Iran Is Unable To Produce Bomb Grade Uranium Befor 2013

WASHINGTON: Iran will not be technically capable of producing bomb-grade uranium, before 2013, the US State Department’s intelligence office has concluded.

“While Iran made significant progress since 2007 in installing and operating centrifuges, [the Intelligence and Research Bureau] continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce highly enriched uranium before 2013,” the US Intelligence Chief Dennis Blair wrote in a document.

The document answered questions posed by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee members at a February hearing and was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists through a Freedom of Information Act request on Friday.

He noted the judgment was based on an estimate of when Iran would have the functional ability to perform enrichment.

In his earlier testimony to Congress, Blair had declared that Iran might produce enough bomb-grade uranium as early as 2010 or as late as 2015.

In the testimony, he had also referred to the assessment conducted by the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INR), which said Iran would not produce HEU before 2013 ‘because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems’.