Nuclear Sites Trump Chooses to Ignore US Intelligence Agencies

When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran's nuclear programme had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.

- James Risen

The debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks since the height of the global war on terror.

The US intelligence agencies have concluded that while Iran has a programme to enrich uranium, it has never built any atomic bombs. It is an assessment that has been at the core of its intelligence reporting on Iran since at least 2007. This has led to constant debates over the significance of Iran's uranium enrichment programme versus "weaponisation" or bomb-building.

Israel and the Iran hawks have repeated that the debate over enrichment versus weaponisation is not significant, because Iran could build a bomb relatively quickly. But Iran suspended its weaponisation programme in 2003 and hasn't tried to build a bomb since; it's clear the Iranian regime has seen its interests are better served by maintaining the threat of having a nuclear weapon rather than actually having one.

Iran's reluctance to build a bomb while maintaining the threat of a nuclear programme has parallels with the way the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein handled his supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. Saddam halted development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s but never divulged that to the US or the UN.