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Pentagon Study Finds Agencies Ill Equipped to Detect Foreign Nuclear Efforts
(New York Times) David E. Sanger and William J. Broad - A three-year study by the Pentagon has concluded that American intelligence agencies are "not yet organized or fully equipped" to detect when foreign powers are developing nuclear weapons or ramping up their existing arsenals. The 100-page report by the Defense Science Board contends that the detection abilities needed in cases like Iran - including finding "undeclared facilities and/or covert operations" - are "either inadequate, or more often, do not exist." American officials first learned of a reactor in Syria when the Israelis alerted them. North Korea built a uranium enrichment facility that went undetected until the North showed it off to a visiting professor from Stanford. "The lesson from this history is that we found these at the last moment, if we found them at all," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA expert on terrorism and nuclear proliferation now at the Brookings Institution. The report implicitly called into question whether administration officials should be so confident that they would detect if Iran ever violated the recent nuclear accord.