Intelligence agencies estimate that it would probably take Iran a minimum of 18 months to develop a nuclear weapon if it chose to build one, Western diplomats and intelligence officials said.
For years the CIA, Britain’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, their French and German counterparts and other spy agencies have been struggling to penetrate Iran’s secretive nuclear program, often disagreeing internally and with each other on when Iran could have a nuclear weapon.
Tehran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful and says Western spies are lying when they suggest Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Some officials at the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna have warned against exaggerating the case against Iran, as happened with prewar Iraq.
But several Western diplomats said that the top spy agencies generally agreed that Tehran would need at least 18 months to build an atomic weapon if it decided to make one — a much shorter timeline than some of the agencies’ publicly released assessments of Iran’s nuclear plans.
“It’s not a formal assessment or formal agreement but a rough agreement that we can all work with more or less,” one Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
He said it was a “worst-case scenario,” not the most likely one.
Another Western diplomat confirmed the agreement, adding that the assessment was based on the assumption that Tehran would need at least six months to purify its uranium stocks to weapons-grade level and another 12 months for “weaponization” — building the actual nuclear weapon.
The minimum possible timeline is crucial because it gives an indication of how much time the six countries spearheading efforts to persuade Iran to halt its enrichment program — the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have before Tehran could theoretically have an atomic weapon.
Iran has so far rejected offers of economic and political incentives from the six in exchange for suspending enrichment, despite getting hit with three rounds of UN sanctions.
A plan under discussion in Vienna that would move most of Iran’s low enriched uranium stocks to Russia and France for enrichment and fabrication into fuel rods would add another 12 months onto the timeline if Tehran accepts it, the diplomats said. Tehran needs a specialized fuel assembly for a medical reactor but is reluctant to send its uranium abroad.
The diplomats also pointed out that the 18-month estimate did not account for technical obstacles and bottlenecks that could be expected to slow down the process of building an actual weapon. Nor does it assume Tehran has already made a strategic decision to build such a weapon.
The US’ director of national intelligence said in February that Iran would not realistically be able to a get a nuclear weapon until 2013.
Mossad Chief Meir Dagan was more cautious, saying recently that it would take the Iranians until 2014.
But an Israeli official linked to the country’s security cabinet described the 18-month timeline as “reasonable.”
A recently retired Israeli government intelligence analyst who still has access to briefings also said the reasoning was solid: “You can argue about the timeline — a few months here or there — but that’s not relevant to the big picture.”
David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security think tank, said it was in line with information he has.
“It’s consistent with what I was told by a senior European intelligence official,” he said.
But one Western intelligence official expressed doubt that Iran would be able to produce a bomb so quickly, describing the 18-month minimum timeline as unrealistic.
“Do they have the knowledge and wherewithal to produce highly enriched uranium now?” the official said. “I’m skeptical.”
The diplomats who described the timeline said there was much about Iran’s nuclear program that intelligence agencies and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were ignorant about because of Tehran’s secretiveness.
“We are all very mindful of what happened in Iraq,” one diplomat said. “There is so much we don’t know.”
One of the justifications for the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had been US and British assertions — now known to have been erroneous — that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had revived his clandestine nuclear arms program.
The diplomats said it was very possible Iran had another undeclared enrichment plant hidden somewhere, similar to the recently exposed site near Qom, which IAEA inspectors visited for the first time on Sunday.
One intelligence official said that even if Iran had another such plant it would probably not be able to produce significant quantities of enriched uranium and would therefore not have much of an impact on the presumed timeline.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of