Benjamin Netanyahu’s Nuclear Nothingburger

On Monday morning, Middle East watchers awoke to astonishing news from Israel. A headline in The Jerusalem Post read, “Netanyahu to Address Country with ‘Dramatic News About Iran.’” As the day passed, details remained sparse, but it became clear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to unveil secret evidence of Iranian cheating on the nuclear deal. The timing of the announcement, right after the new American secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, met with Mr. Netanyahu, accentuated its gravity.

Monday afternoon, just a bit behind schedule, Mr. Netanyahu took to the stage next to an enormous screen.

The substance of Mr. Netanyahu’s allegedly shattering revelation was correspondingly strange. Of greatest interest was the disclosure of a covert operation that spirited Iran’s nuclear archives out of the country for analysis in Israel. These records, according to Mr. Netanyahu, consisted of 55,000 pages and 183 CDs — an enormous load — which nicely demonstrated what can happen when a resourceful and audacious intelligence community in one country meets staggering carelessness and incompetence in another.

The archive had been stored in what Mr. Netanyahu described as a derelict warehouse in Tehran.

It quickly became obvious in Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation, however, that these materials were already widely known and that they covered a weapons program that was shut down in 2003, perhaps because Iran’s leaders reckoned that they were next on the American hit list after Saddam Hussein was toppled, and did not want to get caught with their hand in the nuclear cookie jar. Or perhaps, with Iraq disarmed by the United States, it no longer needed the program.

But this development has been explored exhaustively already in a 2007 United States National Intelligence Estimate that began with this conclusion: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

The Iranian archive that Mr. Netanyahu revealed did show clearly that even though the program had been halted, Iran looked forward to restarting it in the future. This is scarcely surprising.

It is also widely understood, not least by the American government, that Iran — having made the decision in 2015 to put off its nuclear program for 10 years for a shot at economic development — is in compliance with the nuclear agreement. And it is in compliance, then however much its leaders might lust in their hearts for nuclear weapons, the fact remains that they are not making them.

So why did Mr. Netanyahu do his dog and pony show? Because the United States has threatened to withdraw from the nuclear deal, claiming it was a “political agreement” whose validity expired along with the Obama administration that negotiated it.

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