Moving the Ogallala was not enough, however, to keep the project from running into snags. As part of the licensing review, a group of technical staffers from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spent three years sifting through data from WCS and the roughly 600 boreholes it had drilled. In the end, they found two water tables dangerously close to the site — in fact, one was 14 feet or less from the bottom of the trench where WCS intended to bury the waste. Based on these findings, in August 2007, four of the team’s engineers and geologists sent a memo to the director of TCEQ’s Radioactive Materials Division, warning that groundwater was “likely to intrude” on the proposed facility, possibly causing radiation to seep into the water supply — details that were later reiterated in a meeting with senior management. “It was clear that the problems with the site could not be fixed, and that any radioactive material stored there was probably going to leak,” recalls Glenn Lewis, a technical writer who was part of the team. “It was just a matter of time.”

Nevertheless, two months later TCEQ’s executive director Glenn Shankle recommended that the commissioners who head the agency and have final licensing authority give the project the go-ahead. He then ordered the dumbfounded technical team to begin drafting the license. After laboring over the details, in January 2009 the commission, which is made up entirely of Perry appointees, voted 5-to-1 to approve the license. The same month, WCS hired Shankle as a lobbyist. “What happened in this situation is that politics worked to get an unqualified company a license to operate a low-level nuclear waste facility,” concludes Lewis, who along with two other team members resigned in protest.

Why bring this up now? Because the WCS saga offers a window into the often murky political motivations of its owner, Harold Simmons, a man with the power to sway this year’s presidential race. An 80-year-old billionaire who grew up in an east Texas shack with no running water, Simmons amassed his fortune largely by staging aggressive corporate takeovers and running polluting businesses, many of them in heavily regulated industries. And he has spent his money liberally on conservative causes. This election season alone, Simmons has donated more than $18 million to conservative super PACs, making him the deepest of the deep-pocket super PAC donors who are upending electoral politics.

Unlike fellow mega-donors Foster Friess and Sheldon Adelson, Simmons isn’t partial to any single candidate or political cause. He’s given generously to the super PACs backing all the top Republican presidential contenders. And he’s the No. 1 donor to Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, which is supporting Republicans across the board. Simmons says it’s his loathing for Barack Obama that’s driving him to spread his money around. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive.”

But there may be another motive at work. Simmons has a history of giving far and wide to grease the wheels for his business ventures — particularly his nuclear waste repository. And a raft of changes in the pipeline at federal agencies could determine whether the site is eligible for billions of dollars in new contracts.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, is considering allowing depleted uranium (more than a half-million tons of which are languishing at sites around the country) to be discarded in shallow land burial sites, like WCS, even though the National Research Council and some independent scientists suggest it’s better suited to more secure repositories. Similarly, the Department of Energy is weighing options for disposing of what is known as “greater-than-class-C” waste, the most radioactive low-level nuclear debris. In the past, it was generally considered too dangerous to dump in shallow land sites, but that route is now on the table.

These deliberations, which began under the Bush administration, aren’t meant to be political. But progress under Obama has been halting, particularly on the NRC front. In fact, in January the NRC voted to abandon the depleted uranium rulemaking track it had been on since 2008 — a track favorable to WCS — and go back to the drawing board.

Then there are the lucrative nuclear-waste disposal contracts the DOE parcels out to private companies. Typically, they’re negotiated piecemeal and cover about a million cubic feet per year, but right now there’s a much larger prize for the taking: a five-year contract for up to 27 million cubic feet of debris scattered among our national labs. WCS lobbyists are pounding the halls of Congress and the DOE in a bid to sway the outcome. Simmons may be betting that having Republicans in office — particularly ones whose victory he bankrolled — could tilt the odds in his favor, as it has in the past.

