Posted on 11/12/2005 11:56:29 AM PST by neverdem
In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
The briefing for officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.
The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target - considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.
Nonetheless, doubts about the intelligence persist among some foreign analysts. In part, that is because American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Take the computer model that predicts global warming or predicts a bad credit risk or that accurately predicted what Katrina would do to New Orleans a full week before it happened.
Let's apply those same algorithms to Sadam's WMD evidence. Result. Sadam had them 99.5% probability. But not 100%.
WHAT? Using a computer for Intelligence? Send in Joe Wilson.....with lots of mint tea!
Uh, well it was a secret part until the NY Times blasted it across their pages...
"Robert G. Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who led the July briefing, declined to discuss any classified material from the session but acknowledged the existence of the warhead intelligence."
Something tells me that the gov't enjoys the fact that the story will now at least get international attention.
Somebody has set them up the bomb.
Check out the maps in comment 1 of An Opening for Democrats, However Slim
Are you kidding! ROFLMAO What you say?
Not you, too! Laziest man on Mars!
Plus, computer simulations and accounts of experiments,...
do not a bomb make.
Thanks for the ping!
ping
scary stuff.
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