Iran more bark than bite on nukes?

NY Times:

After decades of largely clandestine efforts, Iran is expected to declare in coming days that it has made a huge leap toward industrial-scale production of enriched uranium — a defiant act that the country’s leaders will herald as a major technical stride and its neighbors will denounce as a looming threat. But for now, many nuclear experts say, the frenetic activity at the desert enrichment plant in Natanz may be mostly about political showmanship.

The many setbacks and outright failures of Tehran’s experimental program suggest that its bluster may outstrip its technical expertise. And the problems help explain American intelligence estimates that Iran is at least four years away from producing a nuclear weapon.

After weeks of limited access inside Iran, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have reported that Tehran has succeeded in manufacturing parts for about 3,000 centrifuges, the devices that can spin uranium into reactor fuel — or bomb fuel. In recent days, the Iranians have begun installing the machines and supporting gear in a cavernous plant at Natanz, which would be a potential target if the United States or one of its allies decided that diplomacy would never keep Iran from getting the bomb.

What the Iranians are not talking about, experts with access to the atomic agency’s information say, is that their experimental effort to make centrifuges work has struggled to achieve even limited success and appears to have been put on the back burner so the country’s leaders can declare that they are moving to the next stage.

To enrich uranium on an industrial scale, the machines must spin at very high speeds for months on end. But the latest report of the atomic agency, issued in November, said the primitive machines of the Iran’s pilot plant ran only intermittently, to enrich small amounts of uranium. And the Iranians succeeded in setting up just two of the planned six groupings of 164 centrifuges at the pilot plant.

“It looks political unless they’ve made progress that we don’t know about,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a weapons analysis group in London.

...

I do not trust reports like this. They fit too closely with liberals spinning for doing nothing. They are too close to the stories that for years questioned whether the program even existed, when the Iranians for over 18 years were working in secret. Liberal wishful thinking does not make it so and the consequences of being wrong are unacceptable.