A Dose of Real-World Intel on Iran

I’ve been out of the intelligence business for many years now, so I’ve stayed out of the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. I learned a long time ago that when people who don’t have access to highly classified intelligence about an issue like this one prattle on about what they think is happening, or is likely to happen, they tend to get it wrong. But the debate over Iran’s nuclear program has become so feckless — so disconnected from reality — that perhaps it’s time to inject a dose of what those of us who served on the national security side of the Reagan administration used to call “real-world intelligence.”

Let’s focus on the three big questions that lie at the core of this potentially literally explosive issue:

When, precisely, will Iran have a nuclear weapon?

In the real world of intelligence, you never get a report from a spy saying, “This country will have a nuclear bomb two weeks from Thursday.” It just doesn’t work that way. By the time a spy tells you there’s a nuclear weapon at the military base here, or hidden in the warehouse with the green roof at the end of the dirt road there — that country has had a nuclear bomb for years.

To estimate when a country will have a nuclear bomb, you work with ranges, estimates, and projections based on evidence and experience. And when you look at Iran through this prism, here’s what you’ll see:

It was the United States that invented the nuclear bomb, of course, in World War II. The total elapsed time from launching the Manhattan Project to Hiroshima was six years. And that was back in the 1940s, well before computers were widely available. There’s no need for Iran to re-invent the bomb; they can download the plans. Or they can ask any grad student at MIT or Cal Tech how to build a nuclear bomb. Buying the necessary parts is difficult, and expensive, but these parts are available on the black market to any country, or any group of terrorists, with the will and the cash. The really hard part is creating the nuclear fuel, for instance by converting uranium ore into enriched U-235, or plutonium-239. But it can be done by any country that has the scientific and mathematical talent, and the money. Indeed, quite a few countries have already done it. Iran is Persia; they’ve got the scientific and mathematical talent, and oil exports have provided more than enough money. And they’ve been working at it for several years now.