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Archive of Secret Iranian Nuclear Documents Draws Fresh Scrutiny as Tehran Stockpiles Enriched Uranium
(Washington Post) Joby Warrick - A recently unearthed trove of secret Iranian nuclear documents are now being studied in major Western capitals as weapons experts seek to answer a suddenly timely question: How quickly could Iran build a nuclear bomb if it decided to do so? As the UN nuclear watchdog reported this week that Iran is accelerating its production of enriched uranium, the papers stolen from Iran two years ago by Israeli spies are offering new insight into how far Iran had already come in acquiring other critical components needed to build a nuclear weapon. Newly-released records from the document trove are testaments to the depth and scale of Iran's past nuclear research, showing the country's scientists racing to master key technical challenges. Summary reports provided to the Washington Post by David Albright, a nuclear-weapons analyst, show that Iranian officials were conducting scores of complex experiments across a network of secret laboratories. The results of that work are still available to Iran, giving it a head start to make a dash toward becoming a nuclear-weapons state, say U.S. and Middle Eastern weapons experts. The new disclosures from Iran's nuclear archives are a portrait of what "all out" looks like. Today, Iran has dramatically shrunk its theoretical "breakout" time to acquire a bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium to less than four months, according to some independent calculations.