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On Iran, Questions of Detection and Response Divide U.S. and Israel
(New York Times) David E. Sanger - When President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met in the White House on Monday, the main subject was: If Iran decided to race for a nuclear weapon, would the West detect that in time to stop it? Two years ago, Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, asked: "If their policy is to go to the threshold but not assemble a nuclear weapon, how do you tell that they have not assembled? I don't actually know how you would verify that." The truth is that the answer to the question is unknowable. While American intelligence agencies famously misjudged that Saddam Hussein was advancing on a bomb project when he had none, they also have a long record of missing signs that countries were getting very close to a bomb. They missed the timing of the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949. They also got the timing wrong on China in the 1960s, India in the '70s and Pakistan in the '80s. To this day, even after North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, no one is sure whether the country's engineers actually know how to make and deliver a real, working bomb.