How long will it take for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon?
The estimates vary.
The U.S. Secretary of State said that Iran has a “crash” program, indicating that
we could be seeing one soon.
The Director of the CIA indicated that it could be eight years,
or by the end of the decade.
The Secretary of Defense said it would be about five years, depending on Iran’s access
to fissile materials.
The problem with all of these estimates is that they are imprecise at best and wrong
at worst.
The eight-year estimate actually came from Robert Gates in 1992.
The crash program comment came from Warren Christopher in 1995.
The five-year guess came from William Perry, also in the 1990s.
And the end of the decade prediction came from George Tenet in 2002.
It is currently 2022, and Iran still has no nuclear weapons.
They have nuclear facilities like this one, but no bombs.
From an outsider’s perspective, these intelligence estimates look silly.
It’s just nuclear science, right?
How long does it take to put everything together?
The problem is that it is not just nuclear science.
Building a nuclear weapon is a political decision.
And unless you can properly guess what everyone is thinking in Tehran, your predictions are
going to be inaccurate.
In terms of the pure physics part of nuclear weapons, we have much clearer answers.
There are two subcomponents to this:
fuel production
and weaponization.
The fuel production part is straightforward, so let’s start there.
The technology Iran is pursuing is called uranium enrichment.
More than 99% of the uranium that you dig out of the ground
consists of the 238 isotope.
The fissile part—the good stuff for weapons—is 235, and only about .7% of what is naturally
occurring.
To get the good stuff in higher concentrations, you convert the uranium metal into a gas and
spin it around in a centrifuge.
These things go fast.
I mean very fast.
No—faster.
Faster than the speed of sound.
We should calm those down before they become unhinged,
which can happen—more on that later.
Take a look inside one of those spinning centrifuges.
Uranium 238 has slightly more mass than uranium 235 because of the three extra neutrons.
As a result, the 238 begins congregating toward the edges, while the 235 moves toward the
middle.
Scientists can then extract the gas in the center,
put that purer portion in another centrifuge,
and repeat this process.
Eventually, you get up to 90% enrichment, which is the goal if you want to build a nuclear
weapon.
Iran’s current enrichment level is 60%—where it has stayed steady since April 2021.
It would appear that the centrifuge operators still have a long way to go to get to 90%,
but that’s not how this works.
The higher the concentration, the easier it is to increase the concentration further.
To visualize why, imagine I had two piles, each with 100 coins, only consisting of pennies
and nickels.
The first has 99 pennies and 1 nickel.
How long would it take you to find one nickel?
The second pile has 40 pennies and 60 nickels.
How long would it take you to find a nickel this time?
It’s much easier to pluck out the nickels when they are already more concentrated.
Remember: the goal isn’t to get all of them.
It’s just to isolate some from the pennies.
The same principle applies to uranium 235 and 238.
The right centrifuge is going to “find” 235 a lot faster than the left one.
As a result, it would be a matter of weeks before Iran can amass enough 235 for a bomb.
Thus, the fuel production part isn’t really a bar.
The bigger question mark on timing is the weaponization procedure.
Iran would have to convert the uranium gas back into a metal.
Engineers began installing equipment to do this at scale in May 2021.
Then the weapons engineers would have to construct the actual device.
They’d probably want an implosion-style weapon, like what the United States used in
Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
This design takes that metallic uranium, turns it into a ball,
places it inside of a sphere made from regular metals,
and then surrounds the pit with conventional explosives aimed inward.
The explosives all go off at the same time, causing an implosion.
The uranium core pushes in on itself.
Loose neutrons have nowhere to go but to hit atoms of 235, allowing the chain reaction
to go off.
This is a precise operation.
If explosions around the sphere are not all simultaneous, the uranium core does not implode—it
pancakes.
The uranium metal’s surface area increases, allowing more neutrons to harmlessly escape
into the air rather than chain together.
The weapon is a dud.
You can work on the conventional explosive without having finished the uranium enrichment.
And indeed, Iran has been experimenting on this part since at least 2003, when a large-scale
test occurred.
However, the United States tested an implosion device
before dropping it on Nagasaki, in part because the precision is so difficult.
If Iran did the same, this would cause a further delay.
But not by much—only 24 days separated the
Trinity test from the Nagasaki bombing.
There is another type of design, called a “gun type bomb”, which is what the U.S.
dropped on Hiroshima.
This is simple enough that it would not require testing.
