US intelligence agencies have undercut the White House by disclosing for the first time that Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme for the past four years. The now declassified secret report marks a significant shift from previous estimates. "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," it said.

The disclosure makes it harder for President George Bush to justify a military strike against Iran before he leaves office next year. It also makes it more difficult to persuade Russia and China to join the US, Britain and France in imposing a new round of sanctions on Tehran, a strategy which the US is trying to pursue with minimal if any result.
As with Iraq and its mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney have been claiming without equivocation that Tehran is bent on achieving a nuclear weapon, with the president warning in October of the risk of a third world war.
The White House national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, nevertheless denied that there were echoes of the intelligence failure over Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction. He said that Iran was "one of a handful of the hardest intelligence targets going" and the new intelligence had only arrived in the past few months. As soon as it did, both the president and Congress had been briefed. He warned that there would be a tendency now to think "the problem is less bad than we thought, let's relax. Our view is that would be a mistake." Already, the White House statement does suggests that merely because there is no evidence, this does not mean that Iran is not pursuing its nuclear ambition. In truth, the report argues that there is evidence, and that that evidence shows that Iran no longer has nuclear ambitions.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which pulls together the work of the 16 American intelligence agencies, is entitled "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities". It concluded: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme." It had not been restarted as of the middle of this year.
In a startling admission from an administration that regularly portrays Iran as the biggest threat to the Middle East and the world, the NIE said: "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." That contradicts the assessment two years ago that baldly stated that Tehran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons".
The British government has also repeatedly said that it suspects President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government of seeking a nuclear weapons capability. It will claim that the weapons halt shows that diplomacy - in particular the threat of sanctions - can work, whereas in truth, the programme ended years before sanctions came in place.
Nevertheless, the weapons halt does roughly coincided with a visit by British, French and German foreign ministers to Tehran in October 2003. The Iranian government has insisted throughout that it is only pursuing a civilian nuclear programme.

Although a halt to the nuclear weapons programme is significant, the NIE is far from a clean bill of health for Iran. The emphasis will now likely shift to the fact that Tehran is pushing ahead with its uranium enrichment programme, and they will argue that this has only limited civilian use and that this can be quickly converted to nuclear military use - statements which are exaggerations at best, and lies at worst. For its part, the NIE has warned that Iran could secure a nuclear weapon by 2010. Though in essence true, the NIE of course has concluded that though it "could", it does not "want" to do so. Furthermore, the US state department's intelligence and research office, one of the agencies involved, said the more likely timescale would be 2013. The more neutral agencies concede that Iran may not have enough enriched uranium until after 2015.

Whereas the White House will continue to try to intensify international pressure on Iran, the new revelation will aide Russia and China, two of the permanent members of the UN security council, who have scuppered attempts by the US over the past six months to impose tough new sanctions on Iran.
As to why the American Intelligence Community decided to release this document and contradict the Bush administration, the answer to that question is that, with less than a year to go for Bush, the American intelligence community is trying to recover the public credibility lost when the agencies wrongly claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the years leading up to 2003.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, among senior Democrats who had requested the updated report on Iran, said the assessment challenged some of the administration's "alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran." He and other critics had accused Bush trying to rush the country into war again based on faulty intelligence.