alt Hacker NewsThey said they weren't working on nukes, and our intelligence community released assessments which agreed.
The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.
> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader
Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.
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The intelligence assessment was very careful about what it said.
>A U.S. intelligence assessment says Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons at the moment but has ramped up activities that could help it develop them. https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506...
So they were not actively building a nuke, only getting all the pieces together to build one ready....
Prior to the deal: >Iran initially possessed centrifuges sufficient for one nuclear weapon, but not for nuclear power. https://web.archive.org/web/20190709050018/https://www.polit...
After the deal was broken by Trump and Biden was trying to restart it.... >2023 : An IAEA report on the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant found that two cascades of IR-6 centrifuges were configured in a way "substantially different" from what Iran had previously declared. Iran claimed the difference was due to a human error.
>On 4 March(2023), Grossi met with Raisi and other top Iranian officials. Earlier, IAEA had detected uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% at Fordow. In the meantime, Iran gave assurances that it would reinstall monitoring equipment at sensitive locations.
Ah but the geniuses Trump and Netanyahu assassinated the Iranian leader who had issued a fatwa banning nukes as unislamic so now all bets are off.
>It also isn't nearly enough to make nukes
Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.
That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.
>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?
Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.