Is Iran really developing nuclear weapons?

1 ANSWERS

1. Amit bang
   

   Analysts of all political stripes, including, most importantly, members of the new U.S. president's foreign policy team, seem to agree that Iran is striving to build the bomb. Why else would a state risk further economic isolation, or worse, to develop nuclear-related technologies whose output it could pursue more cheaply and easily on the open market?
   
   But as the foreign policy cognoscenti argue the merits of enhanced sanctions packages, grand bargains, and military options in changing Tehran's behavior, it is worth reconsidering the question of whether Iran even plans to develop nuclear weapons, and how certain anyone outside of Iranian decision-making circles can be of that answer.
   
   The controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, appears to have been all but forgotten. Regardless, more instructive is the inverse of that report's central point; in order to halt a program it must first exist, a fact that suggests the intelligence community has significant evidence that Tehran, at one point at least, authorized the development of nuclear weapons.

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