DNI: IRAN HAS NEITHER NUCLEAR WEAPONS NOR WEAPONIZATION PROGRAM
WHY IS ISRAEL IGNORING THE US NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT?
This week, the US Annual Threat Assessment for 2025 was published. This is the most important US intelligence report. Tulsi Gabbard is the head of the US intelligence community by act of Congress. She is the Principal Advisor to the President in all matters concerning the capabilities, intentions, and strategic threats to the US.
We will focus on the Iranian nuclear issue. Israeli research institutions, specializing in Iran, and senior journalists, ignored and did not address the meaning of this week’s report, just as they did not address the earlier DNI reports published in previous years. The annual report from the United States Director of National Intelligence is absent from the Israeli strategic discourse. An explanation for the disregarding of the report in Israel can be found in one of the central sentences in the DNI Report which contradicts Netanyahu’s declarations and the prevalent interpretive narrative in Israeli: “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
This formulation is identical to the one that appeared in the Biden administration’s last National Intelligence Assessment which was published in unclassified form in December 2024. Similarly to all the DNI Assessments published in the past two decades. Beginning with the 2007 National Intelligence Assessment which estimated with high probability that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not renewed it since. This was an intelligence assessment that marked a watershed moment in the perception of the Iranian nuclear threat, and was received in Israel at the time with complete surprise, “like lightning on a clear day”. US intelligence estimated that it would be able to identify at an early stage if Iran reversed its decision and was moving towards renewal of its weaponization program.
In addition to the US intelligence estimate that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, we can also gain important insights from what is not said in the intelligence report. There is no confirmation of the hints appearing in the Israeli media about new warning information regarding the renewal of weaponization and experimenting with computerized models and metallurgy to develop nuclear weapons at the Parchin Facility. Nor is there anything to support the uncompromising conclusions of Jacob Nagel the former acting head of the Israeli National Security Council and today a senior Israeli representative at the Foundation Defense of Democracies FDD. According to Nagel, who based himself on FDD analysis and position papers, the Iranian nuclear weapons program has advanced far beyond the acceleration of Iranian enrichment, and there is no doubt that Iran has renewed its weaponization program which is being implemented in secret without the official approval of the Supreme Leader, who is turning a blind eye to it.
Surprisingly, the 2025 DNI Report does not contain the addition that appeared in earlier reports, coupled with the assessment that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, which clarifies that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce one, if it so chooses”. For example, the enrichment of uranium to 60% level and the increase in the stockpile of enriched uranium. This subject that was mentioned only in passing in a general manner in one sentence in the opening statement of the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard when she presented the report to the Senate Committee: “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest level and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons”.
Nevertheless , the report does express concern about an apparent abstract threat, the threat of a shift in the Iranian nuclear doctrine. The National Intelligence Report emphasizes that over the past year, there has been an “erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public”. According to the report, the advocates of nuclear weapons have been emboldened and their influence on the decision-making circle has increased. We can infer that US intelligence is most worried about the possibility of a transition from a situation that prohibits nuclear weapons to a perception of the utility of nuclear weapons. A new perception of national security that could be intended, from the Iranian point of view, to “correct” the strategic and deterrent balance that was damaged by the collapse of the forward-defense doctrine (the fall of Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria).
Why is this important? It is important to understand and decipher the US National Intelligence Reports on the Iranian issue against the backdrop of an unprecedented strategic phenomenon that is at its height in Israel. Public calls for a preventive war against Iranian nuclear facilities in an immediate timeframe. Prime Minister Netanyahu in his public appearances emphasizes Israel’s freedom of action for a preventive strike here and now on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Politicians and senior commentators speak with one voice about a unique opportunity to attack the Iranian nuclear weapons program and a green light from the US with President Trump’s entry into the White House.
But at the same time, they are ignoring the US national intelligence estimate that determines that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and has no weaponization program. The intelligence estimate which binds, in my understanding, the US President and does not allow for the launching of a preventive war or authorizing Israel to attack on its behalf. The annual National Intelligence Estimate has been the main obstacle in recent decades preventing US Presidents from granting Netanyahu authorization to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. The bitter lesson of preventive war and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis of false belief and biased intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons.
We do not know how President Trump will act and if Netanyahu is counting on the President this time ignoring the National Intelligence Report. We are at the height of uncertainty regarding the Iranian nuclear crisis and where we go from here. I described this as the Iranian Enigma in my previous article. President Trump is sending out contradictory messages. On the one hand, there is a threat to launch a military option and the demand for the complete dismantling of the Iranian nuclear program, and in the same breath, a preference for the diplomatic solution of a new improved nuclear agreement.
Trump will have to take into account, that in addition to his reluctance to enter into another major war in the Middle East, the US intelligence assessment that an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites could lead to an Iranian counter reaction of a shift in its nuclear doctrine, uranium enrichment to 90% nuclear weapons level, withdrawal from the NPT, and the renewal of the weaponization program. Iran would then move from the status of a nuclear threshold state to that of a nuclear weapons state. A new and dangerous regional and global reality.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst. Graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a former IDF and Tel Aviv University researcher.
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