Bring on our annihilation as our world in chaos collapses.
It never fails to amaze me how quickly we forget.
Watch our world in chaos collapse.

In this article, Gareth Porter quotes Thomas Fingar several times about the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Fingar provides a few insights into the process of creating such an estimate:

… a draft completed in June 2007, after several months of work, simply reaffirmed the main conclusions of the 2005 estimate, according to Fingar. In testimony in early July before the House Armed Services Committee, Fingar actually restated, word for word, the primary conclusion of the 2005 NIE: “We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons, despite its international obligations and international pressure.”

That draft conclusion reflected what Fingar called “the deference that was paid to prior judgments.” Previous NIE’s “damn near came to be sacred texts,” he said. “To go back and redo, relook at original information and judgment reached earlier — it simply wasn’t done.”

Fingar also provides a detail about the dissent which appears in the 2007 NIE:

[Fingar] said that he had personally dissented from the NIE’s “high confidence” that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. “The dissent,” he explained to me, “was on the level of confidence that the halt had embraced all aspects of the program. I did not think we had enough specific information to have high confidence that it did.“

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This June 9 letter from the Russian Mission to the UN references paragraph 36 from this 2012 report from the relevant UN Panel of Experts. Here’s that portion of the report:

A compilation of posts about Crass:

Crass and Falklands and Nuclear Weapons

Yet More on Crass and CND

More on Crass and CND

CND Symbol and Crass

Crass – They’ve Got a Bomb

I find it interesting that the response below apparently only addresses terrorist acquisition of state-produced chemical or biological agents.

Here are 3 recent IAEA INFCIRCs featuring communications from Iran to the agency:

INFCIRC/938

INFCIRC/937

INFCIRC/936

From this briefing about which I wrote yesterday:

This 1989 briefing book for DCI testimony before the SFRC on CBW issues has some interesting material. I’ll confess to being confused by the redacted portions of open testimony, especially because this paragraph is on the cover page:

This is the portion to which I’m referring. I’m sure there’s a reason.

I wrote this a while back, too.

I’m finally getting around to posting a tidbit I found a while back in Tyler Drumheller’s On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence. 

I am referring to the assertion that, when Drumheller was a CIA operative in South Africa, his sources

provided incontrovertible evidence that the apartheid government had in fact tested a nuclear bomb in the south Atlantic in 1979, and that they had developed a delivery system with assistance from the Israelis. 

I really wish Drumheller had provided more detail about this evidence, which sounds a lot more concrete than the Vela satellite evidence. Obviously, a debate still rages about South Africa’s alleged test and cooperation with the Israelis, so more information would be welcome.