- – – – – – - – – – – – – -

Waste Control Specialists started out as a run-of-the-mill hazardous waste dump. The company’s original owner, Ken Bigham, had designs of breaking into the nuclear waste market to cash in on the dismantling of the nation’s Cold War stockpile, but he lacked the money and political clout to push the project through. Then in 1995, a lobbyist Bigham worked with in Austin suggested he join forces with Simmons and tap his deep political connections. The pair eventually struck a deal, under which Simmons paid Bigham $25 million for a controlling stake in the company. In 1996, WCS applied with the Texas Department of Health for a license to build a processing and storage facility for radioactive waste that was awaiting permanent disposal and approached TCEQ for permission to dispose of waste from federal programs. Initially, the answer from both agencies was a resounding no. In fact, the Health Department called WCS’s proposal “severely deficient.” That December, Roy Coffee, a top aide to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who has benefited from more than $4.2 million in Simmons family donations, met with the TCEQ’S director. One week later, the agency changed course, saying it was open to WCS’s Texas facility accepting federal waste, pending approval by the TCEQ commissioners. The license for the processing plant was granted the following year.

But this was just a steppingstone toward WCS’s real goal of remaking itself as a permanent nuclear waste repository, with a view toward landing lucrative government contracts. According to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in Lone Star politics, in 1999 WCS published a study of “emerging market opportunities.” It found the company could earn nearly $40 billion by handling waste for three federally funded programs. The problem with this plan was that, under Texas law, private companies were barred from operating nuclear waste dumps. WCS tried to get around this hitch by lobbying Congress and the DOE to override the ban and contract directly with the company. According to a 1998 investigation by the Dallas Morning News, Simmons and his associates even managed to persuade their allies in Congress — all of whom had taken large sums from Simmons — to block the promotions of a key DOE staffer who opposed the plan. When the DOE refused to give in to these tactics, WCS sued the agency.

At the same time, the company assembled a powerhouse lobbying team in Austin and began pushing to rewrite Texas law. Between 1995 and 2003, WCS spent more than $2 million lobbying the Texas Legislature — part of a shock-and-awe campaign that rattled the Lone Star State. “They rolled over us like a steamroller,” says Tom Smith, who directs the Texas office of Public Citizen, an advocacy group that fought the legislative changes. “I’ve been lobbying for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” Simmons and his employees also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Texas politicians. In 2003, the Texas Legislature voted overwhelmingly to allow privately owned nuclear waste dumps.

Simmons, meanwhile, began wading into presidential politics. In the run-up to the 2004 election, he gave nearly $84,000 to Republican candidates, committees and PACS. He also sank $4 million into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign, which torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential prospects. Perhaps Simmons was put off by Kerry’s tough talk; the otherwise mild-mannered candidate turned into a fire-breathing crusader when the subject turned to nuclear waste. He promised to block the Yucca Mountain repository, which he called a symbol of “recklessness,” on the grounds that it sat above a freshwater aquifer and proposed warehousing radioactive debris where it was generated rather than trucking it to far-flung sites for disposal.

Once Bush had beaten Kerry at the polls, Simmons chipped in $100,000 toward his inaugural ball. The Bush DOE, meanwhile, granted WCS a $15 million contract to store residue from a plant in Fernald, Ohio, that had processed uranium for nuclear weapons. The DOE maintains the decision was not politically motivated. “The subcontract for storage and disposal of the Fernald silo residues was awarded competitively by the Energy Department’s site contractor when it became clear that the initial plan to dispose of the waste at another DOE facility was not feasible,” the agency said in a statement. Nevertheless, it was a curious choice, given that the plant had been owned by another of Simmons’ companies, NL Industries, before being taken over by the federal government for Superfund cleanup in 1992 — a process that has cost taxpayers $4.4 billion.

It was also during this era that WCS applied for the license to operate its nuclear waste dump, which was later approved over the objections of Lewis and other technical staff. In its P.R. materials, WCS has cast the detractors as a “small group” of rabble-rousers who opposed the project and “launched a public misinformation campaign in an effort to slow the company’s progress.” As for the safety concerns TCEQ staffers raised, WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald insists they have no merit. “We’ve sunk nine years and $500 million into this project. We had 600 core samples taken at every conceivable depth,” he says. “There is no threat to any water supply.” McDonald adds that the only water found anywhere near the site was brackish and sealed off from major aquifers: “They could age date the water and it was 16,000 years old. That moisture had been sitting there since the last ice age.”

