You hit the nail on the head.

Iran is having enormous problems scaling up their centrifuge operation. This was fully expected by western experts although I still fault the NIE stating they won't have a bomb for a decade.

These, after all, are the same folks who missed the Chinese bomb in 1964, the Indian bomb, the Pakistani bomb, and the troubling progress made by Khadaffi before we forced him to shut down his bomb program. Their track record on predicting when a country will go nuclear is a joke.

That said, the Israelis think they are 3 years away which would make the date around 2010. Since it's their neck in the noose, I would tend to believe their prognostications before anything our intel guys said.
Rick Moran | 04.03.07 - 6:09 am | #

Hi Rick,

Good point on the US intel communities past failures, but I would say that Israel's "neck in the noose" doesn't mean they would be any more accurate from essentially the same sources the US is using.

During WW2, the Brits consistently over-estimated German nuke progress purely because their necks were "in the noose" and wasted a lot of effort because of it. Their estimates were out by a matter of almost a decade.

Regards, C
Cernig | Homepage | 04.03.07 - 2:49 pm | #