Iran will be able to produce enough nuclear material for an atomic weapon in as little as four months by 2029, the Institute for Science and International Security concluded in a report (.pdf) released Tuesday. A secret addendum to last year’s nuclear deal, which was obtained by the Associated Press last month, stated that between the 11th and 13th years of the deal, Iran will be allowed to install advanced centrifuges that are up to five times as efficient as the ones currently in operation. The AP reported that the centrifuges’ increased efficiency would halve the “breakout period” from one year to six months, but the think tank’s new calculations led its experts to conclude that there will be “a breakout timeline of 4 months at the end of year 13.”
The think tank concluded (.pdf) last year, before the revelation of the secret addendum, that there would be a six-month breakout at that juncture. Their reduction of the breakout timeline, Tuesday’s report stated, “is based on data presented [in the report] that is more detailed than the information we had in August 2015.” When asked about the report by veteran AP journalist Matthew Lee on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson John Kirby said, “I’ve not seen it, Matt. And as far as I know, nothing has changed about our own assessments, and the assessments made by the P5+1 in the negotiations about breakout time.”
President Barack Obama admitted in an interview with NPR in April 2015 that in “year 13, 14, 15, [Iran will] have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.” Afterward, the State Department tried to walk back the president’s statement. Then-Spokesperson Marie Harf said that what Obama “was referring to was a scenario in which there was no deal. … He was not indicating what would happen under an agreement in those years.”
The terms of the secret annex, in addition to reducing Iran’s breakout times, also show “that Iran’s enrichment program has been totally legitimized by this deal,” according to Emily Landau, head of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.
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