This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 29th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Tehran's desire for nuclear weapons isn't entirely unreasonable,

but how credible are U.S. efforts to convince Tehran that having

nuclear weapons will be a short-run advantage as neighbors step up efforts to

get them too. Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute says even the best option for the U.S.

may not yield a positive outcome.

As of last week, what did we think we knew generally about Iran and nuclear weapons?

We knew a good bit, although we're in, to put it in Rumsfeldian terms, we're in the realm of known unknowns and unknowns.

Much of the discussion about the Iranian nuclear program centers on the facility at Natans, which interestingly was also unknown, at least to the United States, and became a topic of public discussion.

I believe it was in 2002. That revelation, as Washington

conventional wisdom would have it, came to us via an Iranian opposition group.

But actually if you look at the backstory and how this emerged,

what was clear is that the U.S. Intelligence community actually discovered the

facility and somehow between that discovery and the U.S. government's going public talking about the facility.

The information got handed over to an Iranian anti-government organization,

which then was happy to hold a press conference certainly and

understandably to take credit for that information. So this is I would say it is

a concerning revelation of this additional facility outside the town of Combe, but it is not,

it doesn't fundamentally change the dynamic I think with respect to what we have suspected for a long time the Iranians are up to and what we probably suspect they're up to going forward.

There hasn't been a lot of discussion on what might actually be a reasonable response on the part of Iran.

There are two US-led wars going on on either side of the country, even if we understood that regime to be reasonable by our standards,

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