US military gets its marching orders from Israel on Iran.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made an unusual visit to Israel and got a polite earful on Monday about Israel’s gloomy assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Skip to next paragraph

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Tel Aviv on Monday.

Israel thinks that an American intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, published in an unclassified version last week, is unduly optimistic and focuses too narrowly on the last stage of weapons development — fashioning a bomb from highly enriched uranium.

The National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus of 16 American spy agencies, says with “high confidence” that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and with “moderate confidence” that the program had not resumed.

Israeli intelligence estimates say Iran stopped all its nuclear weapons activities for a time in 2003, nervous after the American invasion of Iraq, but then resumed those activities in 2005, accelerating enrichment and ballistic missile development and constructing a 40-megawatt heavy-water reactor in Arak that could produce plutonium. NY Times