And if you can’t tell the differnce between India and Iran, there is no hope for you.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but it seems like I have to point this out after every single one of your posts on the CIA: THE CIA IS NOT THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY!

The CIA is (or was) the coordinating agency for NIE’s. An NIE is not CIA analysis, it is the analysis of the entire intelligence community. The fact is, the experts on nuclear proliferation are not resident in the CIA itself but are in the military services, the DOE, and agencies such as DTRA. The CIA’s expertise is not in nonproliferation issues, though they do some reporting and analysis in that area.

Estimates related to Iranian and other nuclear programs are inherently inaccurate because you are trying to predict how soon a country will master a difficult technology. It’s the most difficult estimative analysis there is because certain assumptions must be made about Iranian scientific and technical capability. We know intimately well the science and engineering involved in developing nuclear weapons. We know what difficulties lie ahead for the Iranians. It’s impossible to know how quickly or easily Iranian scientists will be able to overcome the future technical hurdles they face. This explains the diverging estimates with regard to the Iranian program.

This has been visited before. Congress doesn’t know WMD or other technologies from its own ass, yet they consistently criticize the estimates given when they don’t meet their preconceived notions. The exact same thing happened in 1995-1998 with the ballistic missile NIE and the hearings that followed. It turned out the NIE was correct and the Rumsfeld commission was completely off in its estimates. Policy people who have access to intelligence data seem to think they can make better judgments, but they typically cannot (there are rare exceptions).

Now, back to the HEU found on equipment at Natanz. You’re behind the curve on this one. I don’t have time to find you a link now, but that HEU was in a centrifuge feed tube that was bought from Pakistan. The HEU was tested and determined to originate in Pakistan when the centrifuge was used in the Paki program.

If you read the latest IAEA report, there was a further discovery of HEU in some storage containers. Testing on this sample is ongoing, but it’s probably residue from spent reactor fuel that was stored and moved in the containers during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran has an American-built 5MW research reactor that used 90%+ enriched uranium as fuel. The reactor was converted in the late 80’s to LEU, but some of the spent fuel from the original fuel load is still stored in Iran. When the Iraqi’s were attacking Tehran industrial facilities with airstrikes and SCUDS during the 80’s, the spent fuel was moved.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for now.

So why on earth would any sentient human being believe that the IAEA is currently any less craven and inept than they were right up to the time the North Koreans announced that they possessed nuclear weapons and kicked out the IAEA “inspectors?”

It seems to me, that the very first question which ought to be asked of each and every congressional candidate this fall is whether he or she is willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Incidentally, in an interview with Fox’s Neil Cavuto recently, former CIA Director Stansfield Turner offered his opinion that Iran was between 1 year and 2 years away from developing nuclear weapons.