The license WCS finally received in 2009 covered two facilities: one for commercial waste from Texas and Vermont (the two states have a joint-disposal agreement), and one for waste from federal agencies. It also allowed WCS to accept the more dangerous B and C classes of low-level radioactive debris — something no other facility in the country can do.

For Simmons, the license was a godsend. Within months of it coming through, Forbes ran its annual ranking of the richest people in America. The blurb on Simmons, who clocked in a few slots above Ross Perot and George Lucas, noted that he had lost $1.4 billion in the previous year, but that he was “planning to make it back with [his company’s] recently approved low-level radioactive waste disposal license.” As part of its deal with the state of Texas, WCS got to operate the dump for 35 years or more, assuming it met periodic licensing obligations, and keep the bulk of the profits. (Andrews County also got 5 percent.) The state and federal government would then take over and manage the site in perpetuity. While WCS has to put up roughly $140 million in “financial assurance” to cover closure, “corrective actions” and post-closure maintenance, it has managed to persuade the state to accept mostly stock from another Simmons-owned company in lieu of cash for the first five years. And critics argue $140 million is not nearly enough to cover ongoing costs. “WCS is going to walk away and the state will be left holding the bag for thousands of years,” says Lon Burnam, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives and a stalwart opponent of the dump. WCS also prevailed upon the generous folks of Andrews County to put up $75 million in bonds to help finance construction. (Two Andrews residents later sued, saying the bond referendum, which passed by a meager three-vote margin, was riddled with irregularities. But the lower courts sided with WCS, and the Texas Supreme Court, whose justices have received more than $90,000 in Simmons donations, declined to hear their appeal.)

Still, WCS was not satisfied. Under the terms of WCS’s license, the commercial waste facility was capped at just over 2 million cubic feet, only enough to meet about a third of Texas and Vermont’s needs. Nevertheless, the company began lobbying the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission to let it truck in commercial waste from the 36 other states that have no place to dump their radioactive debris. In late 2010, the commission proposed amending its bylaws to make this possible, but not everybody was on board. Two of the commission’s eight members openly opposed the plan, and two Republican appointees who supported it were about to be replaced by the incoming Democratic governor of Vermont. (As part of the joint-disposal agreement, Vermont gets two commission seats.) According to Reuters, after it became clear that the commission might deadlock, Gov. Perry’s office offered one of the detractors, Austin resident Bob Gregory, a coveted appointment as a university regent. Naturally, this would mean relinquishing his commission post. Gregory declined. So in January 2011, shortly before the Vermont Republicans’ terms expired, the commission — the bulk of whose members were Perry appointees — called a vote. Gregory pleaded with his fellow commissioners, saying it was “beyond preposterous” to ram the proposal through without even reading the 5,000 public comments. Nevertheless, the measure passed by a 5-to-2 margin.

Simmons, meanwhile, began currying favor with state-level politicians around the country. According to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics and Texans for Public Justice, he has poured more than $400,000 into state-level races outside Texas since 2005, almost all of them in states that have commercial nuclear power plants and no waste repository. “When you look at how he’s moving his money around to other states, there’s a very clear pattern,” says Texans for Public Justice research director Andrew Wheat. “He’s targeting politicians who can serve his financial interests.” The same is true in Washington, where Simmons has been dumping tens of thousands of dollars into congressional campaigns. He’s also promised to sink another $18 million into conservative super PACs between now and Election Day, meaning his giving this campaign season will outstrip the rest of his career combined.

Simmons is coy about the motives behind this outpouring. As he told the Wall Street Journal, “You never talk about what you want when giving money.” But he’s been in the game long enough to know that, in politics as in business, timing matters. And for WCS this is a deciding moment. Last November, the Andrews plant celebrated its grand opening with an elaborate ribbon-cutting ceremony, featuring cameos by several politicians. In his remarks, delivered from the edge of a gaping pit, WCS president Rod Baltzer trumpeted the fact that it was the first new radioactive waste dump in the United States since the 1980s. “This has never been done before, and in my opinion I don’t think it will be ever done again,” he said. “There’s just a unique set of characteristics that this facility, and the community — and the ownership — has provided.” Later this month, trucks packed with radioactive debris will begin rumbling into the facility, and the true test of Simmons’ grand scheme will begin.