But this pathway requires substantially more enriched uranium, so Iran probably won’t
want to do that.
Thus, if Iran plans to build a nuclear weapon, the timeline to the first device is under
a year, and likely well less than that.
It might take Iran a little longer afterward to put a bomb on a missile, but Iran is the
regional leader in missile production.
The bigger challenge here
is making sure that the bomb is robust enough to maintain its operation after being subjected
to the missile’s g-forces.
No pancaking allowed.
But that’s still not a big deal.
The key phrase here is if Iran wanted to, which has been the problem for predictions
over the last three decades.
Iran has maintained a consistent narrative: following the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they
are exercising their right to explore peaceful uses of nuclear technologies.
The Ayatollah even issued a fatwa against the production and stockpiling of them.
The official position is that they are not building any.
Although that is technically true, western intelligence agencies are suspicious that
Iran will eventually pull the trigger.
However, there are still two political barriers to the final decision.
The first of these is the cost.
Although obtaining reliable information on the true cost of nuclear weapons is notoriously
difficult,
paying for everything, from the raw labor to the
fancy equipment is expensive.
And fortunately, there is a comprehensive study of the U.S. program that can shed some
light here.
You might suspect that the majority of the costs of nuclear weapons arise during the
construction phase.
After all, the K-25 building used for the Manhattan Project was the largest building
in the world when it was constructed in 1944.
But in fact, it’s not even close.
Up through 1996, the U.S. spent 773 billion dollars on nuclear weapons production.
Meanwhile, it spent 6.1 trillion on deployment.
The science is relatively cheap.
Keeping everything running and ready to go is much more expensive.
Thus, even if Iran can just press a button and become a nuclear power overnight, it still
might not want to—not if it wants to avoid those costs anyway.
The other political barrier is the risk that might come along with a final push.
It is doubtful that the U.S. will launch a proper attack—the scars of Iraq are still
too recent.
But it is possible—though still unlikely—that Israel might interfere with it.
Although the situation has not escalated to putting boots on the ground, Israel has likely
already taken smaller measures in this regard.
The stuxnet virus, which made Iran’s centrifuges spin out of control, break down, and possibly
come unattached, could be of Israeli origin.
A bunch of Iranian nuclear scientists have also died under mysterious circumstances—likely
assassinations.
If Israel thinks Iran is about to take the last step, it could initiate bombing runs
like it did against
the Iraqi and Syrian programs.
Internalizing the threat, Iran might think twice about finishing the job.
Unlike those other countries, though, Iran has diversified its facilities and has placed
some of them underground.
There won’t be a simple bombing run for Israel to destroy these.
With this one, you can only see the maintenance building from the air.
Because of the difficulty, the risk of attack is likely not a big part of Iran’s political
calculus.
Now that we have talked about the political sticks Iran faces, there are still political
carrots to discuss.
Iran had originally agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under the Obama administration.
Then Donald Trump, fulfilling his campaign promise, tore up the Iran Deal.
Since that time, Iran has once again made steady progress toward nuclear weapons capability,
including enriching to new highs.
The Biden administration sought to sit back down with Iran upon coming into office, but
progress there was slow moving.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the international community became more optimistic, at least
on that front.
Russia is paying for the war
using its oil and gas revenues.
Without that cash, Putin cannot pay his soldiers, and Ukraine wins by default.
This increased the United States’ willingness to make a deal with Iran like 2015—
It can negotiate over some of the policy issues that Iran wants,
return International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into Iran,
and, most importantly, form a long-term solution to high oil prices by flooding the market
with the Iranian oil that is currently tied down in sanctions.
The glut will cause prices to decline, and perhaps put the final squeeze on Russia.
And that is the other political question.
The more goodies the United States and European Union dangle in front of Iran
to join what Obama once promised as “the community of nations”, the less attractive
it becomes to pay those expensive costs of
nuclear weapons production and deployment.
The question, though, is what the United States and European Union are willing to do.
And that is what policymakers from all of the major players have been discussing in
Vienna.
The bottom line is that predicting Iran’s timeline is basically impossible for us as
spectators.
Even U.S. intelligence officials acknowledge this.
If you look more closely at those predictions from the beginning,
they also hedge their guesses because of the uncertainty surrounding the regime’s preferences.
If they cannot make reliable estimates with troves of classified information in front
of them, outside analysts are going to have even uglier time making predictions.
How long do you think will it be before Iran has a nuclear weapon?
Let me know in the comments.
Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this video.
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Take care.