US, Israel, Still Far Apart on Iran Nuclear Threat

CIA analysts dispute Netanyahu’s claim of Iran “months” away from making a bomb

SkyNews

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking late Thursday shortly after Israel began its attack on Iran, claimed that in recent months Tehran had taken unprecedented “steps to weaponize” its large stockpile of enriched uranium. This new development, he said, indicated  Iran was developing a nuclear weapon that could be ready for use against the Jewish state "in a matter of months," thus compelling  Israel to strike “preemptively.” 

But Susan Miller, a recently retired senior CIA official who served as the agency’s station chief in Israel, said Friday her soundings of current intelligence officials revealed no change in the U.S. intelligence community’s  long standing threat assessment that Iran is not making a dash for a nuclear weapon despite its uranium enrichment.

“They are not developing a bomb right now,” Miller told SpyTalk in a text.

Aside from the factual discrepancy between the U.S. and Israeli perceptions of the Iranian threat, Netanyahu’s statement raises other questions. He provides no evidence that Iran is further enriching, or as Netanyahu calls it, “taking steps to weaponize,” its large stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb. And his claim that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon and miniaturize it to fit atop a ballistic missile in a few months is also highly questionable.

With Iran using its advanced IR-6 centrifuges, experts and intelligence agencies have assessed Iran’s “breakout time” — the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb — in a few weeks. But according to the Institute for Science and International Security, an independent Washington-based research organization, mastering the complex processes of shaping the uranium into a fissile core, compressing it into a supercritical mass and triggering the explosive chain reaction are major engineering hurdles that could take as long as two years. 

Then, assuming the bomb works, there are the challenges of miniaturizing the device without affecting its yield and reliability and fitting it safely into a heat-resistant warhead atop one of Iran’s homemade Shahab or Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missiles. Those processes add many more months to the bomb’s development, the institute's experts say.

Netanyahu’s Wordplay

The lengthy timeline presents another problem for Netanyahu’s statement: his use of the word “preemptive” to characterize Israel’s attack on Iran. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols points out, “Preemptive attacks, in both international law and the historical traditions of war, are spoiling attacks, meant to thwart an imminent attack. In both tradition and law, this form of self-defense is perfectly defensible, similar to the principle in domestic law that when a person cocks a fist or pulls a gun, the intended victim does not need to stand there and wait to get punched or shot.”

Nichols says that from what we know so far, Israel is conducting what he termed a preventive attack, which he says is when a country chooses to go to war “based on a threat that was real, but not imminent.” As examples, he cites Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Countries may be justified in carrying out such attacks, Nichols says, but he adds the international community has long viewed them as illegal and immoral. 

From the numerous official condemnations of Israel’s Iran attacks that have poured in from leaders around the world, that appears to be the broad consensus.  Yet Netanyahu and his hardline nationalist-religious government appear unfazed. 

With Iranian leaders repeatedly threatening to annihilate Israel, Netanyahu has wanted to attack Iran for decades, but he was always held back by successive U.S. administrations and his own generals and intelligence chiefs. That left him to fight Iran’s proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Yemen’s Houthis and the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria – but never what Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, called “the head of the octopus.” 

Two developments paved the way for Israel’s current attacks. The first was Israel’s military campaign last fall that decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership, decimated its legions of fighters and destroyed most of its missiles, which also neutralized the militia that formed Iran’s most threatening forward line of defense. Subsequent Israeli airstrikes last October took out Iran’s air defense systems, leaving  the Islamic Republic severely weakened. As far back as February, U.S. intelligence officials predicted Israel would likely attack Iran within months. 

Trump Ambivalence

The other is President Trump’s foreign policy. While he’s wary of getting involved in another Middle East war and would like to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, he’s also made it clear to Netanyahu that he must “do what you have to do” to protect Israel. 

And so for Netanyahu, who is deeply unpopular at home over his refusal to accept any responsibility for being surprised by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack; on trial for corruption and facing jail if convicted; and widely blamed for pursuing a seemingly endless war in Gaza; his attack on Iran was the only card he had left that could boost his appeal and allow him to survive politically another day.

The consummate Jewish Israeli politician, Netanyahu solemnly invoked the Holocaust in his deep baritone at the close of his televised address Thursday night. 

“When enemies vow to destroy you, believe them,” he intoned. “When enemies build weapons of mass death, stop them.”

Which brings us back to the discrepancy between the U.S. and Israeli assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat. Former U.S. intelligence officials point out that as a result of the close relations between the Mossad and the CIA, both spy agencies see the same intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. But what’s interpreted in far- away Washington as a serious—but not an imminent—threat is seen differently by Israelis staring it squarely in the face.

As one veteran U.S. official put it, “Where you stand is where you sit.”