Comment by storus
16 hours ago
Does this mean that Iran will have functional nukes in two weeks? Given how previous "ceasefires" turned out (blowing up their leadership), I don't think they are naive again and don't seem desperate to end it.
16 hours ago
Does this mean that Iran will have functional nukes in two weeks? Given how previous "ceasefires" turned out (blowing up their leadership), I don't think they are naive again and don't seem desperate to end it.
No, there is more to building a functioning nuke than just fuel enrichment.
The access to highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium is the limiting factor for construction of nuclear weapons.
It really depends on how small and how efficient you need to make weapon, a nuclear weapon fitting inside a rocket nose cone is much more sophisticated than nuclear weapon that has to be only transportable by truck, ship or airplane.
For example, the simple design of Little Boy used on Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms of uranium, but less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_boy
"Unlike the implosion design developed for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb design that was used against Nagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima."
So with access to highly enriched uranium (enrichment greater than 90%), a large and crude bomb could be produced in few weeks. How could they deliver it anywhere? They don't have airplanes. Truck? Speedboat?
Given how the past nuclear deals went over decades, there's little hope of follow through now.
JCPoA compliance was verified by the US and the IAEA regularly until the agreement was suspended by Donald Trump in 2018.
And the agreement continued with other nations, but IAEA started raising concerns in 2019 and Iran started breaking conditions. A bunch of countries tried to reinstate it under Biden but the Iranians wouldn't do it. Maybe they would have stayed compliant, maybe not. We'll never know. What we do know is that they wouldn't continue the agreement with other parties nor recommit to it later.