This piece in today's New York Times notes that Saddam was "as little as a year away" from getting a nuclear weapon. He was that close, as I have noted before. But while I'm no fan of how the Times often frames news stories, it's pretty clear the reporter is referring to 1991 - the year inspectors discovered Saddam's clandestine nuclear program was 12 to 18 months from a bomb - and not saying that Saddam was a year or so away from a bomb in 1995 or 1998 or 2002, as some on the Web have suggested. We now know that the inspection process had decimated Saddam's nuclear weapons program, though, for the record, that wasn't the belief at the end of the Clinton administration. That said, the fact that Saddam's bomb program went undetected by Western intelligence agencies is rarely mentioned nowadays. We tend to forget that while our intelligence agencies can overestimate a target nation's capabilities (the 2002 Iraq NIE being the obvious example) they can also underestimated them - as was the case with Saddam in 1990-91 and North Korea.