Reports are coming in from a number of officials familiar with the upcoming IAEA report on Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment, saying that Iran’s advanced centrifuges are not working nearly as well as predicted, and the nation is continuing to rely on its older, less efficient ones.
One former IAEA inspector, Olli Heinonen, said it wasn’t clear from what he’d seen if the problem was a lack of raw material or simply trouble with perfecting the design of the new centrifuges.
Iran has regularly announced new, even more advanced centrifuges, but diplomats say that the designs are actually attempts to fix flaws within a previous design. Western experts had been saying that for quite some time, and the IAEA report is simply expected to confirm this.
It is particularly important, however, because it comes at a time when the fact that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons is being shouted down with wild speculation about Iran’s supposedly rapidly advancing capabilities. The claims of Iran’s technological advancement being used to push for a military attack, besides being an extremely poor reason for a war, also appear to be suffering from the handicap of being untrue.
I strongly disagree with this "analysis". Iran clearly now has the ability to produce bomb suitable uranium with its existing centrifuges in a short timespan if it choses to do so. The more efficient centrifuge types would help, but don't change anything in principle.
Iranian nuclear capabilities where hyped, when they were in their infancy. Now, that they are maturing, they are mostly played down. The reason for this is not difficult to see: If it were acknowledged that Iran now has the potential ability to build a nuclear weapon (as has any country with a developed civilian nuclear industry) this would be an implicitly admission that this fact is not the horrible disaster as it is always presented. Therefore, according to official propaganda, Iran is always close to achieve nuclear weapon capability, but is never allowed to actually reach it.
A similar thing happened with North Korea. There was a lot of hysterical hyperventilating about the effects of a nuclear armed North Korea. But when North Korea actually declared itself as a nuclear weapon state, the effect could not have been more anticlimactic. The crazy rogue state had the bomb – and nothing special happened. Since then the US is systematically playing down North Korean nuclear weapon capabilities. For instance, the US estimated the yields of the north korean nuclear weapon tests much lower as russian specialists and declared that the bombs did not work correctly.
Menschmaschine: Forget about Iran, is not having it yet, or even if they did is only one of 36000.., So by your explanation that is why US is playing down the Israel have – no have a nuclear bomb, or hundred of them or just a few of them or don't have at all any…? Or…? So that is why US, England, French, German, Russian, China and others don't talk about, or US is not talking about how many, for why, have and not have or might have or etc. One thing is for sure, 36000 nuclear warheads is in the hand of US, Russia, China, Europeans and others, question is what we are going to do with them when they start fighting each other. This scenario is more likely then Iran attacking Israel, don't you think.
So, we're officially back to the "Iran has the bomb" or is about to get it routine, I gather?
IMHO, as long as I can't prove otherwise everybody should have the benefit of doubt. And I think that's now particuularly true with all of those speculations about Iran's intentions. Most of what is said or written is just hypothesis, but many times it is represented as "truth".
But I could understand that Iran has problems with manufacturing such devices due to the sanctions. I can remember when the East germans tried to redo the IBM disk memory storage (large hard drives in IBM mainframes). They had stolen all the construction papers but for several years they were not able to produce the metal components so that they would resist the rotational forces.