Iran’s Breakout Time Down From 1 Year To Half (Rev 16)

 

Former IAEA Deputy Director: Current Deal’s Breakout Time Would Be Seven or Eight Months

by TheTower.org Staff | 03.30.15 6:04 pm
 

Top analysts, including a former top official at the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, are calling into question basic assumptions about the wisdom of the deal currently being hammered out in Lausanne, Switzerland between the P5+1 global powers and Iran. At stake is whether the administration’s publicly-expressed goal for the talks—that they produce a deal that keeps Iran a year from nuclear breakout for roughly the next decade—is a tenable way to prevent the Iranians from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

In an analysis published Saturday, Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general for safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and now at Harvard University, argued that a one-year breakout window is not enough to prevent the Iranians from dashing across the nuclear finish line—even assuming that the rumored terms could achieve such a one-year period, which Heinonen calculated is not at all certain. Instead, it appears that the deal shaping up would put Iran perhaps only seven to eight months from breakout. Assuming that Iran will be able to operate 6,500 centrifuges, Heinonen estimated that using first-generation centrifuges, the breakout time would be nine months; however, given the stockpile of low-enriched uranium the Iranians have on hand, he writes that “a breakout time of between seven and eight months would…be possible.”

Real world constraints on detection mean that even with a one year breakout time, the U.S. might not have sufficient time to prevent the Iranians from constructing a nuclear bomb should the Islamic Republic go down that path. If Iran attempted to conceal its nuclear activities from the IAEA, it would take the organization at least two months to sift through samples and conduct the proper analysis. Further samples would likely be needed, expanding the detection time to three months. Then the IAEA would need time to report to the United Nations Security Council, which would need more time to respond.

Heinonen, along with Michael Hayden, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Ray Takeyh, a former State Department advisor on Iranian affairs in the Obama administration, wrote last week in The Washington Post about additional real-world constraints that make one year an inadequate time to catch Iran cheating and act:

The United States would have to convince the other member states invested in the agreement — including veto-wielding Russia and China — that the accord was being violated and that forceful action was needed. Time would be spent quarrelling over divergent views, with several outcomes possible, including a Security Council presidential statement or a resolution whose content would need to be agreed upon. And only then could new economic sanctions be imposed on Iran.

Either prior to or after the IAEA inspections, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence would need a significant amount of time to build a case of Iranian noncompliance and bring it to the attention of the President. The result would mean that the international community would not have enough time to implement effective economic sanctions in response.

The breakout time could actually be reduced further. If Iran is able to conduct research and development on advanced centrifuges, and make them operational, the enrichment process would speed up significantly. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that Iranian demands to build more advanced centrifuges have emerged as a key hurdle in the talks. In April 2014, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared, “Consent was given to the nuclear talks in order to break up the hostile atmosphere created by the hegemonistic [sic] front against Iran, but all people should be aware that despite the fact that the talks will continue, the Islamic Republic of Iran will not halt its activities with regard to nuclear research and development.”

Iran Will Have Enough To Make 38 Nukes Yearly

Iran’s Red Line: Centrifuges for 38 A-Bombs Per Year

By Mark Langfan

 

First Publish: 10/17/2014, 3:23 PM

With the self-imposed deadline of November 24 looming over the negotiations between the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) and Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and effective ruler, tweeted a graphic last week which outlined Iran’s 11 “Red Lines for Nuclear Talks.”

These included a “red line” of retaining enough centrifuge capacity to produce approximately 38 uranium nuclear bombs per year. This is Red Line 8, which says: “Supplying the final need of the country’s enrichment capacity which is 190 SWUs.”

Khamenei’s tweeted graphic included an inset that reads: “Ayatollah Khamenei, in line with his support for the Iranian negotiators… has called it necessary to observe the red lines in the course of the nuclear talks. In this infographic, some details of these red lines are reviewed in the Leader of the Revolution’s remarks.”

The “Infographic” is as follows:

Tweeted graphic

“SWU” is an acronym for a “Separative Work Unit” which is a measure by which nuclear centrifuge capacity is measured to enrich uranium. Nuclear centrifuges separate the heavier isotope of uranium U238 from its lighter cousin uranium isotope U235. Natural uranium has a high percentage of U238 and a low percentage of U235. Only enriched uranium that has a high percentage of the lighter U235 isotope is useable for a nuclear bomb.

Now, in order to calculate how many uranium nuclear bombs’ worth of enriched uranium “190,000 SWUs” of centrifuge enrichment capacity could produce per year, one has to know two separate figures: first, the amount of kilograms of enriched uranium needed for a nuclear bomb, and second, how many SWUs are necessary to enrich the required number of kilograms of enriched uranium.

Sources such as A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates the amount of highly enriched U235 necessary for an implosion-type uranium nuclear bomb to be 10kg-18kg, and for a simple gun-type bomb – about 40 kg.

Also, the IAEA defines a “Significant Quantity” (SQ) of enriched uranium as “the approximate amount of nuclear material for which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded. Significant quantities take into account unavoidable losses due to conversion and manufacturing processes and should not be confused with critical masses. Significant quantities are used in establishing the quantity component of the IAEA inspection goal.”

IAEA defines a “Significant Quantity,” or “SQ” of highly enriched Uranium to be 25 kg.

So, for purposes of the “SWU/bombs per year” calculation, the IAEA “Significant Quantity” estimate of 25 kg of 90% U235 / 10% U238 uranium is a good basic number of kilograms of enriched uranium needed for one uranium nuclear bomb.

The scientific “MrReid.org” website has generated a SWU graph which easily calculates the amount of SWUs needed to produce a given enrichment percentage level of U235-enriched uranium to a specific kilogram amount of the enriched level of uranium.

The “Mr. Reid-SWU” chart states that 3,831 SWUs are necessary for 20 kg of 90% U235 enriched uranium, if one starts from scratch with unenriched uranium. So, approximating and rounding up for 25 kilograms of 90% U235, the number of SWUs necessary is about 5,000 SWUs.

Since Khamenei stated that Iran needs at least 190,000 SWUs, that means he is demanding that Iran needs enough nuclear centrifuge capacity to enrich 38 uranium nuclear bombs per year (190,000 SWUs per year / 5,000 SWUs necessary to produce one nuclear bomb). This amount of centrifuge capacity demanded by Iran will surely meet opposition from Israel, which has demanded Iran be barred from any centrifuge capacity whatsoever.

Recently, at the UN General Assembly, PM Netanyahu explained that many countries that use civilian nuclear power have no need for any centrifuge capacity, because outside countries enrich the fuel necessary for their civilian nuclear power plants.