I still remember it. The first shock of it. It was just one big hammer.

I turned to my two American friends Danny and Jeff and said, “Earthquake.” They didn’t feel it. They looked at me, and cocked their heads a little bit. And then she hit. We were in a turbine building that is built, for lack of a better term, like Fort Knox. The entire building was shaking.

None of us fell. But everyone got up against a wall, or got up on something. I heard that this earthquake lasted six minutes. But for me, it felt like a lifetime. I’m still living it, 10 months later.

I was working in a contaminated zone. I’ve been working in the nuclear field since 1984, and I’ve always followed good radiological practices. You step in properly. You step out properly. But when the earthquake ramped up, for the first time in my career, I lifted my one leg up and over that boundary and landed my dirty foot on the clean floor. We don’t even hand things across this boundary. Here I am putting my leg over it. And I put my other leg over and I told the guys, “Let’s get out.”

You could feel it under your feet. It was this entire enormous building moving at once. A lot of things were falling. We lost almost every light in the room. The structural steel was moving overhead. The lights were crashing everywhere. There was one young Japanese boy in front of me, still dressed out, and I was coaxing him out and this light came down like a guillotine right next to him. I didn’t know how to say “Look up!” or “Heads up” in Japanese. I wish I did. I was doing my best through charades to tell him, keep your eyes up. Everything was coming down. Thank God this boy didn’t get struck by this light fixture. Because even a light fixture will clean your clock. Or worse.

The crane operator was the toughest one to watch. But I had to keep an eye on him because this crane was just crabbing and jumping. He kept getting up off his chair — putting one leg out of the chair and putting it back in, and I’m thinking, please, please don’t even attempt to get out of there. But I was more in fear of the crane coming down. He had to be a good 30-40 feet up in that cab. It’s a crane that travels the entire length of the turbine deck. He would have put a champion bull rider to shame.

The sounds coming out of this turbine were pretty terrifying. Besides the earthquake and the lights dropping, this turbine was spinning. I had Danny over to the left screaming, “It’s going to blow! It’s going to blow!”

In one nanosecond, the entire floor went black. Every light went out. You would expect some emergency lighting would come on, but there wasn’t a one. And there was this most welcome beam of white light coming from the gap under the door. I made my way over to the door, and the one and only light in the room, it was swinging violently and then at the same time I opened the door it busted free and shattered on the floor. It was pitch black again. I remember thinking, “None of you are getting out of here.”

One of the Japanese guys had grabbed me around the waist. I put my arm up on his shoulder. With every jolt I squeezed his shoulder. I remember praying aloud for him, for all of us. I thought, we’re going to perish in this turbine building. I can still hear the turbine making its most unwelcome sound. I had many thoughts. But one of them was: Good God. I got up this morning just to go to work. And this is how it’s written for me? Dying is a fact of life. We all have to do it sooner or later. But this is how it’s written for me? March 11? On a Friday? On a turbine deck? In Fukushima? At work?  Of course my thoughts went immediately to my family. My two young children.

But then the lights did come back on. The lights were not emergency lights, they were what remained of the lights that didn’t fall. They were peppered about. There were maybe 60 lights on that deck and maybe four came on. It was enough light to see again. I took a look around the deck there. I’ve passed this thing 100 times and never noticed it. But it was an aluminum extension ladder. The most welcome sight I’d ever seen. Because the power was out, the crane isn’t working. This guy can’t drive the crane over to its docking station and get out. Thank God. We got him out of the crane.

—–

After we all got out, I was headed toward my rental car. Then I saw the tsunami coming. I stood there and as it came in I thought, you gotta be kidding me. This thing was huge.

When I first saw it, I saw it as far north and as far south as you could look. It didn’t resemble a wave. It resembled this huge swell of the ocean. This huge hump in the ocean coming your way. It rolled up over everything. It rolled uphill. It did come up over parking lots and took cars away in front of me. The first one receded back and took enough water to expose the sea bed.

