Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away - New York Times
The New York Times

April 13, 2006

Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, NAZILA FATHI and JOEL BRINKLEY

Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills,
materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions,
even as
a senior Iranian official said
Iran
would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich
uranium for fuel.

The official, Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's atomic energy
organization, said Iran would push quickly to put 54,000 centrifuges on
line - a
vast increase from the 164 the Iranians said Tuesday that they had used to
enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.

Still, nuclear analysts called the claims exaggerated. They said nothing had
changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a
single
nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States
government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it
could come
as late as 2020.

Iran's announcement brought criticism from several Western nations and to a
lesser degree from Russia and China. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice
called for "strong steps" against Iran, using the country's clear statement
of defiance to persuade reluctant countries like Russia and China to support
tough international penalties. But Russian officials said they had not
changed their opposition to such penalties. Nuclear analysts said Iran's
boast that
it had enriched uranium using 164 centrifuges meant that it had now moved
one small but significant step beyond what it had been ready to do nearly
three
years ago, when it agreed to suspend enrichment while negotiating the fate
of its nuclear program.

"They're hyping it," said David Albright, president of the Institute for
Science and International Security in Washington, a private group that
monitors
the Iranian nuclear program. Anthony H. Cordesman and Khalid R. al-Rodhan of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington called the
new Iranian claims "little more than vacuous political posturing" meant to
promote Iranian nationalism and a global sense of atomic inevitability.

The nuclear experts said Iran's claim yesterday that it would mass-produce
54,000 centrifuges echoed boasts that it made years ago. Even so, they
noted,
the Islamic state still lacked the parts and materials to make droves of the
highly complex machines, which can spin uranium into fuel rich enough for
use in nuclear reactors or atom bombs.

It took Tehran 21 years of planning and 7 years of sporadic experiments,
mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning
centrifuges
in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has
to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and
years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if
Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the
challenge
of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always
plays in tune and in unison.

Yesterday, Mr. Saeedi, the Iranian nuclear official, said Iran was moving
rapidly toward its atomic goals. "We will expand uranium enrichment to
industrial
scale at Natanz," he was quoted as saying by the ISNA student news agency in
a reference to Iran's main enrichment facility. Mr. Saeedi said Iran would
start operating the first of 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz by late 2006, with
further expansion to 54,000 centrifuges. "We have no problem in doing that,"
he told ISNA. "We just need to increase our production lines."

The news from Iran, which holds 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, has
made oil markets very nervous in recent days and contributed to a spike in
oil
prices to nearly $70 a barrel on Tuesday. Oil futures on the New York
Mercantile Exchange closed at $68.62 a barrel yesterday, just $2 short of
their record
after Hurricane Katrina.

Since the beginning of the year, the diplomatic crisis has prompted fears
that Iran might be tempted to restrict its oil sales, provoking a price jump
that
would cause economic havoc around the world. Iranian officials have
repeatedly said they might use their country's "oil weapon" in a
confrontation with
the West. But, as is often the case in Iranian politics, such statements
were just as rapidly offset by more reassuring comments from the Oil
Ministry
that Iran would not use its oil exports as a bargaining chip with the West.

More realistically, many traders fear that any international penalties
against Iran might hurt Iran's oil industry, slow investments, or remove
sorely needed
barrels from oil-hungry markets.

The Russian stance against penalties highlighted the obstacles Washington
faces in its effort to force a halt to Iran's nuclear program. A senior aide
to
President
Vladimir V. Putin
of Russia said yesterday that any effort to employ broad penalties against
Tehran would backfire because "Iran's current president will use them for
his
benefit, and he will use them to consolidate public opinion around him."

The United States is urging members of the
United Nations
Security Council to approve travel and financial restrictions on Iran's
leaders, and administration officials view Russia, which has close trade
ties to
Iran, as the linchpin of those efforts.

Ms. Rice said yesterday that the Security Council must consider "strong
steps" to induce Iran to change course. "The Security Council will need to
take
into consideration this move by Iran," she said about Tuesday's
announcement. "It will be time when it reconvenes on this case for strong
steps to make
certain that we maintain the credibility of the international community."

In Iran on Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in an elaborate
ceremony that Iranian scientists had enriched uranium to 3.5 percent - a
level
of purity that, if enough could be made, might fuel a nuclear reactor. While
Iran hailed the step as a first, the nuclear experts said Tehran had in fact
been doing periodic enrichment experiments with centrifuges for seven years,
since 1999.

Amid the tensions,
Mohamed ElBaradei,
the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived in Tehran
yesterday for talks with Iranian nuclear officials. Despite the provocative
nature
of Iran's statements, he still held out hope that the government could be
persuaded to compromise. "We hope to convince Iran to take
confidence-building
measures including suspension of uranium enrichment activities until
outstanding issues are clarified," Dr. ElBaradei told journalists at the
Tehran airport,
Reuters reported.

Iran's state-run television was dominated by programs about the atomic claim
in what seemed like an organized effort to mobilize public support for the
nuclear program. One channel showed a reporter stopping people on the street
to ask if they had bought pastry to celebrate the news. Another showed
nuclear
sites and uranium mines. Television news said schools celebrated the success
and rebroadcast the announcement of Iran's president hailing the enrichment
step.

While Iran has sharply raised its atomic claims in the past two days,
nuclear analysts said it appeared to be roughly where it was expected to be
on the
road to learning how to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, and still had
years of work ahead of it to attain its ambitious goals.

Mr. Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security said he
was not surprised that the Iranians had got a group of 164 centrifuges up
and
running and had begun to introduce uranium gas into them for enrichment.

"There's still a lot they have to do," he said, to perfect the operation of
the cascade of centrifuges. A report that he and his colleagues made public
late last month suggested that Iran would need 6 to 12 months to master that
process, and Mr. Albright said in an interview that he stood by that rough
estimate as accurate.

His March report said Iran had parts for perhaps 1,000 or 2,000 centrifuges
beyond the ones already in operation, and that Iran is not likely to produce
enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon until 2009 at the
earliest.

Several Western nations criticized Iran's recent announcements as needlessly
provocative.

Foreign Minister
Jack Straw
of Britain said they were "deeply unhelpful," and his German counterpart,
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Iran was "going in precisely the wrong
direction."
Russia and China joined the chorus, but their criticisms were qualified.

"For China, we are concerned about the events and the way things are
developing," said Wang Guamgya, China's ambassador to the United Nations.
But he added,
"In spite of this, I believe diplomatic efforts are still under way."

In Moscow, a Foreign Ministry spokesman called Iran's push to expand uranium
enrichment "a step in the wrong direction."

But Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov later tempered that. He inveighed
against any possible military action against Iran and advised against a rush
to
judgment, saying Iran had "never stated that it is striving to possess
nuclear weapons."

Jad Mouawad contributed reporting from New York for this article.

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