U.S. persuades Israel Iran nuclear threat is at least a year away

American officials say the Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuaded Israel that it would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a “dash” for a nuclear weapon, according to American officials.

The New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger write that these officials said they believe the assessment has made it less likely that Israel would launch a military strike against the Iran’s nuclear facilities within the next year, as Israeli officials have implied Israel would do.

With one exception — the November 2007 Bush administration’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which, inexplicably, claimed that Iran had “halted” its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — there has been an agreement between the United States and Israel concerning Iran’s inexorable drive toward a nuclear bomb. The debate between the two countries, rather, revolved around two other questions (see “One screw turn away from the bomb: Iran’s nuclear game plan,” 20 April 2010 HSNW):

• The time it would take Tehran to convert existing stocks of low-enriched uranium into weapons-grade material, a process commonly known as “breakout”
• The stage of Iranian warhead design — that is, how long it would take Iran to use weapon-grade materials in a deliverable warhead that can be carried by missiles or planes.

“Israeli intelligence officials had argued that Iran could complete such a race for the bomb in months, while American intelligence agencies have come to believe in the past year that the timeline is longer,” Mazzetti and Sanger write. The two quote

“We think that they have roughly a year dash time,” said Gary Samore, President Obama’s top adviser on nuclear issues, referring to how long it would take the Iranians to convert nuclear material into a working weapon. “A year is a very long period of time.”

Administration officials also argue that international inspectors would detect an Iranian move toward breakout within weeks, leaving a considerable amount of time for the United States and Israel to consider military strikes.

The New York Times reports that the American assessments are based on intelligence collected over the past year, as well as reports from international inspectors. It is unclear whether the problems that Iran has had enriching uranium are the result of poor centrifuge design, difficulty obtaining components, or accelerated Western efforts to sabotage the nuclear program.

American officials said new intelligence information was being fed