By Henry Sokolski
As military tensions between Israel and Iran escalate, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the other media outlets are speculating about how soon Iran could acquire a missile-deliverable warhead if it decided to do so. The conventional wisdom is it would take a year or more.
But, as Greg Jones and I note in the attached Foreign Policy piece, “Iran Could Build a Nuclear Weapons Sooner Than You Think,” it would take no more than a few months.
History here is our guide. The United States, under the pressures of an ongoing world war in the 1940s, had working gun and implosion devices on the ready to accept nuclear weapons fissile material. The nuclear material and the nonnuclear components of the bomb were developed at the same time and were completed for the Hiroshima bomb just nine days after the United States had enough uranium for this device.
That was 79 years ago. Since then, most nations’ first weapons designs have been more efficient, lighter, and smaller than either of the nuclear weapons America dropped on Japan. This includes Iran’s design, which Tehran began working on more than 20 years ago. It was geared to be a missile-deliverable warhead from the start.
US intelligence believes Iran is within a week or two of producing enough weapons-grade uranium for four devices (and, by our calculations, could produce another six in another eight weeks). Even if Iran has not completed construction of its missile-deliverable warhead design, history suggests it could finish this work after a decision to do so in no more than five months. Of course, if our intelligence is wrong, and Iran has already completed work on this implosion device, it’s assembly with weapons uranium cores might only take a few weeks.
Bottom line: We’d be wise to hedge our bets against Iran going nuclear much sooner rather than later.
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future. He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993.
Gregory S. Jones is the publisher of Proliferation Matters. His research focuses on the potential for terrorists and hostile countries to acquire and use nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons as well as the formulation of policies and actions to control and counter these weapons.
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