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

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.

http://www.thetower.org/1829-former-iaea-deputy-director-current-deals-breakout-time-could-be-seven-or-eight-months/