How the U.S. Gave Iran the Upper Hand

Iran The U.S. government so badly mishandled the findings on Iran’s uranium-enrichment program that the world now faces a far greater risk of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the Economist says.

In a cover story some two months after U.S. intelligence services concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the British newsweekly says the report undid five years of painstaking diplomacy aimed at keeping the bomb out of Tehran’s hands.

Why not applaud what might be an olive branch from Washington toward its longtime adversary? The problem is that the intelligence estimate played down Iran’s ability to produce uranium, which the authors call the toughest skill in bomb-making. The design and engineering work needed to turn fissile material into weapons, the focus of the National Intelligence Estimate assembled by 16 U.S. agencies, would be relatively easy to hide, and to restart. No one knows how much progress Iran achieved toward building a nuclear warhead before 2003.