Why Iran is building the bomb where Iraq failed

WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) -- Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on Sunday that Iran now has enough nuclear material to make a nuclear weapon. He called Iran's development of a nuclear weapon "a very, very bad outcome for the region."

Mullen's comments were especially significant because they served notice that the U.S. defense establishment has quietly shelved the controversial and -- at the time -- much criticized National Intelligence Estimate last year that said Iran was still at least five years away from developing nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to carry them.

As we noted in these columns last month, Iran's success in firing a satellite into Earth orbit on board one of its own missiles serves notice that it effectively already has the capability to build intercontinental ballistic missiles that can put all of Western Europe and the Eastern Seaboard cities of the United States within range.

If a nation can build multistage rockets with "big dumb booster" first stages equipped with engines powerful enough to propel a satellite into orbit, it can also use those same missiles to fire thermonuclear weapons at cities thousands of miles away. That fundamental lesson was true when the Soviet Union used its R7 booster to put Sputnik 1 into orbit, inaugurating the Space Age in October 1957. It was true just months later in February 1958, when a U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency Jupiter C booster -- designed and built by Wernher von Braun and his team -- launched Explorer 1, the very first successful U.S. satellite. And it is still true today for Iran.

It should also be noted that the Iranian nuclear and long-range ballistic missile programs have very different characteristics and tendencies from Iraq's. We now know that U.S. technical intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear and ballistic missile programs pursued by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during his last decade of power were absolutely correct.

The much-maligned U.S. intelligence community, in fact, during the early years of the Bush administration knew far more about those programs than Saddam himself did. Saddam was repeatedly lied to by his fearful lackeys, who knew that the program was a shambles, that it was crippled by highly effective international sanctions imposed by both Republican and Democratic presidents in the United States and by the United Nations, and that it had never recovered from the shattering of Iraq's military-industrial infrastructure in the 1991 Gulf War.

However, Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs have followed a very different path. Iran's nuclear installations have never been systematically attacked by the U.S. Air Force. Iran has had close, highly effective links for at least 20 years with both North Korea and Pakistan. As UPI Editor at Large Arnaud de Borchgrave has documented, A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, has brokered deals with Iran and acted as a middleman to funnel much crucial technology to Tehran. Iran also enjoys extremely warm diplomatic relations with Russia and China, and Russia is now close to finishing at last the Bushehr nuclear reactor complex in Iran.

Consequently, it should come as no surprise that while Iraq's nuclear program was much slower and weaker than was commonly assumed, Iran has moved far faster and more effectively than most U.S. pundits imagined or predicted.

U.S. officials were also slow to recognize the effectiveness of the Iranian programs because senior Bush administration officials and their supporters in the U.S. media cried wolf so irresponsibly and even hysterically in the run-up to the 2003 Gulf War against Iraq. These people therefore understandably lost a great deal of credibility across the intelligence and policy-making spectrum in Washington with regard to Iran, even though on this occasion their fears and warnings were justified.

Mullen's warning Sunday served notice, however, that the U.S. armed forces recognize the speed and success of Iran's technological and strategic progress very clearly. The ball is now in the court of U.S. President Barack Obama to decide how the U.S. government should proceed from here.