The United States government has known for “several years” that Iran’s breakout time—the amount of time required to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb—is only two to three months, but only declassified the information recently, Eli Lake reported today for Bloomberg View.
Lake noted that in 2013, when President Barack Obama sought to play down the sense of urgency with regard to Iran’s nuclear program, he said that Iran couldn’t assemble a bomb in less than a year; now that he’s seeking to convince Congress to accept the deal following the parameters announced earlier this month, he announced the shorter breakout time.
Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel’s Channel Two, “Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”
On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama told the Associated Press, “Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”
Ben Caspit, an Israeli journalist and columnist for Al-Monitor, reported last year that Israel’s breakout estimate was also two to three months away.
In seeking to clarify the difference in the administration’s positions, Lake talked to David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who explained, “They weren’t clear at all about what this one-year estimate meant, but people like me who said let’s break it down to the constituent pieces in terms of time to build a bomb were rebuffed.”
The reason “breakout time” refers to the production of sufficient fissile material for a bomb is because this is the step that is easiest to detect and respond to. While disputing earlier estimates of a short breakout time, the administration was using the estimated time to produce a nuclear weapon.
Publicly available information led Albright’s institute to reduce its estimate of Iran’s breakout time to between two and four months in late 2012. A year later, Albright and former International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general Olli Heinonen estimated that Iran’s breakout time had been shortened further to one month.
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