Intelligence agencies estimate that it would probably take Iran a minimum of 18 months to develop a nuclear weapon if it chose to build one, Western diplomats and intelligence officials said. For years the US Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, their French and German counterparts and other spy agencies have been struggling to penetrate Iran's secretive nuclear programme, often disagreeing internally and with each other on when Iran could have a nuclear weapon.
Tehran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful and says Western spies are lying when they suggest Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Some officials at the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna have warned against exaggerating the case against Iran, as happened with pre-war Iraq.
But several Western diplomats told Reuters that the top spy agencies generally agreed that Tehran would need at least 18 months to build an atomic weapon if it decided to make one - a much shorter timeline than some of the agencies' publicly released assessments of Iran's nuclear plans. "It's not a formal assessment or formal agreement but a rough agreement that we can all work with more or less," one Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. He said it was a "worst-case scenario," not the most likely one.
Another Western diplomat confirmed the agreement, adding that the assessment was based on the assumption that Tehran would need at least six months to purify its uranium stocks to weapons-grade level and another 12 months for "weaponization" - building the actual nuclear weapon.
The minimum possible timeline is crucial because it gives an indication of how much time the six countries spearheading efforts to persuade Iran to halt its enrichment programme - the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - have before Tehran could theoretically have an atomic weapon.
Iran has so far rejected offers of economic and political incentives from the six in exchange for suspending enrichment, despite getting hit with three rounds of UN sanctions. A plan under discussion in Vienna that would move most of Iran's low enriched uranium stocks to Russia and France for enrichment and fabrication into fuel rods would add another 12 months onto the timeline if Tehran accepts it, the diplomats said. Tehran needs a specialised fuel assembly for a medical reactor but is reluctant to send its uranium abroad.
The diplomats also pointed out that the 18-month estimate did not account for technical obstacles and bottlenecks that could be expected to slow down the process of building an actual weapon. Nor does it assume Tehran has already made a strategic decision to build such a weapon. US Director of National Intelligence said in February that Iran would not realistically be able to a get a nuclear weapon until 2013. Mossad Chief Meir Dagan was more cautious, saying recently that it would take the Iranians until 2014.
But an Israeli official linked to the country's security cabinet described the 18-month timeline as "reasonable." A recently retired Israeli government intelligence analyst who still has access to briefings also said the reasoning was solid: "You can argue about the timeline - a few months here or there - but that's not relevant to the big picture." David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security think-tank, said it was in line with information he has. "It's consistent with what I was told by a senior European intelligence official," he said.
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