Whenever Donald Trump has contemplated confrontation with Iran, his decisions have been guided less by the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community than by his own calculation of risk and reward. At times he has pulled the trigger. At times he has backed down. All the while, the U.S. assessment of Iranian nuclear intentions has stayed remarkably consistent.
每当唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）考虑与伊朗对抗时，他的决定就被美国情报界的共识所指导的少于他自己的风险和回报。有时他拉了扳机。有时他退缩了。一直以来，美国对伊朗核意图的评估一直保持一致。
Now, Trump has gone all in. His decision this week to drop more than a dozen of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal on key Iranian nuclear facilities was based, he has said, on his belief that Iran is close to being able to make the ultimate weapon.
现在，特朗普全力以赴。他本周决定在美国阿森纳在伊朗主要的核设施上放下十几个最大的传统炸弹，这是他的决定是基于伊朗核设施的。
That’s not exactly what his intelligence agencies have concluded. Their official, publicly stated assessment of Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suspended the country’s nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the year that the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein in order to seize his supposed weapons of mass destruction. Those turned out to not exist. But Iran’s leaders reasonably feared that the U.S. might next turn its sights on their country and its very real weapons program.
这并不是他的情报机构总结的。他们的官方对伊朗核武器的野心的评估是，最高领导人阿亚图拉·阿里·哈梅内伊（Ayatollah Ali Khamenei）于2003年暂停了该国的核武器计划，即美国入侵伊拉克并推翻萨达姆·侯赛因（Saddam Hussein），以抓住他所谓的大规模摧毁武器。事实证明不存在。但是伊朗的领导人合理地担心美国下一步可能将目光投向其国家和非常真实的武器计划。
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and (on paper at least) Trump’s senior intelligence adviser, reiterated the consensus view in congressional testimony this March. But she also noted that Iran had built up its largest-ever stockpile of enriched uranium, the core ingredient of a weapon, in a manner that was “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
国家情报主任塔尔西·加巴德（Tulsi Gabbard）（至少在纸面上）特朗普的高级情报顾问重申了今年3月国会证词中共识的观点。但是她还指出，伊朗建立了其有史以来最大的富集铀，武器的核心成分，这种方式“是没有核武器的国家前所未有的”。
Her brief remark escaped much scrutiny but turns out to have been telling.
她的简短言论逃脱了很多审查，但事实证明。
In recent briefings with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has laid out what the intelligence agencies know, particularly about Iran’s uranium stockpiles, and said Iran was clearly trying to build a nuclear weapon, according to officials familiar with his presentation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. On its face, that appears to contradict the long-standing intelligence-community position. But Ratcliffe’s analysis is actually a more nuanced reading of the available information.
在最近与特朗普的简报中，中央情报局局长约翰·拉特克利夫（John Ratcliffe）阐述了情报机构所知道的，特别是伊朗铀库存的知识，并说伊朗显然正在试图建立核武器，据熟悉他的演讲的官员说，他在匿名的情况下讲话，讨论敏感问题。从表面上看，这似乎与长期的情报社区地位相矛盾。但是Ratcliffe的分析实际上是对可用信息的更细微的阅读。
In a separate briefing for lawmakers last week, Ratcliffe used a football analogy to describe Iran’s ambitions: If a team had gone 99 yards down the field, its intention was obviously to score a touchdown, not stop at the one-yard line, he said.
拉特克利夫（Ratcliffe）在为立法者的另一份简报中，使用了足球比喻来描述伊朗的野心：如果一支球队在场上走了99码，其意图显然是要进行达阵，而不是在一码线上停下来。
International experts agree that Iran has enriched uranium to a point that is close to weapons grade, a fact that Vice President J. D. Vance has emphasized in his own public remarks. Senior administration officials take little comfort in Khamenei’s decades-old halt to the nuclear-weapons program. Trump believes that Iran is actively pursuing everything it would need to build a weapon, and in relatively short order, if the supreme leader gave the go-ahead. That’s the real threat, and the reason Trump gave the order to strike now, officials told me.
国际专家同意，伊朗将铀丰富到接近武器等级的地步，这一事实是副总统J. D. Vance在他自己的公开言论中强调。高级政府官员在Khamenei数十年历史的核武器计划中几乎没有安慰。特朗普认为，伊朗正在积极追求建造武器所需的一切，如果最高领导人批准了该武器。官员告诉我，这就是真正的威胁，也是特朗普下令罢工的命令的原因。
It also helps that Israel has assisted in paving the way. Trump’s thinking is in line with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s; the prime minister has said that Iran may have been months or mere weeks away from building a weapon, and has generally taken the view that the country’s leaders are stockpiling uranium precisely for that purpose. In the week leading up to the U.S. strike-–which Israeli leaders appear not to have known about in advance-–the Israeli air force pummeled nuclear facilities, killed nuclear scientists and experts, and degraded Iranian air defenses.
