Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions: A Baseline Assessment
A new report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee discusses what is known about Iran’s potential for developing nuclear weapons, as well as what is suspected or imagined.
“There is no sign that Iran’s leaders have ordered up a bomb,” the report notes. “But unclassified interviews… make clear that Iran has moved closer to completing the three components for a nuclear weapon–fissile material, warhead design and delivery system,” the report stated. Resolving suspicions about the potential military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program “will be one of the most difficult [issues] confronting negotiators for the two countries and the international community,” wrote Committee chairman Sen. John Kerry in his transmittal letter.
See “Iran: Where We Are Today,” A Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, May 4, 2009.
Similarly, “We do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, although we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons by continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” according to another report (pdf) drafted for the U.S. Intelligence Community by the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC).
See “Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 January Through 31 December 2008,” Unclassified Report to Congress, March 2009.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.