(The New American)—The United States is close to getting embroiled in a full-on, offensive war against Iran — possibly over a nonexistent threat.
The Pentagon has been moving carrier strike groups into the Middle East, and President Donald Trump has been considering offensive military attacks on Iran. But recent news reports suggest that before Israel launched its attack on Iran last Thursday, U.S. intelligence didn’t believe the Islamic autocracy was close to building nuclear weapons.
When the Israelis told American intel officials that Tehran “was conducting renewed research useful for a nuclear weapon,” the Americans “weren’t convinced that the information pointed to a decision by Tehran to build a bomb,” according to a Wall Street Journal article published Tuesday.
The Israelis presented information about “a multi-point initiation system” and Iranian work on “neutron particles to generate a chain reaction — a critical part of nuclear fission — as well as on plastic explosives and on integration of fissile material in an explosive device,” according to the report. But the Americans, despite agreeing that Iran has made some progress in developing nuclear weapons, believed the intel “only showed Iran was still researching nuclear weapons, including revisiting work it had done before its nuclear weapons program shut down in 2003.” Moreover, “the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb.”
U.S. Intel
The Journal report is based on conversations with senior intel officials, another U.S. official, and two congressional staffers familiar with the conversations. It corroborates a major point in the annual threat assessment that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 26. “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” the assessment said.
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