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      U.S. Spy Agencies Assess Iran Remains Undecided on Building a Bomb

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      U.S. intelligence officials said Iran was likely to pivot toward producing a nuclear weapon if the U.S. attacked a main uranium enrichment site, or if Israel killed its supreme leader.U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb even though it has developed a large stockpile of the enriched uranium necessary for it to do so, according to intelligence and other American officials.That assessment has not changed since the intelligence agencies last addressed the question of Iran’s intentions in March, the officials said, even as Israel has attacked Iranian nuclear facilities.Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader.The question of whether Iran has decided to complete the work of building a bomb is irrelevant in the eyes of many Iran hawks in the United States and Israel, who say Tehran is close enough to represent an existential danger to Israel. But it has long been a flashpoint in the debate over policy toward Iran and has flared again as President Trump weighs whether to bomb Fordo.White House officials held an intelligence briefing on Thursday and announced that Mr. Trump would make his decision within the next two weeks.At the White House meeting, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, told officials that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s plan for Iran divides Republicans – podcast

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      In Crisis With Iran, U.S. Military Officials Focus on Strait of Hormuz

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      Pentagon officials are trying to prepare for all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump hints at what he might do.Iran retains the naval assets and other capabilities it would need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a move that could pin any U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, American military officials say.In meetings at the White House, senior military officials have raised the need to prepare for that possibility, after Iranian officials threatened to mine the strait if the United States joined Israel’s attacks on the country.Pentagon officials are considering all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump cryptically hints at what he might do, saying on Wednesday that he had not made a final decision.In several days of attacks, Israel has targeted Iranian military sites and state-sponsored entities, as well as high-ranking generals. It has taken out many of Iran’s ballistic missiles, though Iran still has hundreds of them, U.S. defense officials said.But Israel has steered clear of Iranian naval assets. So while Iran’s ability to respond has been severely damaged, it has robust a navy and maintains operatives across the region, where the United States has more than 40,000 troops. Iran also has an array of mines that its navy could lay in the Strait of Hormuz.The narrow 90-mile waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean is a key shipping route. A quarter of the world’s oil passes through it, so mining the choke-point would cause gas prices to soar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Attorney general warns UK joining war on Iran may be illegal

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      Britain’s attorney general has warned ministers that getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran could be illegal beyond offering defensive support, it has emerged.Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior legal officer, is reported to have raised concerns internally about the legality of joining a bombing campaign against Iran.An official who has seen Hermer’s official legal advice told the Spectator, which first reported the story, that “the AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies”.Keir Starmer is considering whether to provide the US with military support if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, and whether to approve the use of the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean for the attack. Hermer’s advice could limit the degree of UK support for the US.A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “By longstanding convention, reflected in the ministerial code, whether the law officers have been asked to provide legal advice and the content of any advice is not routinely disclosed.“The convention provides the fullest guarantee that government business will be conducted at all times in light of thorough and candid legal advice.”The prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday to discuss a range of scenarios and ongoing diplomatic efforts. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, in Washington DC on Thursday as the US weighs up its options.Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to launch strikes against Iran. The Guardian reported that the president had suggested to defence officials it would make sense to do so only if the so-called bunker buster bomb was guaranteed to destroy the country’s critical uranium enrichment facility, which is between 80 and 90 metres inside a mountain at Fordow.Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire for days after Israel launched airstrikes which it said were aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials claim the country’s nuclear programme is peaceful and that Israel has caused hundreds of civilian casualties.Taking Fordow offline – either diplomatically or militarily – is seen as central to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons after the International Atomic Energy Agency found the site had enriched uranium to 83.7% – close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons.Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister, said Starmer would take any decisions with a “cool, calm head” and be guided by international law.“Legal advice is for the prime minister, and I think that’s where it will stay – and you can understand why I won’t comment on that. But what I will say is that we have a prime minister who is a lawyer and a human rights lawyer, he will obviously do everything that is in accord with international law,” she told Times Radio.“No one wants an escalation. No one wants this to erupt into a major conflict in the region that is hugely destabilising for every country involved, and for us globally. So the most important role that the prime minister can play, and is playing, is to be that cool, calm head to urge all partners around the negotiating table and to find a diplomatic route out of this.”However, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said the UK could “hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis”.Asked if she believed Hermer was right to sound a warning, Patel told Times Radio: “I don’t think we can hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis and national security when we have to work alongside our biggest ally in the world, the United States, when they look to us for potentially … setting out operational activities through our own military bases.”The UK had not received a formal request from the US to use Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean or any of its other airbases to bomb Iran as of Wednesday night.Diego Garcia was recently the subject of a new 99-year lease agreement with Mauritius that left the UK in full operational control of the military base. In practice, Diego Garcia is mainly used by the US, but the fact that it is ultimately a British base means that Starmer would have to approve its use for an attack on Iran.The US is also thought likely to want to request the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for its air tankers, used to refuel B-2 bombers. The UK has deployed 14 Typhoon jets at Akrotiri to protect its bases and forces and to help regional allies, such as Cyprus and Oman, if they come under attack. More

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      An Iran Strategy for Trump

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      Nobody, perhaps even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.By contrast, skeptics fear that the lessons Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’

