TPM Book Club
Levi's book is especially timely this week in regard to the revised NIE on Iran. And as I interpret his work, it leads to a nuanced and mixed interpretation of the NIE. On the one hand, as George Bush and John Bolton rightly point out, enriching uranium (or making and separating plutonium) is the hardest part of building a bomb, and Iran hasn't stopped its efforts on the HEU front. On the other hand, building a high-quality, modest-weight, high-reliability nuclear bomb isn't trivial even once you have the fissile material. You need good machining, symmetrical explosives and precise electronics, neutron generators, neutron reflectors, etc. So this week's news is good; it does show at least a partial slowdown of Iran's program, even if hardly a "halt" to it.
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