“The distances are too great,” Wilkins said. “They’ll need our help, and it won’t be a one-location strike. The Iranians have two reactors, three enrichment facilities-centrifuge, laser and heavy water-and an underground bomb-making plant that is impervious to conventional attack.”

“I thought the National Security assessment was that Iran didn’t have a weapons program.”

“Your predeces sor thought so,” Wilkins said drily, “and you know how that came about.”

Indeed, they all did. After the American intelligence community concluded, based on circumstantial evidence, much of it manufactured by Saddam Hussein in the hopes of deterring Iranian aggression, that Iraq had nuclear weapons, the administration had used the erroneous assessment as justification for invasion. The discovery that Saddam did not possess, nor was he building, nuclear weapons had proven to be a major embarrassment. The intelligence agencies were even more embarrassed, and the discredited professionals had decided to insist on verifiable facts before they would again put their reputations on the political chopping block. The entire basis of a sound foreign policy, good intelligence, had gone off the track. Arguably, the assessments immediately went from too aggressive to too conservative-and one was as bad as the other.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Wilkins continued, “the Iranians are enriching uranium. They are not presently manufacturing weapons.”

“What will it take to convince you?” Schulz asked.

“An explosion with a mushroom cloud,” Sal Molina said heavily. A Hispanic lawyer who had been with the president since he started his political career, Molina didn’t have a big title at the White House. In fact, no one seemed to know just what his title was; his refusal to make speeches, attend parties or fund-raisers or talk to the press added to his aura of mystery.

The president broke the silence that followed. “I have read the assessments, read the raw reports the assessments were constructed from, and I’ve looked at the satellite photos. It is beyond dispute that they are spending billions on enrichment facilities. I am convinced Iran is gearing up to make bombs. There is no other logical explanation.”