Abstract
How soon could Iran get the Bomb? If you watch cable news, the answer depends upon which pundit happens to be on the air. On March 14, Roll Call executive editor Morton Kondracke claimed on Fox News that Iran could produce sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon in as little as “six months.” Then on April 15, also on Fox News, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Bret Stephens warned, “They're going to be able to enrich uranium in the next year or two. So, it adds urgency to the crisis.” Not to be outdone, two days later, MSNBC political analyst Monica Crowley said that Iran “may already have” a nuclear weapon. That's rather excitable talk, given that thus far Iran has reportedly produced “dozens of grams” of low-enriched uranium–an amount considerably less than the 15-20 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) required to build a crude fission nuclear weapon. Iran's nuclear program still has significant hurdles to overcome, a fact that was tacitly acknowledged by director of national intelligence John Negroponte, who informed the Senate that Iran could have “the capability to produce a nuclear weapon within the next decade.”
This assessment, however, is being undercut by Negroponte's own colleagues within the Bush administration. Robert Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, says that Iran is accelerating its efforts and that “we are very close” to the “point of no return.” In a radio interview, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated that he was “not confident” in the U.S. intelligence community's timeline. “I think it's a very difficult target for our intelligence community,” he sympathized. “They work hard at it and they're fine people, but it's a difficult thing to do.”
Under different circumstances–say the months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq–such healthy skepticism would have been applauded. But as David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, notes in this issue's cover story, “The more recent Iranian analysis has been subject to more thorough review and is more consensual than the Iraqi assessments.” While many details remain unknown about Iran's nuclear program–not least whether Iran has even decided to pursue a nuclear arsenal–Albright contends that what we do know about Iran's capabilities suggests that Tehran would need at least three years before it could have sufficient HEU for a nuclear weapon. “Given the technical difficulty of the task,” he adds, “it could take Iran much longer.”
Time enough, in other words, to still pursue diplomatic initiatives to defuse the crisis–that is, of course, assuming all sides wish to see the crisis peacefully resolved.