Iran Atomic Chief: Claims of Escalated Enrichment Untrue, Nothing New in Nuclear Work

On Wednesday, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, said that Western media reports of acceleration of uranium enrichment were totally unfounded, suggesting the US was hyping the claim as an attempt to distract from the goings-on in the Gaza Strip.

“We are proceeding with our current activity within the framework of the regulations,” Eslami told reporters at the sidelines of a cabinet meeting. He added Iran is continuing to enrich uranium to 60%, stating “we have neither changed our work nor expanded our capacity.”

The US claimed, citing the IAEA, that Iran has tripled their production of “near weapons-grade” uranium in recent weeks, saying since November, they were up to approximately 9 kg per month whereas in June they were producing only 3 kg.

This is typical US hype about Iran’s production, centering its allegations on the untruth that 60% enrichment is “near weapons-grade,” when weapons-grade is more than 90% purity, something Iran has never attempted to produce.

Even if Iran has increased the 60% rate of production, which Eslami insists they have not, it is a huge leap to convert the uranium further to weapons-grade, even with their best centrifuges. The fact that they’ve never tried to set things up to do so would make this a trial-and-error process.

If we grant that, given enough time, Iran might be able to overcome this obstacle, it would still take 40-50 kg of 90% uranium to even attempt to produce a simple atomic bomb. That’s more than it sounds like, as increasing enrichment involves the separation of the U-235 and eliminating the rest, which is waste. In this process, the resulting mass necessarily goes down, so 9 kg of 60% uranium would produce a considerably smaller amount of 90% enriched uranium – the minimum needed to even think of making a weapon.

If Iran pulled all of this off, they would still need to conduct a test detonation to prove that their weapon design worked. If the test succeeded – and it might not, the first detonation by multiple nations struggled greatly with the atomic yield – all that is purely theoretical.

Beyond the fact that Iran would just have wasted 40-50 kg on a test explosion, they would probably have used most of their stockpile in doing so. However, assuming they had enough weapons-grade material to go ahead, they’d next have to work on the difficult process of miniaturization to try to make the weapon in a deliverable form.

All in all, this is a lot of hoops to jump through to get from a small but active 60% enrichment, the rate of which sounds massively overstated, to a functional, deliverable atomic bomb. Even in the best case, this would take many years to accomplish, and would require Iran to fairly publicly admit they were headed down that road, something which would invite a US attack.

Eslami sees all the talk about this as, yet again, another attempt to reduce mounting global public opinion opposition to the deadly war in the Gaza Strip, hoping that the largely mythical Iranian threat will serve as a potent distraction.