International Herald Tribune
November 14, 2005
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger (New York Times)

In mid-July, senior U.S. 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, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb.

The documents were presented 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 Mideast countries.

The briefing for officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, including the director, Mohamed ElBaradei, was part of a U.S. 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 U.S. officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion.

The documents specified a blast roughly 600 meters, or 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 U.S. officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran.

Also, this presentation is infused with the memory of the faulty U.S. intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons. In this atmosphere, although few countries are willing to believe Iran's denials about nuclear arms, few are willing to accept the U.S. weapons intelligence without question.

"I can fabricate that data," a senior European diplomat said of the documents. "It looks beautiful but is open to doubt."

Robert Joseph, the U.S. under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who led the July briefing, called the warhead intelligence one of many indicators "that together lead to the conclusion Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability."

Even if the documents accurately reflect Iran's advances in designing a nuclear warhead, Western arms experts say that Iran is still far away from producing the radioactive bomb fuel that would form the warhead's heart. U.S. intelligence agencies recently estimated that Iran would have a working nuclear weapon no sooner than the early years of the next decade.

Still, nuclear analysts at the international atomic agency studied the laptop documents and found them to be credible evidence of Iranian progress, European diplomats said.

A dozen officials and nuclear weapons experts in Europe and the United States with detailed knowledge of the intelligence said in interviews that they believed it reflected a concerted effort to develop a warhead.

"They've worked problems that you don't do unless you're very serious," said one European arms official. "This stuff is deadly serious."

In fact, some countries that were skeptical of the intelligence on Iraq - including France and Germany - are deeply concerned about what the warhead discovery could portend, according to several officials.

Officials said that scientists at the U.S. weapons labs, as well as foreign analysts, had examined the documents for signs of fraud. It was a particular concern given the fake documents that emerged several years ago purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger.

Officials said they found the warhead documents, written in Farsi, convincing because of their consistency and technical accuracy and because they showed a progression of developmental work from 2001 to early 2004.

The Iranians deny any knowledge of the warhead plans.

"We are sure that there are no such documents in Iran," Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the country's chief nuclear negotiator, said in an interview in Tehran. "I have no idea what they have or what they claim to have. We just hear the claims."

The United States has helped to produce a consensus among International Atomic Energy Agency board members, although a fragile one.

On Sept. 24, the board passed a resolution against Iran by a vote of 22 to 1, with 12 countries abstaining, including China and Russia.

As a measure of the skepticism the Bush administration faces, officials said the U.S. ambassador to the UN agency, Gregory Schulte, was urging other countries to consult with his French counterpart. "On Iraq we disagreed, and on Iran we completely agree," a senior State Department official said. "That gets attention."

On Nov. 24, the board of the international atomic agency plans to meet again to confront the Iranian nuclear question - and decide whether to take the next step and send the issue to the UN Security Council.

Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.

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