Iran and Weapons of Mass Destruction - Nuclear Weapons - History

History

The United States and Western European governments actively encouraged and participated in Iran's nuclear program, through the Atoms for Peace program, and under the Iranian monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on 1 July 1968 and ratified the treaty on 2 February 1970. The monarchy was replaced by the Islamic republic in 1979, but Iran remains legally bound to the NPT and to state its support for the treaty.

There are various estimates of when Iran might be able to produce a nuclear weapon, should it choose to do so:

• A 2005 assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded "if Iran threw caution to the wind, and sought a nuclear weapon capability as quickly as possible without regard for international reaction, it might be able to produce enough HEU for a single nuclear weapon by the end of this decade", assuming no technical problems. The report concludes, however, that it is unlikely that Iran would flatly ignore international reactions and develop nuclear weapons anyway.
• A 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate stated that Iran was ten years from making a nuclear weapon.
• In 2006 Ernst Uhrlau, the head of German intelligence service, said Tehran would not be able to produce enough material for a nuclear bomb before 2010 and would only be able to make it into a weapon by about 2015.
• A 2007 annual review the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London stated that "If and when Iran does have 3,000 centrifuges operating smoothly, the IISS estimates it would take an additional 9-11 months to produce 25 kg of highly enriched uranium, enough for one implosion-type weapon. That day is still 2–3 years away at the earliest."
• The former head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, said on 24 May 2007 that Iran could take between 3 and 8 years to make a bomb if it went down that route.
• On 22 October 2007, Mohamed ElBaradei repeated that, even assuming Iran was trying to develop a nuclear bomb, they would require "between another three and eight years to succeed", an assessment shared by "all the intelligence services".
• In December 2007, the United States National Intelligence Estimate (representing the consensus view of all 16 American intelligence agencies) concluded with a "high level of confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and "with moderate confidence" that the program remains frozen as of mid-2007. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, but that intelligence agencies "do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons" at some future date. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said 70 percent of the U.S. report was "true and positive," but denied its allegations of Iran having had a nuclear weapons program before 2003. Russia has said there was no proof Iran has ever run a nuclear weapons program. The former head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, stated that he had seen "maybe some studies about possible weaponization", but "no evidence" of "an active weaponization program" as of October 2007. Thomas Fingar, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council until December 2008, in reference to the 2007 Iran NIE and using intelligence to anticipate opportunities and shape the future, said intelligence has a "recently reinforced propensity to underscore, overstate, or 'hype' the findings in order to get people to pay attention" and that the 2007 NIE was intended to send the message "you do not have a lot of time but you appear to have a diplomatic or non-military option". A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence.
• The U.S. Director of National Intelligence said in February 2009 that Iran would not realistically be able to a get a nuclear weapon until 2013, if it chose to develop one., and that US intelligence does not know whether Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons, but believes Iran could at least be keeping the option to develop them open. Mossad Chief Meir Dagan was more cautious, saying recently that it would take the Iranians until 2014. German, French, and British intelligence say that under a worst case scenario it would take Iran a minimum of 18 months to develop a nuclear weapon if it chose to build one, and it would have to first purify its uranium and weaponize its uranium. An anonymous source in the German Foreign Intelligence Service (BND) whose rank was not provided has gone further and claimed Iran could produce a nuclear bomb and conduct an underground test in 6 months if it wanted to and further asserted that Iran had already mastered the full uranium enrichment cycle, and possessed enough centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium. Physicists say that if Iran were to choose to develop a nuclear weapon, it would have to withdraw from the International Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and expel International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the country. George Friedman, head of the global intelligence company Stratfor, has said Iran is "decades away" from developing any credible nuclear-arms capacity.

• On 12 February 2010 US think tank expert David Albright, the head of the Institute for Science and International Security, said in a report that Iran was seeking to "make sufficient weapons-grade uranium". His claim was criticized by former chief U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

• An IAEA report issued 8 November 2011 provided detailed information outlining the IAEA's concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program, noting that Iran had pursued a structured program or activities relevant to the development of nuclear weapons.