这也有助于以色列协助铺平道路。特朗普的思想与本杰明·内塔尼亚胡总理一致。总理表示，伊朗可能已经距建立武器已经几个月或几周了，并且通常认为该国的领导人正是为此目的库存铀。在美国罢工之前的一周中，以色列领导人似乎并未提前知道 - 以色列空军殴打了核设施，杀死了核科学家和专家，并降低了伊朗防空。
The Israeli attacks, like the American ones, appear to have been largely driven by a sense of opportunity, after Israel previously weakened the regime and neutralized its longtime proxy forces in the region. There is no reason to think that the Trump administration, or Israel, suddenly had some new window into Khamenei’s brain. But the president took an intuitive view of the intelligence the U.S. has long possessed, and a fateful set of actions based on it.
以色列像美国的袭击一样，似乎在很大程度上是由机会感驱动的。没有理由认为特朗普政府或以色列突然有一些新的窗口进入了哈梅内伊的大脑。但是总统对美国长期以来拥有的情报和基于它的一系列行动进行了直观的看法。
It’s too pat to say that Trump has ignored his intelligence advisers, although he certainly created that impression. “Well then my intelligence community is wrong,” he said earlier in the week when a reporter noted that the agencies had found no evidence that Iran was trying to build a weapon. Trump had previously said that Gabbard was also wrong when she testified earlier this year.
说特朗普忽略了他的情报顾问，尽管他确实给人留下了深刻的印象，但太轻拍了。他在一周早些时候说：“那我的情报界是错的。”一周早些时候，一位记者指出，这些机构没有发现伊朗试图建造武器的证据。特朗普此前曾表示，加巴德（Gabbard）今年早些时候作证时也是错误的。
Officials have told me that they’re not just concerned about Iran’s ability to build a warhead that could be placed atop a ballistic missile—a complex process that would require Iran to build a device that could survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and land precisely on its target. The regime could construct a simpler device and hand it over to a third party.
官员们告诉我，他们不仅担心伊朗建造可以放在弹道导弹上的弹头的能力，这是一个复杂的过程，需要伊朗建造一种可以在地球大气中生存并精确地登陆其目标的设备。该政权可以构建一个更简单的设备并将其交给第三方。
In an interview last month with a state-linked news outlet, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist and the former head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, warned that Iran could use nuclear weapons against the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel without deploying them on missiles or an aircraft. “What if they are attacked from within?” he asked, an unsubtle suggestion that Iran could give a nuclear weapon to one of its proxies.
在上个月的一次采访中，伊朗著名的核科学家，前原子能组织的前负责人Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani警告说，伊朗可以对美国，英国和以色列使用核武器，而无需将它们部署在导弹或飞机上。“如果他们在内部受到攻击怎么办？”他问，一个毫无根据的建议，即伊朗可以将核武器提供给其代理之一。
Israel was apparently listening and thought that Abbassi-Davani might possess the know-how to make such a device. He was killed earlier this month in an Israeli air strike.
以色列显然在听，并认为阿巴西·戴瓦尼（Abbassi-Davani）可能拥有制造这种设备的专业知识。他本月初在以色列的空袭中被杀。
Democratic lawmakers and Trump’s critics are sure to press for more information on when and how the president came to his decision. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker that he was briefed last week on the intelligence. It “was clear to me that Iran did not pose an imminent threat, that they are not on the verge of being able to obtain a nuclear weapon that could pose a real threat to neighbors, and that negotiations were ongoing and certainly not at their endpoints,” Murphy said.
民主党议员和特朗普的批评者一定会敦促有关总统何时以及如何做出决定的更多信息。康涅狄格州的参议员克里斯·墨菲（Chris Murphy）告诉我的同事艾萨克·史丹利·贝克（Isaac Stanley-Becker），他上周向情报介绍了他。“对我来说，伊朗并没有构成迫在眉睫的威胁，他们并不是要获得可能对邻居构成真正威胁的核武器的边缘，而且谈判正在进行，肯定不会处于终点。”墨菲说。
On Sunday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth briefed reporters about the U.S. operation and was asked whether new information had persuaded Trump to act. Hegseth declined to share many details about Trump’s decision making, but he allowed that “the president has made it very clear [that] he’s looked at all of this, all of the intelligence, all the information, and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat, and was willing to take this precision operation to neutralize that threat.”
周日早上，国防部长皮特·黑格斯（Pete Hegseth）向记者介绍了美国行动，并被问及是否说服特朗普采取行动。赫格斯（Hegseth）拒绝分享有关特朗普决策的许多细节，但他允许“总统非常清楚地表明，他已经研究了所有这些，所有的情报，所有信息，并得出结论，并得出结论，伊朗核计划是一个威胁，并且愿意将这种精确的行动置于中和这种威胁。”
Ultimately, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran had little to do with any sudden change in intelligence assessments. The choice to use military force was a judgment call, and now, it’s his to own.
最终，特朗普决定轰炸伊朗的决定与情报评估的突然变化无关。使用军事力量的选择是一个判断，现在是他拥有的。
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Missy Ryan contributed reporting.
Isaac Stanley-Becker和Missy Ryan贡献了报告。
