Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [196]
• The proper way to pose alternative analytic questions that yield true alternative hypotheses instead of supporting or simply refuting the current one
• The need to rethink the prevalence of denial and deception (see chap. 6)
• The larger estimative process (see chap. 6)
The proliferation issue was then made even more contentious politically by the release in December 2007 of the unclassified KJs of a new NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, a reversal of the judgments made in a 2005 estimate.
Iraq WMD, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and a few other intelligence experiences, will probably be a touchstone for years to come in debates over intelligence analysis. (Iraq may also have an ironic and dangerous effect on other would-be proliferators. The lesson they may take away from Iraq’s fate could be: Get a nuclear weapon. Iraq, without a weapon, was overrun with impunity, whereas North Korea, which claims to have tested a nuclear weapon, is going to receive aid in exchange for ceasing its nuclear weapons program.)
The role of intelligence in the WMD policy area is fairly obvious: Identify proliferation programs early enough to stop them before they are completed. As former DCI Tenet noted in his memoirs, for proliferation policy to be successful, intelligence must identify and discern the nature of a program before a test occurs, not record the fact of a test, as was the usual case in tracking Soviet weapons developments. Intelligence also targets the clandestine international commerce in some of the specialty items required to manufacture WMD. However, proliferation programs are, by their very nature, covert. Thus, the types of collection that the United States must undertake tend to come from the clandestine side of the intelligence community. The evidence of nascent programs—as well as mature programs—that U.S. intelligence might obtain may be ambiguous. Fuzzy information complicates the ability of policy makers to confront potential proliferators with confidence or to convince other nations that a problem exists. As the exposure of Pakistani A. Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation network shows, however, doing so is not an impossible task. But it is time-consuming (the effort against Khan went on for years) and sensitive diplomatically. In the case of the Khan network, the sensitivities of Pakistan had to be taken into account, given its support for the war on terrorism. Khan’s activities also confirmed the international nature of nuclear proliferation. His enterprises spanned three continents and may have been involved in more than just the Pakistan and Libyan programs. This points up another intelligence challenge: determining how vast the interconnections are between would-be proliferators and would-be providers. Although the disruption of the Khan network was a major intelligence success, parts of the program could continue to operate without Khan’s guidance.
STOPPING PROLIFERATION. Beyond the problem of amassing convincing intelligence lies the policy question: How can a would-be proliferator be stopped? The preferred means is diplomacy, but the track record in this area is unimpressive. No nation has been talked out of developing nuclear weapons by diplomacy alone. The United States has used its influence, and its leverage as the guarantor of a state’s national security, to pressure a state into desisting from nuclear weapons development. Press accounts allege that the United States