From Global Security Newswire:

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, an assessment that appeared to contradict months of aggressive Bush administration rhetoric on Tehran’s nuclear program, was a “sloppy” document that could have been drafted by a less-than-stellar graduate student, nonproliferation experts said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 29 ).

The report seemingly fails to make the link between the role that preparation of a civilian nuclear program could play in supporting any military nuclear efforts, they said.

The document released to the public, including three pages of key judgments, was a fraction of the entire classified document report by the U.S. intelligence community.

Its crucial finding, that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, was reported as a bombshell revelation that seemed to undermine administration claims about the threat posed by Iranian nuclear ambitions (see GSN, Dec. 4, 2007 ).

For experts, though, the way the anonymous authors of the slim unclassified document defined “nuclear weapons program,” tucked away in a footnote at the bottom of the first page, poses problems.

“For purposes of this estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapons design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work,” the report states. “We do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.”

Civil and military efforts cannot be so discretely divorced, according to analysts speaking at a U.S. Institute of Peace panel discussion here.

Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which Iran belongs, nations are permitted to pursue and develop civilian nuclear technology. That technology, however, could provide an avenue to a weapons program. Once a capacity for uranium enrichment is achieved, the same equipment be used to produce nuclear weapon materials.

Tehran has rebuffed repeated international demands that it halt its enrichment activities, which today consist of about 3,000 working enrichment centrifuges. Iran’s intransigence has resulted in two rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions; member states are now considering a third sanctions resolution (see related GSN story, today).

“There are levels of paradox about this document,” said Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, adding that it was written “in a sloppy and misleading way.”

The definition of what exactly constitutes a “nuclear weapons program” is at best a failure to grasp the phenomenon of nuclear proliferation and at worst deliberately biased, Cohen said. “They insist on the most narrow definition of a nuclear weapons program.”

David Kay, who once led U.S. efforts to uncover WMD activities in Iraq, was just as critical.

“It looks like it was written by a really inadequately trained graduate student,” said Kay, now a senior research fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. The document seems to exhibit a failure to understand that civil and military nuclear programs are “one in the same in terms of the science,” he said.

The assessment “may represent what is in the classified version,” but “it really does look like something that was almost an afterthought.”

“I suspect that if this represents an accurate view of what’s in the classified version, it will not be many years [before] we judge this NIE to be as wrong as the Iraqi NIE,” Kay said.

The assessment might be, in part, a response to mistakes made in U.S. assessments of Iraqi unconventional weapons programs. “I think in fact the people writing this were in large measure trying to correct a past failure and because it was public that plays into a policy debate in a way I find unseemly and not very useful,” Kay said.

Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran and former intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, argued the media overstated the degree to which the report represents a change in intelligence community opinions.

“It’s important to remember, to point out, just what hasn’t changed in the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community,” he said.

Iran is continuing uranium enrichment; the time frame within which intelligence officials believe Tehran could produce a weapon is unchanged; and analysts continue to assess that Iranian officials have not been truthful regarding their intentions in pursuing nuclear technology, Pillar said. Lastly, the document notes that whether Tehran decides to exercise its nuclear weapon option depends on Iranian decisions yet to be taken.

“All of that is unchanged,” he said. “It’s what the intelligence community was saying a couple of years ago.”

The latest assessment adds information about clandestine weapons design work, but in the last U.S. intelligence assessment on Iran officials advanced no such judgment about clandestine weapons activity, Pillar said.

“One will search in vain for the judgment that was supposedly reversed,” he said. “It just wasn’t there.”

He criticized the way in which “the whole thing is structured to emphasize what has changed and not what has continued.”

“I think it’s hard for anyone in this field to read the summary and feel that its an artfully done piece of work,” said George Perkovich, director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.