Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @ReuelMGerecht. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
February 11, 2023 | The Dispatch
Intention, Not Capacity
The White House’s new way of seeing the Iranian bomb.
February 11, 2023 | The Dispatch
Intention, Not Capacity
The White House’s new way of seeing the Iranian bomb.
Excerpt
Confronted with a regime that has been rapidly increasing its capacity to enrich uranium to bomb-grade, senior officials in the Biden administration have started to ask an eminently sensible question: Why hasn’t the Islamic Republic already gone nuclear? In a perfect world, the CIA or NSA would be able to read the intentions of our enemies and answer that question. Instead, it’s a good day when intelligence services can tell us what our enemies can do. And so with Iran, the Biden administration is in a perverse gray zone, uncertain whether the clerical regime intends to construct a nuclear weapon, and if so, when, and whether it has already mastered the technology required to detonate a nuclear device.
Despite its enormous progress since the program became serious in the early 1990s, the theocracy has exercised a certain restraint in building the wherewithal for an A-bomb. Assuming the regime has mastered the engineering required to construct a nuclear trigger (neither the CIA nor Israel’s Mossad appears to know), volition would be the missing element. As much as it’s a sensible question, asking it, and centering U.S. policy on it, are, of course, self-serving for the White House: The administration gets more wiggle room and less anxiety about Iran’s atomic progress if it surmises that its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has decided for whatever reasons not to construct a nuke.