Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says

[Waya]

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Iran, which is defying United Nations Security Council demands to cease its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days if it goes ahead with plans to install thousands of centrifuges at its Natanz plant, a U.S. State Department official said.

``Natanz was constructed to house 50,000 centrifuges,'' Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow. ``Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days.''

In fact, Iran will move forward to ``industrial scale'' uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at Natanz, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday the country had succeeded in enriching uranium on a small scale for the first time, using 164 centrifuges. That announcement defies demands by the UN Security Council that Iran shut down its nuclear program this month.

The U.S. and other countries fear Iran is pursuing a nuclear program to make weapons, while Iran says it is intent on purely civilian purposes, to provide energy. Saeedi said 54,000 centrifuges will be able to enrich uranium to provide fuel for a 1,000-megawat nuclear power plant similar to the one Russia is finishing in southern Iran, AP reported.

``It was a deeply disappointing announcement,'' Rademaker said of Ahmadinejad's statement.

Weapons-Grade Uranium

Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use. The process involves placing uranium hexafluoride gas in a series of rotating drums or cylinders known as centrifuges that run at high speeds to extract weapons grade uranium.

Iran has informed the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to construct 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz next year, Rademaker said.

``We calculate that a 3,000-machine cascade could produce enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within 271 days,'' he said......


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=awSzbHpjozAo&refer=top_world_news



Uhuh!!!

:crazy:

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

1. They Could.

With that many centrifuges working efficiently together they absolutely could make a weapon in 16 days.

Please note the following dislcaimer: 16 days is not reflective of 16 days from now. It is a number of the time frame it would take to make a weapon once all 54000 centrifuges were operating efficiently. This could take 10 or more years. Therefore, Sometime 10-15 years from now Iran could have the ability to make a weapon in 16 days.

[Waya]

3. Sure....

... once all 54000 centrifuges are operating

As of yet it seems they don't got enough going on to light up an outhouse on the outskirts of Teheran.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

6. I Mean, You Did Read The Whole Post Right?

I mean, you read it all and were just reiterating my clearly made point as opposed to not paying attention to what I actually said correct? :shrug:

Just wanted to confirm. :)

[Ignacio Upton]

4. They don't have anywhere near a FRACTION of 50,000

This is "mushroom cloud" deux.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

7. Hi. I'd Like To Direct You Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=917600&mesg_id=917674

:hi:

[SPKrazy]

17. Sure They Could

if they could get the 54000 centrifuges up and running












































:evilgrin:

just messing with ya man!

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

19. hehehehe

:evilgrin:

[hobbit709]

2. And if I tried real hard

I could probably shit a brick of gold in 16 days too.

[Deja Q]

5. Okay, so maybe they will have a weapon at some point.

Stern sanctions, right now, are good enough indeed.

Iran broke the UN's own rules, therefore the UN must react or really look like a real fuckin' fool, pardon my language.

And this time, I won't have any sympathy if the UN acts like a galloping gaggle of twits. If you tell someone "don't do this!" and then they go do it anyway, you don't tell them not to do it again and hope they will comply. You punish them.

Iran is not Iraq.

And we know Iran has every intent to use such a weapon once they make it.

And the right diplomacy will stop them without hurting anyone else. Hell, the right diplomacy might make them less at odds against Israel, but now I'm dreaming. (and the fact even Israel isn't sure (a google headline from ~3 hours ago) has me wondering too.)

[Turbineguy]

8. The irony

is that if Bush had not become Presdient, oil prices would never have gotten so high and it's unlikely that Iran could have afforded the cost of this.

Just another benefit of voting for Bush or being cheated out of your vote by Republicans.

[SPKrazy]

9. So How Long To Get 54,000 Centrifuges?

they have 164 now

anyone have any idea how long it seriously could take them to get it?

[tjwash]

11. It's not just getting the centrifuges...

it's the entire process of getting the centrifuges there, assembling them, and getting a working system in place that could actually be capable of having 54000 centrifuges work in unison, to enrich enough uranium to create a working nuke. That would, at the minimum, take 10 years to accomplish. And that's with an experienced team of engineers and scientists, that already know how to do it.

[SPKrazy]

16. Are You An Engineer?

just curious how you come up with the number 10 years?

[tjwash]

21. Yes I'm an Electrical Engineer.

And have worked in a couple different power plants. I mostly do consulting work now.

