Iran well on it's way to make atomic bomb

The IAEA has recently announced that Iran has been more open about it's nuclear work. However Iran failed to reassure the IAEA that it's nuclear work is solely for peaceful activities. In the past several months there have been conflicting reports about Iran's nuclear work. The most recent NIE said Iran halted it's nuclear weapons program in 2003 but just the other day the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the group that originally revealed Iran's secret nuclear research, said that Iran is actually speeding up their nuclear weapons program.

Now EU experts have concluded that Iran may actually have enough enriched uranium by the end of the year to produce an atomic bomb.

New simulations carried out by European Union experts come to an alarming conclusion: Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium to build an atomic bomb by the end of this year.

....

As part of a project to improve control of nuclear materials, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy set up a detailed simulation of the centrifuges currently used by Iran in the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium. The results look nothing like those reached by the US intelligence community.

For one scenario, the JRC scientists assumed the centrifuges in Natanz were operating at 100 percent efficiency. Were that the case, Iran could already have the 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary for an atomic device by the end of this year. Another scenario assumed a much lower efficiency -- just 25 percent. But even then, Iran would have produced enough uranium by the end of 2010.

For the purposes of the simulation, the JRC modelled each of the centrifuges individually and then hooked them together to form the kind of cascade necessary to enrich uranium. A number of variables were taken into account, including the assumption by most experts that Iran isn't even close to operating its centrifuges at 100 percent efficiency. What is known, however, is that the Iranians are operating 18 cascades, each made up of 164 centrifuges. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself said last April that the country had 3,000 centrifuges in operation. At the time, most Western observers discounted the claim as mere propaganda. But the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Ahmadinejad's assertion in November.

Read the whole thing!