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      President Trump is pondering swift military action in Iran. There were similar expectations that the war in Iraq would be quick and triumphant.A little more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a president stood on the precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished.”By the time the United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.The specter of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump, who campaigned against America’s “forever wars,” is pondering a swift deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some 200,000 American troops massed in the Middle East, or antiwar demonstrations around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the same.“So much of this is the same story told again,” said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”There are many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq. And America held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final decision.Today Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      America is sleepwalking into another unnecessary war | Eli Clifton and Eldar Mamedov

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      As the United States inches closer to direct military confrontation with Iran, it is critical to recognize how avoidable this escalation has been. “We knew everything [about Israel’s plans to strike Iran], and I tried to save Iran humiliation and death,” said Donald Trump on Friday. “I tried to save them very hard because I would have loved to have seen a deal worked out.”As two of the last analysts from an American thinktank to visit Iran, just three weeks ago, we can report that Iran’s own foreign ministry and members of the nuclear negotiating team were eager to work out a deal with Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, and showed no indication they were interested in slow-walking talks.Over the course of conversations held on the sidelines of the Tehran Dialogue Forum, high-level foreign ministry officials expressed concern about the potential for a spoiling effort by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and various staff and officials showed themselves open to considering a variety of scenarios including a regional nuclear consortium for uranium enrichment under international oversight and bilateral areas of diplomatic and economic engagement with the United States.What we heard should have been cause for cautious optimism – yet instead, Washington squandered a rare diplomatic opening, seemingly allowing Israel to start a disastrous war of choice that may soon drag in the US. Contrary to the narrative that Iran was dragging its feet in negotiations, we saw no evidence of deliberate stalling. In fact, Iran’s worsening economic crisis had created a strong incentive for Tehran to strike a deal – one that would provide sanctions relief in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, with even the possibility of broader normalization with the US on the horizon. Middle-class Iranians we spoke with elsewhere in Tehran were frustrated with the economic situation and, despite a highly developed sanctions-resistant economy, eager for sanctions relief allowing them greater access to international travel and trade.Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, emphasized flexibility on nearly every issue outside Iran’s red line on low-level uranium enrichment. That was echoed in private conversations we held with foreign ministry staff and members of the nuclear negotiating team. Domestic enrichment is non-negotiable for Iran but they believed they had front-loaded their concessions to Witkoff, offering up a 3.67% limit on their enrichment with whatever monitoring and surveillance mechanisms were necessary for the US to feel confident the deal was being honored.Enrichment, even at a low level, is a matter of national pride, a symbol of scientific achievement and a defiant response to decades of sanctions, the red line consistently stated in our conversations and one which they thought was agreeable to Witkoff. Iran claimed to be completely blindsided by Witkoff’s 18 May statement that zero enrichment was the only acceptable terms for a nuclear deal but was open to returning to talks to discuss ways forward. After weathering immense economic pain to develop this capability, no Iranian government – reformist or hardline – could feasibly surrender to the zero enrichment demand. The idea that Tehran would dismantle its enrichment program in 60 days, as the Trump administration demanded, was never realistic.This was not mere stubbornness – it was rooted in deep mistrust sown by Trump. The US had already violated the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) by unilaterally withdrawing during Trump’s first term, despite Iran’s verified compliance. Why would Tehran now accept another agreement requiring total denuclearization, with no guarantee Washington wouldn’t renege again?Iranian officials signaled openness to creative solutions, including shipping excess low-enriched uranium to Russia; forming a regional consortium for enrichment; allowing US inspectors to join International Atomic Energy Agency teams – a major shift from previous positions. Other ideas were also floated at the Tehran forum, albeit not from official sources – temporary suspension of enrichment and a pause on advanced IR-6 centrifuges as confidence-building measures. Araghchi’s expressed willingness to return to JCPOA-permitted enrichment levels (below 4%) – was a concession so significant that it drew criticism from Iranian hardliners for giving too much, too soon. This was not the behavior of a regime trying to stall; it was the posture of a government eager for a deal, engaged in an effort to avoid spoilers in Jerusalem, Washington and at home in Tehran, and knowing full well that long, drawn-out negotiations would offer more, not fewer, opportunities for enemies of diplomacy to strike.The US team, led by Witkoff and mediated by Oman, seemed to share this urgency. The Iranian government seemed empowered enough to make a deal – if the US had been willing to take yes for an answer. Yet here we are, on the brink of another Middle East conflict – one that was entirely preventable. Instead of seizing this rare moment of Iranian flexibility, the US chose escalation. The consequences may be catastrophic: a wider regional war, soaring oil prices and the total collapse of diplomacy with Iran for years to come.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is still possible to step back from the brink. Tehran has signaled willingness to re-engage in talks if Israeli ceases attack. Omani channels remain open. Yet, after the start of the Israeli bombing campaign, the political space for negotiations has shrunk.The US is sleepwalking into another Middle East quagmire, an open-ended war with unclear goals, loose talk of regime change and the potential for a regional conflagration if Iran attacks US military installations in the Persian Gulf. And this war comes after Iran extended a real offer for compromise. If Washington chooses bombs over diplomacy, history will record this as a war not of necessity, but of tragic, reckless choice.

      Eli Clifton is senior adviser at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

      Eldar Mamedov is non-resident fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and member of the Pugwash Council on Science and World Affairs More