IRAN’S NUKESIran Building Nuclear Weapons

By David Albright

Published 5 December 2022

Rather than a traditional nuclear weapons program, Iran threatens the world with a program ready to produce nuclear weapons “on-demand.” Its readiness program poses a difficult challenge to the international community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Understanding the pace of Iran building nuclear weapons matters, in particular, for designing strategies against Iran moving to construct them.

Background

·  Rather than a traditional nuclear weapons program, Iran threatens the world with a program ready to produce nuclear weapons “on-demand.” Its readiness program poses a difficult challenge to the international community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

·  Due to its past, large-scale nuclear weapons program, called the Amad Plan, Iran has a readiness program with less need for secret nuclear weapon development activities. Iran has advanced its nuclear weapons readiness under civilian nuclear and military non-nuclear cover projects. Using a civilian cover, Iran has in recent years successfully produced highly enriched uranium (HEU) and near HEU metal.

·  Understanding the pace of Iran building nuclear weapons matters, in particular, for designing strategies against Iran moving to construct them.

Findings

·  Iran is increasingly viewed as a nuclear power, yet it has so far not been subjected to harsh international and regional penalties.

·  Iran has multiple pathways to build nuclear weapons: (1) Reviving and completing the Amad Plan with a capability of serially producing many warheads suitable for ballistic missiles (and possibly cruise missiles); (2) launching an accelerated effort to achieve a few crude nuclear weapons; or (3) a combination of both. Iran’s likelier pathway to nuclear weapons is the pursuit of both an accelerated approach and a revival of the Amad Plan.

·  The time needed to revive and complete the Amad Plan is estimated as two years, at which point Iran would have produced its first missile-delivered nuclear warhead and created the infrastructure for serial warhead production.

·  An accelerated program, benefiting from earlier Amad work, could produce its first crude nuclear weapon in six months. Too often, the missile warhead pathway is overemphasized.

·  A priority is ensuring that Iran is inhibited, or deterred, from deciding to build nuclear weapons.

Introduction
A frequently propagated red herring is that if Iran’s leadership has not decided to build nuclear weapons, it does not have a nuclear weapons program, as if only a directive to build them or the act of building them qualifies. However, for a country like Iran, a simplistic binary model does not suffice. Similarly, this type of categorization did not apply to Taiwan in the 1980s, when it had a program of being ready to build nuclear weapons on short order, if requested by the regime’s leadership. 1