When Americans tuned in to the news on the afternoon of December 3, they were in for a surprise. A new assessment made public by the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that while Iran was still enriching uranium, which can be used for both nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, it had frozen its weaponization-only program back in 2003. In other words, Iran did not seem dead set on building nukes. It was quite a shock. After all, the administration had been saying for years that Iran was racing to build the bomb.

President Bush warned just last August that unless Iran is stopped, the Middle East would be put “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” Military strikes seemed to be a possibility. “We will confront this danger before it is too late,” Bush said. And yet the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the collective judgment of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, concluded that Iran wasn’t intent on building a bomb.

George Perkovich, a nonproliferation analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was surprised by the news, too, but for a different reason. “I thought, wait a minute,” he recalls. “I’ve written this before.”

In May 2005, Perkovich wrote a paper speculating that Iran’s leaders weren’t actually bent on making the bomb but rather wanted to keep their options open. In that scenario, he wrote, “as Iranian elites began to pay attention to nuclear issues,” they realized their best bet was an above-board civilian nuclear program. Such a path would still allow Iran to “gradually acquire” the know-how and technology to “produce nuclear weapons some day should a dire strategic threat arise”—all the while abiding by international law.

Perkovich wasn’t the only one to guess that Iran wasn’t bent on building the bomb. “I would see intelligence analysts...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.