When Iran Will REALLY Have a Nuclear Bomb
It's sooner than you think and tensions continue to escalate-here are the facts on what experts agree is the timeline for when Iran could have nuclear capability and what we can do about it.
(Trump during a cabinet meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Defense Secretary Richard Spencer, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others at the White House July 16, 2019 in Washington. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
After the Trump administration claimed responsibility for assassinating top Iranian leader Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike, Iran announced on Sunday that it would no longer abide by any of the restrictions set forth in 2015 in the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump had already withdrawn the United States from the deal in May of 2018, claiming that the agreement was insufficient due to the 15 year expiration date on Iran’s restrictions for producing nuclear fuel. Although Iran agreed to continue to allow oversight inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iranian officials issued the following statement:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will end its final limitations in the nuclear deal, meaning the limitation in the number of centrifuges. Therefore Iran’s nuclear program will have no limitations in production including enrichment capacity and percentage and number of enriched uranium and research and expansion.”
Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif issued a statement confirming that Iran would no longer be adhering to the limitations previously imposed by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) and said that Iran will still to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) to review nuclear research. An especially hopeful aspect of the recent statement was the caveat that Iran would still be willing to rejoin the initial agreement if sanctions against Iran are removed.
But given that the Trump administration announced additional sanctions against Iran on Friday that will heavily affect the Iranian people and Iranian government officials by cutting off billions of dollars of support to the Iranian regime, an Iranian Nuclear Deal reconciliation in the near future hardly seems possible. Meanwhile, Trump has doubled-down on his threats to attack cultural sites in Iran and continues to make public statements that Iran will never have access to nuclear weapons despite the recent abandonment of any kind of check on their nuclear capabilities. All of the recent tit-for-tat action between Iran and the United States ultimately presents the pressing question of how soon Iran will have nuclear weapon attack capabilities now that their production is unlimited.
While it is certain that Iran is not capable of becoming a nuclear-armed superpower within the next few months, it now has unlimited restrictions on the number of uranium centrifuges it operates and the amount of enriched uranium it stockpiles. This means that a door that was once solidly bolted shut in limiting Iran for the next 15 years has now been opened wide.
Miles Pomper, a nuclear arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, estimates that Iran’s current capacity to obtain nuclear capability is at least a year out. Pomper has based his calculation on the amount of work Iran would have to accomplish to get its nuclear infrastructure back to pre-2015 levels. This time period that encapsulates a country’s ability to reach nuclear readiness is called the “breakout time” and Pomper acknowledges that assessing this phase involves a lot of guesswork, because calculations depend on how aggressively a country moves.
Another factor is how quickly a country mobilizes on upping uranium enrichment levels needed for nuclear power plants to weapons-grade material. Part of the 2015 treaty ensured that Iran was limited to enriching its uranium to just 3.7 percent and stockpiling no more than 300 kilograms of uranium. The deal also mandated that the country could only operate around 5,000 of the basic centrifuges needed to enrich uranium ore, bringing that number down from the 19,000 it had before the treaty. Pomper estimates that if the limitations on uranium production were breached and again became unlimited, the breakout time on nuclear weapons would be one year.
(View of the reactor building at the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant as the first fuel is loaded, on August 21, 2010 in Bushehr, southern Iran. The Russian built and operated nuclear power station took 35 years to build due to a series of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the move provoked International concerns that Iran were intending to produce a nuclear weapon, but the facility's uranium fuel fell well below the enrichment level needed for weapons-grade uranium at the time. Via IIPA/Getty Images.)
Daryl Kimball, executive director at the Arms Control Association, confirms the difficulty in estimating breakout times due to the guesswork involved and the need to know exactly how motivated a country is to achieve a nuclear result. Kimball also confirms that it’s safe to diminish breakout capability based on how many unknown factors exist in analyzing nuclear production.
Another important aspect of assessing breakout time is the quality and capacity of operating centrifuges. (A centrifuge is a spinning apparatus that creates a force thousands of times more powerful than the force of gravity that separates uranium by spinning it into a compound that is necessary for making a bomb.) Officials in Tehran have yet to confirm how many centrifuges they will add to their current active fleet, but experts agree that those in play now are fairly rudimentary. However, Pomper claims that although Iran has started to work on faster advanced uranium centrifuges and the creation of more of these would significantly drop breakout time, “they don’t have the centrifuges installed in numbers they’d need to get there” at this point.
Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, is also of the opinion that Iran is looking to slow things down. Bell says that despite the recent escalations, Iran still understands that nuclear war is in no one’s best interest. “Iran seems to be taking these things very slowly and pausing for a reaction,” says Bell. “I think that's an indication that they are looking for a way to not have this situation deteriorate further. It's not in their interest to go to war with the United States, and it's not in our interest to go to war with them.”
Experts seem to agree that decisions made by Iran and the United States in the next few weeks will definitely play a role in how aggressive Iran becomes and how this influences the breakout time for nuclear capability. Given the recent actions of the Trump administration in murdering an Iranian military leader without proper provocation, continuing to issue threats and bombs to the entire country and then employing crippling sanctions on all of it’s people, it doesn’t take an expert to discern that Iran is likely as motivated as any country could be to acquire nuclear capability.
The recent mistaken destruction of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 by Iran that resulted in the deaths of 176 innocent civilian passengers may also play a tempering role in escalating tensions. Iran admitted today that it brought down the airliner after mistaking it for a hostile aircraft when the plane turned toward a “sensitive military site” shortly after departing from Tehran. The flight was carrying 82 Iranians, 57 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians, including the crew, and the majority of the passengers were headed to Toronto. Iran’s egregious mistake has now triggered the involvement of Ukraine and Canada in speaking out against escalating behaviors, which could ultimately slow down Iran in terms of retaliatory action and breakout time.
Regardless of the many contributing factors that seem to change daily based on alpha-male driven tendencies, the expert consensus on the worst case scenario for Iran developing nuclear attack capability seems to be roughly a year. One would hope that calmer minds will prevail in terms of leadership and the choices that are now made moving forward, but the bottom line is that we have a year to make any significant changes within our control as citizens to stop any impending nuclear development in Iran.
In addition to the appointment of federal judges with lifetime tenure, environmental deregulation that continues to destroy the Earth, the declining respect and credibility of the United States amongst our allies and our enemies — we have only one year to turn it all around. One year, every thing now depends on it.
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Amee Vanderpool writes the “Shero” Newsletter and is an attorney, contributor to Playboy Magazine and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
I hope calmer heads prevail, there are no winners in a nuclear war. When I was in grade school, we had bomb drills. It was the height of the Cold War. I really don't want to revisit those. We all know it was because of tRump's recklessness the airliner was brought down. Unfortunately there is no one who can wrangle him in, that's what keeps me up at night.
Dear Amee, thanks for providing this blog. Hopefully cooler minds will prevail. It’s a stressful time when clueless (Similar to a vengeful Foghorn Leghorn-like) alpha male stupidity primes the pump for more collateral civilian deaths.And this indeed occurred on the second drone ‘hit’ made the same day yet failed to kill its intended target while killing many innocent civilians. This fast and loose administration does not seem to follow rules. Thank you.