It was a beautiful day. Clear, sunny, gorgeous. That’s one of the reasons I parked my rental car so far away, so I would walk in. A meteorologist would have to explain this — I think as a result of so much sea bed being exposed, it must be linked with the atmosphere — it sucked this front down from behind us. This big, black ominous front came rolling down on us, so much so that it began to snow. I’ve never heard anyone mention the snow. I mean, it didn’t snow and accumulate. But it snowed.

And the wind was — it was like a vacuum going by. There’s a harbor in front of Fukushima. And it was totally drained.

When the first wave came in, it just buried the walls to the plant. They were gone. They were all gone. The water just came in, wrapped around the walls and came back out. Units 1, 2, 3, 4 — as everyone knows. It was just an ungodly amount of water.

I was on top of the hill and — you gotta wonder. You gotta wonder about a lot of people. And as it turned out, a lot of people lost their lives in those minutes.

—–

We had a substantial amount of rental cars. We had no choice when they showed up. I think it was the police and maybe National Guard types that showed up, and said, you have to move south or west, and we were on our way. The freeway system was down. We had to take the secondary roads. It was a slow trip. We weren’t the only ones headed south. There were a lot of people headed south. But there were a lot of people headed north, too. I saw a lot of people sobbing, in tears in those vehicles. Maybe they had family north. Who knows what they were driving into? I know I would have done it for my brother, for my sister, or my parents. I would have driven in the opposite direction to help them. It seemed like there were more cars driving in to the zone than there were driving out. But there was a lot of road damage, a lot of cracks in the road. A lot of landslides, a lot of fissures in the ground. We got there after midnight to the train station. Our company had a train chartered from Tokyo. We didn’t get into until 4:30 a.m.

When I heard about the explosion on the turbine deck of unit 1, where I was working — that came as a shock. We heard about that on the bus. Nobody said nothing. We just put our heads down. I remember thinking: Oh, not there. Not this place I was so connected to. You hear about these things happening in the world somewhere, but it really hurt. It hurt to hear that.

I had been in the turbine deck for unit 1 less than 24 hours before. I’ve read that unit 1 was the most badly damaged unit. I don’t doubt that. I felt within the first two to three minutes of the earthquake that this was going to be significant.

—–

This is the first time I’m telling the story in some kind of chronological order. It’s not an easy story to tell. I’m struggling through it. I’m hoping that this helps me and my wife and my two school-age children. The holidays were difficult for me. I didn’t put up decorations. I hardly bought any gifts. Maybe March 11 will help me get past it. I need a year.

The most important thing to me now is people. Like this morning I had a cup of coffee. I watched this exchange outside between two people who didn’t know each other. They both had dogs. It was rather unfriendly and it seemed most unnecessary. That’s just one tiny example in the world. I wish I could take you all by the hand and re-set you with me. That’s what I feel like — I feel like I’ve been re-set. Not that I was all that much trouble before. I’ve always been a decent man. But humbling — that’s the word I’m looking for. This has been a humbling experience. What’s really important, you know?

As told to Alex Chadwick.

“They have huge underground facilities. Some of the underground facilities are under mosques,” Gingrich said. “Some of them are in cities. The idea that you’re going to wage a bombing campaign that accurately takes out all the Iranian nuclear program I think is a fantasy.”

That’s an extremely significant charge, one made by a man who now has a real shot at being the next president of the United States.

An extensive search of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports on Iran found no mentions of the terms “mosque” or “holy site.” We do know that some of Iran’s nuclear facilities are underground; but I found no media mentions of them being under mosques.

(Also worth noting: it’s not a given that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, rather than nuclear power. The question of Iran’s intentions is complex and remains unresolved.)

“There’s no evidence [for that],” said David Albright, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, when asked about the mosques issue. “I don’t know where Gingrich gets this, but it sounds like he is just repeating rumors.”

I also asked Ken Pollack, a Mideast specialist at the Brookings Institution, if he has heard of anything like Gingrich’s mosques claim.

