Israelis brief Americans...

The latest Israeli thinking on Iran...

Israel thinks that an American intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, published in an unclassified version last week, is unduly optimistic and focuses too narrowly on the last stage of weapons development — fashioning a bomb from highly enriched uranium.

The National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus of 16 American spy agencies, says with “high confidence” that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and with “moderate confidence” that the program had not resumed.

Israeli intelligence estimates say Iran stopped all its nuclear weapons activities for a time in 2003, nervous after the American invasion of Iraq, but then resumed those activities in 2005, accelerating enrichment and ballistic missile development and constructing a 40-megawatt heavy-water reactor in Arak that could produce plutonium.

Israel believes Iran continues to work, however limited by international pressure and economic and technical difficulties, on all phases of building a nuclear weapon. Iran denies ever having had a nuclear weapons program and says its nuclear program is focused on generating electricity.

In meetings on Monday with the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, and Israeli intelligence officials, Admiral Mullen and his staff listened to concerns that Iran could produce a nuclear bomb, unless deterred, by the end of 2009 at the earliest or, more likely, sometime in 2010-11.