All the United States gets from a nonproliferation standpoint are a few more civilian energy production reactors under safeguards. But it's meaningless, given that India's weapons production capacity will soar in the coming years.

This is a highly complex deal and on balance it is not in the national security interests of the US. It will damage the nuclear non proliferation regime.

I don't think that China and Russia, at the moment, are going to support or even allow a decision to impose meaningful political or economic sanctions against Iran to go through. And that's not necessarily because Russia and China have a strong economic relationship with Iran, but because they fear, I believe, the rapid escalation of this crisis.

In Congress, this one clearly crosses party lines. The bottom line is this will not come out of Congress the way it came in.

The negotiations for the agreement would take a substantial amount of time. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has been telling people on the Capitol Hill (where US Congress and Senate are) that it will be a year or so.

It's not going to come out the same way it went in.

The next step is not clear. If the United States pushes for stronger actions against Iran, these targeted political and economic sanctions, and the Russians and the Chinese resist, then it is quite possible that the Security Council will be deadlocked. They will not be able to take any action. At the same time, that kind of scenario might lead some in the United States to argue that the Bush administration should take actions on its own. So we are moving in a very delicate phase here.

They say, 'we're within the treaty, we're within our rights'.

The bottom line is that this deal would allow India to significantly increase its nuclear weapons arsenal and provides precious little safeguarding. This is a nonproliferation nothing-burger, and Congress will see it as that if they look carefully.

Even the most concerned and skeptical of intelligence agencies now estimate that Iran is nearly a decade away from developing a nuclear weapon.