Cheat Sheet

When the National Intelligence Estimate reported last year that Iran had abandoned its nuclear program, it was praised for challenging the Bush administration’s hawkish line. But it turns out, writes Edward Jay Epstein in The International Herald Tribune, that it may have been wrong. The CIA’s report was based on Iran’s termination of a program known as Project 1-11, but the reason Iran may have ended it is that it found other ways of building nuclear warheads. A.Q. Khan and a Russian scientist both helped Iran to work around Project 1-11, and it extracted uranium ostensibly for civilian purposes that could be used in a weapon. It now has enough material to, with further enrichment, build a nuclear bomb. “America's new president will have to confront the reality that Iran now has the capability to change the balance of power in the Gulf, if it so elects to do so, by building a nuclear weapon.”