Former presidential adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues that the much-publicized report on the Iranian nuclear weapons program issued last week by the National Intelligence Estimate has been widely misread.
And he asserts that it does not indicate that Iran has abandoned efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
The key passage in the report reads: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."
In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Kissinger states that the passage “was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.
“The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads.....
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