[Douglas Carpenter]

10. Fishing for a Pretext in Iran

by Juan Cole; March 18, 2006

link: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=9929

snip:"it is often alleged that since Iran harbors the desire to “destroy” Israel, it must not be allowed to have the bomb. Ahmadinejad has gone blue in the face denouncing the immorality of any mass extermination of innocent civilians, but has been unable to get a hearing in the English-language press. Moreover, the presidency is a very weak post in Iran, and the president is not commander of the armed forces and has no control over nuclear policy. Ahmadinejad’s election is not relevant to the nuclear issue, and neither is the question of whether he is, as Liz Cheney is reported to have said, “a madman.” Iran has not behaved in a militarily aggressive way since its 1979 revolution, having invaded no other countries, unlike Iraq, Israel or the U.S. Washington has nevertheless succeeded in depicting Iran as a rogue state"

In fact, the Iranian regime has gone further, calling for the Middle East to be a nuclear-weapons-free zone. On Feb. 26, Ahmadinejad said:
“We too demand that the Middle East be free of nuclear weapons; not only the Middle East, but the whole world should be free of nuclear weapons.”
Only Israel among the states of the Middle East has the bomb, and its stockpile provoked the arms race with Iraq that in some ways led to the U.S. invasion of 2003. The U.S. has also moved nukes into the Middle East at some points, either on bases in Turkey or on submarines."

snip:"On March 13, President Bush told an audience at George Washington University, “Coalition forces have seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran...Such actions--along with Iran’s support for terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons--are increasingly isolating Iran, and America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.”

Bush’s allegations about the Iranians providing improvised explosive devices to the Iraqi guerrilla insurgency are bizarre. The British military looked into charges of improvised explosive devices coming from Iran, and actually came out this past January and apologized to Tehran when no evidence pointed to Iranian government involvement. The guerrillas in Iraq are militant Sunnis who hate Shiites, and it is wholly implausible that the Iranian regime would supply bombs to the enemies of its Iraqi allies.

Although Bush charges Iran with “support for terrorism,” he seems unable to name any international terrorist incident of the past six years that can unambiguously be attributed to Iran. His baldfaced accusation that Iran is in “pursuit of nuclear weapons” is, as we will see below, not proved either."


link to Juan Cole's article:

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=9929
________________________________________

link to interview with Seymour Hersh on Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/12/1359254

"The Israelis, they can tell you that Iran is anywhere from two to three years at the best, by their estimate, from actually being in a position to do it. But the American intelligence estimate, which was published last summer by the Washington Post, what they call the N.I.E., the National Intelligence Estimate, an official document, said something like eight to ten years away."

[tjwash]

12. "Rademaker said"

At that point in the article, you can pretty much safely dismiss the entire thing as more lies, and white house spin, designed to send ma-and-pa nasscar into a "we gotta nuke them arabs" frenzy.

Stephen Rademaker works for Robert Joseph, who was charged with muscling the CIA into letting President Bush use the "yellow cake uranium", "Saddam's gonna nuke us in 45 minutes" horse-shit in the 2003 State of the Union address.

I see they haven't refined their scare tactics any...

[GliderGuider]

13. "16 Days" sounds like a signal to me

Given the specific date and the context in which it was used, I think the Pentagon is telegraphing their timetable. By Apr. 28 it will be done, one way or another.

[baby_mouse]

14. Oh, for heaven's sake.

This is just boring and unfashionable.

I'm off to post in the Lounge... George can pore over my epistles when he's thought of something new.

[peacetalksforall]

15. June 2005 - Natl Security Council says 10 years. April '06 - 16 days?

The smell of death.

[brettdale]

18. According to BBC International on TV last Night

Thye are not even close to producing one Nuke, from where they are now, it will take years.

Where the fu*k this 16 days come from is a mystery.

[OneBlueSky]

20. I call bullshit . . . in fact, my initial reaction to ANYTHING coming . .

from BushCo or their corporate media minions is to assume that it's bullshit . . . a lesson learned from recent history . . .

[Initech]

22. Is this Dumbya math now? 16 days = 271 days?

Huh?

[Dem2theMax]

23. Step away - step carefully away

from the White House controlled LIES. :crazy:


If there is one thing we all should have learned by now -
it is to NEVER NEVER NEVER believe anything that is even remotely connected to the White House.