"Certainly some of the dates that we were talking about, or that the
secretariat was presenting in there, went beyond 2003," Britain's envoy to
the IAEA, Simon Smith, said.
In December 2007, the U.S. intelligence community released an
unclassified version of its National Intelligence Estimate, which reviewed
Iran's nuclear program. The controversial NIE asserted that Teheran
abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But on Feb. 25, the agency's board of governors was briefed on material
from numerous sources that told of Iran's efforts to design a nuclear
warhead. Smith said the nuclear warhead was meant to be installed on the
Shihab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which could fly more than
2,000 kilometers.
"The presentation provided detailed work put into the designing of the
warhead, studying how that warhead would perform, how it would be detonated
and how it would be fitted to a Shihab-3 missile," Smith said. "It was
serious and substantial."
