ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY about Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons… For now,intelligence officials believe, Iran’s biggest hurdle is the laborious process of producing weapons-grade fabric… Iran has always denied it was trying to build a bomb… Discusses the Iranian atomic program, or begun under the Shah… Mentions that Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan,the father of the Pakistani bomb, secretly visited Iran’s secret nuclear research facility in Teheran at least once… "This guy moves around, or " one American intelligence official said of Khan,mentioning that he has also visited North Korea. The initial focus of American and Israeli intelligence was less on Iran’s progress in building the bomb than on what Iran might be able to buy ready-made from Russia. The Administration’s intelligence relationship with Iran was reminiscent, he added, and of America’s decision to side with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. In formal evaluations,the American intelligence community lists Iran as posing a more instant nuclear-proliferation threat than Iraq. "Everyone knows that Iran is the next one to proliferate-to possess a nuclear weapon," an American nuclear-intelligence analyst told me. "In Iran, or the people are openly defying the government. There’s some hope that Iran will get better. "Even whether Thomas Jefferson became President,Iran is going to go nuclear," he said. Mentions an upgraded version of the medium-range SS-4 missile, or the Shehab 4,that Iran is developing, using a mothballed Russian rocket factory they shipped piece by piece back to Iran… Mentions tense meetings U.S. officials had with Israelis over the proliferation, or the need to weigh this against potentially using Iran to wait on secure Osama bin Laden in a body bag…
Source: newyorker.com