IRAN has become Nuclear Power state but did not announced officially; Intelligence Sources
As its 2015 nuclear deal with major powers has eroded over the years, Iran has expanded and accelerated its nuclear program, shortening the time it would need to build a nuclear bomb if it chose to do so, although it denies this.
A senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Thursday that Iran could review its "nuclear doctrine" amid Israeli threats. While it wasn't clear exactly what he meant, and the term tends to refer to countries that, unlike Iran, have nuclear weapons, below is an outline of where Iran stands.
CANCELLATION OF AGREEMENT AND TIME OF DISCONTINUATION:
The 2015 deal imposed severe restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran. It reduced Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, leaving it with only a small amount enriched to 3.67% purity, a far cry from the roughly 90% weapons-grade purity.
The United States said at the time that the main goal was to extend the time it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb — the biggest hurdle in the weapons program — by at least a year.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran that have cut its oil sales and crippled its economy. In 2019, Iran began violating restrictions on its nuclear activities, and then far exceeded them.
It has now violated all of the deal's key restrictions, including where, with what machinery and to what level it can enrich uranium, as well as how much material it can stockpile.
Its stockpile of enriched uranium, capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the UN nuclear watchdog, which oversees Iran's enrichment facilities.
Iran is now enriching uranium to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if further enriched, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition.
That means Iran's so-called "leakage time" — the time it would take to produce enough uranium to make a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely weeks or days.
The IAEA inspects Iran's declared enrichment sites: an above-ground factory and a larger underground power plant at its Natanz complex and another buried inside a mountain at Fordow.
As a result of Iran ceasing to implement elements of the deal, the IAEA can no longer fully monitor Iran's production and stockpile of centrifuges, uranium enrichment machines, and can no longer conduct immediate inspections. This has led to speculation that Iran may have set up a secret enrichment site, but there are no concrete indications of one.
WEAPONS:
In addition to enriching uranium, there is the question of how long it would take Iran to produce the rest of the nuclear weapon and potentially make it small enough to put on a delivery system like a ballistic missile if it chose to do so. This is much harder to estimate because it is less clear how much knowledge Iran has.
U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA believe Iran had a coordinated nuclear weapons program, which it halted in 2003. It was working on weapons aspects, and some work continued until 2009, the IAEA found in a 2015 report.
Iran denies ever having a nuclear weapons program, although Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said that if he wanted to, he "couldn't stop us".
Estimates of how long it would take Iran to weaponize generally vary between months and about a year.
In March 2023, the top US military officer at the time, General Mark Milley, testified to Congress that it would take Iran several months to arm, although he did not say what that assessment was based on.
In a quarterly report in February this year, the IAEA said: "Public statements made by Iran regarding its technical capabilities to produce nuclear weapons only heighten the Director-General's concerns about the accuracy and completeness of Iran's assurances."
Diplomats said the statements included a televised interview by Iran's former nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, in which he compared building a nuclear weapon to building a car and said Iran knew how to make the necessary parts.