GOOD SENSE IS BREAKING OUT ALL OVER:

Russia is Iran’s top nuclear business partner and the builder of a controversial $1 billion reactor at Bushehr. But after years of defending Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful, Russia appears to be undergoing an change in official thinking . . . .

“Russian officials have made a huge evolution in understanding the threat from Iran” and are making “progress toward the US position,” says Anton Khlopkov, an Iran expert at the PIR Center in Moscow, a military-research institute that predicts a “worst-case scenario” of Iran building a nuclear weapon by 2006, in a report soon to be released.

“Not only US but Russian experts were really surprised by the information about these two sites and these two plants,” Mr. Khlopkov says of the enrichment facilities. “Russia and the US should engage with European experts to find the source of such technologies … maybe in North Korea or Pakistan.”

Why the Russians would want a not-terribly-friendly-or-stable nuclear-armed power on their southern border has never made sense to me. I guess they’ve just been unable to resist the lure of those big contracts. The last paragraph above also indicates just how hard it is to know what’s going on in these programs from the outside. It sounds as if the Iranians have managed to keep the Russians in the dark about the extent of their program even while buying a lot of expertise and materiel from them.