On Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press published an exclusive report on the Iran nuclear program so shocking that many political pundits declared the nuclear deal dead in the water. But the article turned out to be a lot less damning that it looked — and the AP, which scrubbed many of the most damning details, is now itself part of this increasingly bizarre story.
To get a handle on all this, I spoke to Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at Middlebury College's Monterey Institute of International Studies. What follows is a primer on what happened, what the AP story said and how it changed, the nuclear issues involved — a place called Parchin and something known as PMD — and what they mean for the nuclear deal.
The bottom line here is that this is all over a mild and widely anticipated compromise on a single set of inspections to a single, long-dormant site. The AP, deliberately or not, has distorted that into something that sounds much worse, but actually isn't. The whole incident is a fascinating, if disturbing, example of how misleading reporting on technical issues can play into the politics of foreign policy.
