Israelis Brief Top U.S. Official on Iran

[New York Times] Steven Erlanger - Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heard Israel's assessment of Iran's nuclear ambitions during a visit to Israel on Monday. Israel thinks that an American intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons program, published in an unclassified version last week, is unduly optimistic and focuses too narrowly on the last stage of weapons development - fashioning a bomb from highly enriched uranium. Israeli intelligence estimates say Iran stopped all its nuclear weapons activities for a time in 2003, nervous after the American invasion of Iraq, but then resumed those activities in 2005, accelerating enrichment and ballistic missile development and constructing a 40-megawatt heavy-water reactor in Arak that could produce plutonium. Israel believes Iran continues to work on all phases of building a nuclear weapon.


2007-12-11 01:00:00

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