U.S. Says Iran Has Enough Material for Nuclear Bomb

The United States now believes that Iran has amassed enough uranium that with further purification could be used to build an atomic bomb, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared Sunday.

The statement by the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, went further than previous, official judgments of the Iranian nuclear threat, and it essentially confirmed a new report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which found that Iran had enough nuclear material for a bomb.

“We think they do, quite frankly,” Admiral Mullen said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “And Iran having a nuclear weapon, I’ve believed for a long time, is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations agency, reported on Feb. 19 that its inspectors had found that Iran had understated by a third how much uranium it had enriched.

In its study, the agency declared for the first time that the amount of low-enriched uranium that Tehran had stockpiled, estimated at more than a ton, was sufficient to make an atomic bomb, but only with added purification.

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Iran Has Fuel For Nuclear Bomb – IAEA

The report by the IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, surprises diplomats and arms control experts. Officials note that major obstacles remain to building a weapon.

Iran has made no such gestures and has slowed its expansion of machinery producing nuclear fuel, having increased production capacity by less than 5% over the last three months, according to a report issued Thursday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Another IAEA report released Thursday raises suspicions about graphite and uranium particles found at an alleged nuclear site in Syria that was bombed by Israel in 2007.

The reports, the latest updates from the arms control watchdog for the United Nations, show that Iran had amassed about 2,227 pounds of low-enriched, or reactor-grade, nuclear fuel by late January. Physicists estimate that producing the 55 pounds or so of highly enriched, or weapons-grade, uranium needed for an atomic warhead requires 2,205 to 3,748 pounds of low-enriched uranium.

Iran’s increased supply of low-enriched uranium surprised diplomats and arms control experts who had assumed that Iran would need until the end of the year to acquire enough fuel for a bomb.

One expert, David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said he was “blindsided” by the report.

“We are surprised,” Albright said. “We did not expect this.”

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Report: U.S. Rejected Israeli Plea To Attack Iran Nuclear Facilities

President Bush rejected several Israeli requests last year for weapons and permission for a potential airstrike inside Iran, according to the author of an investigative report.

Israel approached the White House in early 2008 with three requests for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex, said New York Times reporter David Sanger. His article appears in the newspaper on Sunday.

According to Sanger, Israel wanted specialized bunker-busting bombs, equipment to help refuel planes making flights into Iran and permission to fly over Iraq to reach the major nuclear complex at Natanz, the site of Iran’s only known uranium enrichment plant.

The White House “deflected” the first two requests and denied the last, Sanger said.

“They feared that if it appeared that the United States had helped Israel strike Iran, using Iraqi airspace, that the result in Iraq could be the expulsion of the American troops (from Iraq),” he said.

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New Report Calls Nuclear Terrorism Risk Unacceptably High

A new report says the world still faces a serious risk that terrorists could obtain a nuclear bomb and urges President-elect Barack Obama to make reducing that risk a top priority of U.S. security policy and diplomacy. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel has details from Washington.

The new report, called “Securing the Bomb 2008,” says major progress has been made to reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism.

The report warns, however, there are still major gaps in these efforts and says the risk of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon remains unacceptably high.

The author of the report, Harvard professor Matthew Bunn, says the potential for a disastrous attack is very real.

“That would incinerate the heart of a major city,” he said. “It could turn the center of Washington, D.C. or the center of Manhattan into a smoking, radioactive ruin that would be unusable for decades to come. That would have profound and catastrophic affects on our society, really reverberating around the world.”

The study is the seventh annual report from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonproliferation group based in Washington, D.C.

The report details a series of events around the world in recent years it says highlights the risk of poor security at nuclear installations.

These include an armed break-in at a South African site with hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, the arrest of a Russian colonel for soliciting bribes to overlook violations of nuclear security rules and the increasing terrorist threats amid the ongoing strife in Pakistan.

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Iran Said to Have Enough Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.

Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved.

“They clearly have enough material for a bomb,” said Richard L. Garwin, a top nuclear physicist who helped invent the hydrogen bomb and has advised Washington for decades. “They know how to do the enrichment. Whether they know how to design a bomb, well, that’s another matter.”

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Georgia: Terror Fears Over Whereabouts Of Region’s Nuclear Material

When the breakaway region of Abkhazia split from Georgia in 1993, the world’s only known case of enriched uranium going missing was reported after up to 2kg of the potentially devastating material was stolen from a laboratory.

There are now fears that the organized criminal gangs that are rife in the region could exploit the confusion of the current conflict to loot other stocks. Read more