"Three of the most pressing national security issues facing the Obama administration—nuclear proliferation, the war in Iraq, and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan—have one element in common: Iran," write William Luers [2], Thomas Pickering and Jim Walsh [3] in the New York Review of Books [4].
"The Islamic Republic has made startling progress over the past few years in its nuclear program... Setting aside recent, misleading reports that Iran already has enough nuclear fuel to build a weapon, the reality is that Tehran now has five thousand centrifuges for enriching uranium and is steadily moving toward achieving the capability to build nuclear bombs. Having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon is not the same thing as having one, and having a large stock of low-enriched uranium is not the same as having the highly enriched uranium necessary for a bomb. But the Obama administration cannot postpone dealing with the nuclear situation in Iran, as President Bush did."
(An abbreviated version of this article appears in today's International Herald Tribune [5]. The authors' work in Iran has been supported by Ploughshares Fund.)
Links
[1] https://ploughshares.org/file/231
[2] http://www.ploughshares.org/expert.php?id=214
[3] http://www.ploughshares.org/expert.php?id=135
[4] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22271
[5] http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/opinion/edluers.1-409075.php