“Nope,” Pollack said in an email. “Never heard that they have underground facilities beneath mosques.  They do have extensive tunnels at some sites, and I guess some of those tunnels may run under mosques, but I have never heard that they purposely built them under mosques as this seems to suggest.”

Gingrich’s spokesman did not immediately respond to an inquiry about his source for the claim.

It’s also at least a bit ironic that Gingrich made the iffy mosques assertion after specifically questioning the ability of the CIA to determine what the Iranians are doing.

“This idea that somehow we have magically accurate intelligence … is baloney,” he said.

Dreyfuss is right that the report doesn’t contain unequivocal evidence that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program — but so what? If an Iranian nuke was not containable and a major threat to the United States, then America would be justified in destroying the program before it was fully realized. But it is neither. And it is unwise to overlook those points in favor of obsessively following the daily shifts of Iranian nuclear progress like traders scouring the Dow Jones. History and strategic logic say that a nuclear Iran would not represent a major threat to the U.S. or its allies.

The logic of Mutually Assured Destruction holds that a country with nuclear weapons will not attack another nuclear-armed country because it will itself face retaliation in the form of nuclear destruction. Destroying the enemy becomes a way of destroying oneself. MAD, as the policy came to be known during the Cold War, is unsettling but has proved 100 percent effective in preventing war between nuclear-armed states.

Iran is unique, argue the hawks of Washington and Tel Aviv. Unlike with every other country with nuclear weapons that has preceded it, this form of deterrence will not work with Iran, they say. The Iranian regime is distinguished by the radical Islamist ideology of its leaders, who believe death in the service of Allah is desirable. As a result, it is unlikely that “deterrence can be successful with religious extremists who regard life and death differently,” argued Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. For all the horrors of nuclear menaces from previous eras like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, hawks claim, they were atheists committed to sustaining life on earth and hence subject to rational deterrence.

Objections to this argument are twofold. First, there is no indication the Iranian regime is committed to martyrdom at all. Consider its actions, not its words. Iran promised repeatedly that it would destroy Iraq in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War — and accept destruction itself — rather than accept a cease-fire or end hostilities. It even used human waves to clear minefields and declared the war a sacred jihad, promising to resist until victory. Nonetheless, in 1988 Iran sued for peace and accepted a compromised end to the war that left the country in no more of a favorable position than when the war began.

Moreover, the Islamic regime in Iran has not invaded a single other country, instead relying only on the low-risk strategy of supporting proxy groups like Hezbollah. According to the prizewinning book “Treacherous Alliance,” by Iranian-born scholar Trita Parsi, Iran also had extensive dealings with its sworn opponent, Israel, throughout the 1980s. If the religious extremists who lead Iran are prepared to commit national suicide, they have never displayed it. Just the opposite, in fact. They have shown they prize survival above all else.

Second, singling out the Iranian regime as particularly unstable and untrustworthy romanticizes challenges from the past. Far from predictable, the Soviet Union and Chinese governments that developed the bomb were totalitarian, expansionist and far more threatening to the United States than Iran has ever been. The same hawks who claim Iran cannot be trusted are ideological descendants (sometimes literal descendants) of the individuals who wrongly argued that the Soviets were gaining strength on America in the 1970s and were determined to destroy it.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous warning to the Western world that “we will bury you” was far more threatening to America than anything that Iran, with its third-rate military and economy, could ever do. Similarly, Mao Zedong, who developed China’s nuclear capabilities, was every bit as aggressive with his rhetoric as the Iranians are: “Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half … I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again,” he said. And China, unlike present-day Iran, was a country with a huge military capacity and had matched Americans directly on the battlefield, on the Korean peninsula.

In retrospect, it is clear that nuclear weapons actually moderated China’s sabre-rattling, but that was hardly obvious at the time. Released documents showed that John F. Kennedy’s administration very seriously contemplated a strike on China’s nuclear program, as did previous administrations with the Soviets. The worst fears of hawks that China and the Soviets would deploy their nukes against the United States or its allies never materialized. And had America struck either China or the Soviet Union, the result would have been unmitigated, unnecessary disaster. The same is true of Iran today.

