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US: Iran may be nuclear Bomb , Ready within a year

April 15, 2010 by · Comments Off on US: Iran may be nuclear Bomb , Ready within a year 

Iran may be nuclear Bomb , Ready within a yearU.S. officials today stated that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb within a year, although that doesn’t mean the country would actually have a weapon that soon.

“The general consensus — not knowing again the exact number of centrifuges that we actually have visibility into — is we’re talking one year,” Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a Senate panel today about Iran’s ability to produce enough fuel for a nuclear bomb.
Does that mean Iran would have a ready-to-use nuclear bomb next year? Not quite.

Once they produce the needed quantity of highly enriched uranium for a bomb, the Iranians still have to package it into a weapon, and that takes additional time, Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee. The expertise needed to build a working weapon adds another “three to five years” to that timeline, he said.

Those numbers are generally consistent with a 2005 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran was 10 years away from a bomb. The government in Tehran continues to insist that its nuclear program does not aim to produce weapons.

President Barack Obama is trying to shore up international support for a new round of sanctions against Iran. Chinese negotiators last week joined in discussions at the United Nations Security Council to discuss a U.S. draft for tougher measures against Iran, but a further session under way today is not expected to yield an agreement.

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