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Iran’s nuclear programme has made big strides in recent months and the country is on course to pass an important threshold for nuclear weapons capability next year, scientists and analysts say.Ever since Iran started enriching uranium in defiance of United Nations resolutions, western diplomats have highlighted the technological obstacles facing the country, arguing that they provided time to deal with the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme.But several leading experts say that Iran is now twice as effective in enriching uranium than before, based on a report this week by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.They add that during the course of next year Iran is likely to have built up a stockpile of enriched uranium that in theory could be turned into enough fissile material for a bomb in a matter of months.While the US and its allies charge Tehran with seeking nuclear weapons, Iran insists its purposes are purely peaceful.David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, concurs with other analysts that while Iran was previously only enriching uranium at 20 per cent of the rate it sought, it is now operating at about 50 per cent.“Their centrifuges work better [at enriching uranium] and they are working to develop more advanced centrifuges,” he says.In a sign of the Iranian programme’s increased effectiveness, this week’s IAEA report said that in the six months between December and May Iran put 2300kg of the feedstock uranium hexafluoride into the centrifuges at its facility at Natanz. This implies a markedly faster rate of enrichment – and hence greater effectiveness – than the preceding 10 months, during which Iran fed in only 1670kg of uranium hexafluoride into the centrifuges.A diplomat close to the IAEA added that between December and May Iran had produced 160kg of enriched uranium at the lower levels suitable to serve as fuel supply.“A year ago we were talking about the Iranians making enough low enriched uranium to be put in a little glass vial and shown to the press,” said Prof Peter Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Now we have almost as much as two people weigh. That’s a lot of uranium for a plant that a year ago we were snickering at.”Prof Zimmerman added – and other scientists agreed – that he would expect Iran to accumulate 600kg-700kg of low enriched uranium during the course of next year.Iran’s possession of such a stockpile has been described as “breakout capacity” – the brink of nuclear weapons status – since if 600kg-700kg of low enriched uranium were run though Iran’s facilities again, it would provide enough fissile material for one bomb.Some analysts have suggested that Iran’s real goal may be such a “virtual” nuclear status, in which the country does not have the bomb but can develop it relatively speedily.As in the days of Noah...
