So, an Administration official says Iran “could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days“. Well that sounds scary.
Of course over in the reality-based community we can read that “Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions“, and in particular that:
The nuclear experts said Iran’s claim yesterday that it would mass-produce 54,000 centrifuges echoed boasts that it made years ago. Even so, they noted, the Islamic state still lacked the parts and materials to make droves of the highly complex machines, which can spin uranium into fuel rich enough for use in nuclear reactors or atom bombs.
It took Tehran 21 years of planning and 7 years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the challenge of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always plays in tune and in unison.
Interesting that you don’t see the Administration officals being quoted about that–they say “with 50,000 centrifuges they could make a bomb in 16 days” rather than “if they had 50,000 centrifuges, instead of the 164 that it’s taken them 28 years to build, they could theoretically produce enough nuclear material for one bomb in 16 days. Of course, they still wouldn’t have any delivery system, or indeed so far as we know the engineering skill to produce the rest of the bomb–you need a lot of other technical bits to make a nuclear explosion besides just a bunch of enriched fuel”.
Shades of “We don’t want the ‘smoking gun’ to be a mushroom cloud”
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