in His own image" Genesis 1 after the likeness of his Master.
Miriam, did not go into error...that is why it is written.... Do we not worship the G-D of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? It is written the people worshiped the G-D of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob up until her death. After they fell into error, due to the control of mankind. Israel, was to be the tree of life, below having food for all. Now the tree has not fruit. It is written...Israel is My Son, My firstborn". Exodus 4 The Tree of Life with Food for All. Error seeded inthem and the harvest is small. This is why Isaiah 1 was given these words......For you shall be ashamed of the oaks in which you delighted; and you shll blush for the gardens that you have chosen. Today look at all the religions, the leaders the tall oaks of nations.
for it is written....Isaiah 1.....For you shll be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water. The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.
Daniel 4 As for the Shechinah, which dwells among the lower beings only. Israel below are considered Her life, the Torah Her sustenance, and prayer an offering, which offers the Shechinah for a union with Hisband. That why it is written in Job 33 The Spirit of G-D made me( below, flesh) but the breath of the Almighty gives me life. (above, everlasting life)
During the exile, it is said that the Shechinah said to her Husband,( "Give me children, or else I die" Genesis 30)
Mating with Her is accomplished by the Righteous, who great desire is to desire what G-D of All That Is desires in His heart and mind for all of us to have. That why it is written in Psalm 51 Behold, thou desirest Truth in the inward parts (heart and mind): and in the hidden part (the Capstone, the Rock, the LORD of HOST) .....thou shalt make me, to know Wisdom.
You will enter in only when you put sin out....that is why it is written....Psalm 101-:1-8. The Rock or the hidden part is the true foundation, the true temple that G-D has been building from every generation, that turned and became that miror image, and sealed in their inward parts the law of G-D knowing truth and wisdom.
Those who do not turn....it is written of them....Jeremiah 31 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those day-s (day-s we are all given) saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their G-D, and they shall be my people.
We are to be elevated to that known place......hidden part.....just as one aims the stone in a slingshot. Just as one aims the stone carefully, so as not to miss the target, so should thought be elevated with concentration on the name of G-D that is sealed upon our hearts and minds, for we now become the ark, that holds the two sided tablets that Moses and every generation after broke. For this reason it is written in Psalm 118 The Stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
It is written.....Isaiah 1 In day-s to come the mountain (the hidden part, the Rock, Strong Tower) .....of the LORD'S house shall be established as the hightest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shll stream to it. Many people shall come and say, " Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the G-D of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may wald in his paths."
This was pland long ago. That is why it is written... Isaiah 25 O LORD, You are my G-D; I will exalt You and praise Your name, for in perfect faithfulness You have done marvelous things, things planned long ago.
Psalm 140 O G-D, the LORD, the strength of my salvation, You have covered my head in the day of battle.
This article demonstrates to me that so-called Progressive Jews are enemies of the Jewish people. It is quite obvious that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon and along with the Iranian government's overt support of radical Islamic groups the future seems quite bleak indeed. Yet here we have another article by another Progessive Jew who is essentially poo pooing concerns regarding Iranian nuclear ambitions. Articles like this is why I cancelled my subscription to the Forward several years ago.
NUCLEAR....
It is written of Isaiah 10...Therefore shall the LORD, the LORD of Host, (the remenant that G-D host's are those who have put out sin rest upon the G-D of host).....send among his fat ones leanness; and under His glory He shall kindle (the enemies of Israel) a burning like the burning of a fire. And the light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame: and it shall burn and devour His thorns and his briers IN ONE DAY; And shall consume the glory of His forest shall be----few,----that a ---child---may write them. And it shall come to pass in that DAY, that the REMNANT OF ISRAEl, and such as are escaped of the HOUSE OF JACOB, shall no more again stay upon ---him---that smote them; but shall stay up on the LORD, the HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL, in truth. The REMNANT OF JACOB, unto the MIGHTY G-D. For though thy people Israel be as sand of the sea, yet a REMNANT of them shlll return: the consumption DECREE SHALLL OVERFLOW WITH THE RIGHTOUS. For the LORD G-D OF hosts SHALL MAKE A CONSUMPTION, even determined, in the midst of all the land.