Late 1970s: US receives intelligence that the Shah had "set up a clandestine nuclear weapons development program."
1979: Shah ousted in the Iranian revolution, ...
1984: Soon after West German engineers visit the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor, Jane's Defence Weekly quotes West German intelligence sources saying that Iran's production of a bomb "is entering its final stages." US Senator Alan Cranston claims Iran is seven years away from making a weapon.
1990s saw a concerted effort by Tel Aviv to portray Iran as a new and existential threat.
1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon .... Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999....Joseph Alpher, a former official of Israel's Mossad spy agency, says "Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1."...
early 1992 a task force of the House Republican Research Committee claimed that there was a "98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two or three operational nuclear weapons."
Similar predictions received airtime, including one from then-CIA chief Robert Gates that Iran's nuclear program could be a "serious problem" in five years or less. Still, the bureaucracy took some time to catch up with the Iran threat rhetoric.
1992: Leaked copy of the Pentagon's "Defense Strategy for the 1990s" makes little reference to Iran, despite laying out seven scenarios for potential future conflict that stretch from Iraq to North Korea.
1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that "Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought" – about five years away...
1998: ... former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years....
2002: President George W. Bush labels Iran as part of the "axis of evil," along with Iraq and North Korea.
In August 2002, the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK, a.k.a. MKO) announces that Iran is building an underground uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, and a heavy water reactor at Arak. It is widely believed that the (doctored) 'evidence' had been passed to the MEK by Israeli intelligence. Enrichment and reactors are not forbidden to Iran as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
2004: Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tells reporters that Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. ....
2006: The drums of war beat faster after the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh quotes US sources saying that a strike on Iran is all but inevitable, and that there are plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against buried Iranian facilities.
2007: President Bush warns that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to "World War III." Vice President Dick Cheney had previously warned of "serious consequences" if Iran did not give up its nuclear program.
2007: A month later, an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with "high confidence" that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.
2008: Then-US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicts that Israel will attack Iran before January 2009, taking advantage of a window before the next US president came to office.
May 2009: US Senate Foreign Relations Committee reports states: "There is no sign that Iran's leaders have ordered up a bomb."
August 2010: An article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic's September issue is published online, outlining a scenario in which Israel would chose to launch a unilateral strike against Iran with 100 aircraft, ... Goldberg predicts that Israel will launch a strike by July 2011.
January 2011: When Meir Dagan steps down as director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, he says that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015. ...
November 2011: The IAEA claims for the first time that Iran is has worked on weapons-related activities for years,...
No comments:
Post a Comment