U.S., Israel Disagree on Iran Arms Threat

[Washington Post] Peter Finn - U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress Tuesday: "The overall situation - and the intelligence community agrees on this - [is] that Iran has not decided to press forward...to have a nuclear weapon on top of a ballistic missile....Our current estimate is that the minimum time at which Iran could technically produce the amount of highly enriched uranium for a single weapon is 2010 to 2015." On Sunday, Israel's chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, said: "Iran continues to stockpile hundreds of kilograms of low-level enriched uranium and hopes to use the dialogue with the West to buy the time it requires in order to move towards an ability to manufacture a nuclear bomb." Blair said Israel was working from the same facts but had drawn a different interpretation of their meaning. "The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things."


2009-03-11 06:00:00

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