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on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon or acquiring the
“breakout capacity” to make one, but never, despite the dire warning
of Israeli leaders dating back to the 1990s, doing either, preferring to
dwell in the Islamic Republic’s favored zones: ambivalence and
inertia. As one awaits this tortuous Godot, one might recall a forecast
of a bomb by 1999 (Shimon Peres) or 2004 (Ehud Barak), or Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of “a messianic apocalyptic cult
controlling atomic bombs,” or my friend Jeffrey Goldberg’s allusion
in The Atlantic last year to a “consensus” that there is “a better than
50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.” That
would be next month.
It might also be worth recalling that Meir Dagan, the former head of
Israel’s Mossad spy agency, declared last month that attacking Iran
would be “a stupid idea.” He suggested his main worry was not Iran
itself but Netanyahu’s susceptibility to “dangerous adventure.”
Dagan’s concerns have surfaced as Seymour Hersh concludes in a
New Yorker article this month that, as he put it in one interview,
“There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing
anything to make a nuclear weapon.”
His reporting reveals that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate
(N.I.E.) of 2007 — which concluded “with high confidence” that Iran
had halted a nuclear-weapons program in 2003 — still pertains in the
classified N.I.E. of 2011. As a retired senior intelligence official put
it to Hersh, there’s nothing “substantially new” that “leads to a
bomb.”
In other words, Iran, epicenter of inefficiency, unable to produce a
kilowatt of electricity through its Bushehr nuclear reactor despite
decades of effort, is still doing its old brinkmanship number.
Remember, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the guardian of the
revolution. That is a conservative business. Breakout, let alone a
bomb, is a bridge too far if the Islamic Republic is what you’ve

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