None of this is to say that an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon is a positive development. It isn’t. Nuclear proliferation in any region is problematic; in the chaos-ridden Middle East, it is simply dangerous. But it is a danger the United States and the rest of the world can live with. What America cannot afford is another unnecessary, poorly considered attack on a Muslim country in the heart of the Middle East. If only we had a reliable deterrent to prevent against that.

The United States has already signaled that it will use this report in its continuing campaign to get tough sanctions against Iran in order to force it to negotiate on its nuclear ambitions. The report buttresses U.S. policy of isolating Iran as much as possible. Washington wants to rally the international community to put pressure on Iran, and now it has a documented report from the U.N. nuclear watchdog that Iran has done much more to obtain nuclear weapons than was previously known. The Obama administration is trying to reach a settlement that will spare it from having to choose between bombing Iran or letting Iran get the bomb. The IAEA report increases the urgency in finding such a solution.

The IAEA does not state unequivocally that Iran is making nuclear weapons, concluding only that it  has “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme,” and that “information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” This is a strong statement but short of the almost unambiguous assessment the IAEA made last May that a building bombed in Syria by Israeli planes in 2007 was “very likely” to have been a nuclear reactor.

The IAEA recognizes skepticism about intelligence on weapons of mass destruction after the false claims that led up to the Iraq war. The report includes a section that  lays out why it considers the information it has credible. Iran says the documents are forgeries but the IAEA says it has a variety of records including engineering drawings, videos, procurement information, financial records and “documents demonstrating manufacturing techniques for certain high explosive components.”

The report  says the information is “consistent in terms of technical content, individuals and organizations involved, and time frames.” In addition, the information came from “more than 10 member states” as well as the IAEA investigation. The agency presents a chart of how Iran has allegedly changed the organizations doing weapons work in order to avoid being detected.

Among the key points in the IAEA report:

• Iran has blueprints for how to make the uranium metal needed for a bomb and has done dry runs, not including nuclear material, on how to make this metal.

• Iran received “nuclear explosive design information,” or plans how to put a bomb together, and that it may have more advanced information than previously believed.

• Iran has developed the “exploding bridgewire detonators” needed for an implosion-type nuclear device and has done a large-scale experiment to test this.

• Iran did computer simulations on whether, based on high-explosive tests using tungsten, it could make an implosion bomb work.

The IAEA report comes at a tense time. There are press accounts of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing for an attack on Iran. There is the U.S. allegation of a rocambolesque Iranian plot for a terrorist attack in the U.S. capital.  But this does not necessarily portend war.  Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and other key security figures oppose an Israeli rush to arms, especially as they feel there are non-kinetic ways, including tougher sanctions and cyber-attacks, to bring Iran to heel. And Washington is not at this point anxious for war. Israel would have to be in exceptionally dire straits before it would risk its alliance with the United States over such a key, strategic issue.

There is another key point: The hardest part of making an atomic bomb is getting the fissile material, the nuclear matter that explodes. Iran says it is only working peacefully to get fuel for yet-to-be-built power reactors.

Israel is concerned since Iran has said it will move enrichment work from Natanz, which is an underground bunker complex, to the Fordow site, near Qom, which is built into a mountain. The IAEA report says Iran has not yet done this but is working on it. This could possibly close the window on potential military action against Iran’s nuclear work.

“It’s totally different because the one [Natanz] is a basement, the other [Fordow] is under a mountain,” said one diplomat. Israeli analysts have said the time for an attack on Iran will come when the Iranians are on the verge of doing something that would make military action useless. Stocking Fordow with enrichment lines could be that something.

But we are not there at this point. The immediate fallout from the IAEA report will be a push for tougher sanctions against Iran, a policy Israel has been backing.  And if the IAEA report this month does not convince, there will be another one, with more data, in February. After that, especially if Fordow becomes an inaccessible factory for producing the enriched uranium that can power a reactor but also a bomb, the Iranian nuclear crisis may be heading for its crunch time.