As the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers has fallen apart over the years, Tehran has expanded and accelerated its nuclear program, reducing the time it would take to build a nuclear bomb if it chose to, although it denies any such intentions.
A senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Thursday that Iran may revise its "nuclear doctrine" amid Israeli threats. While it was unclear exactly what he meant, and the term usually refers to countries that, unlike Iran, have nuclear weapons, here's a Reuters analysis of the matter.
Nuclear deal collapse
The 2015 deal imposed tight restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran. It reduced Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, leaving it with only a small amount enriched to 3.67 percent purity, far from the roughly 90 percent purity that is weapons grade.
At the time, the United States said the main goal was to increase the time it would take for Iran to produce enough material for a nuclear bomb - the single biggest hurdle in a weapons program - to at least a year.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, reimposing sanctions on Tehran that have cut oil sales and hit its economy. In 2019, Iran began violating limits on its nuclear activities and then exceeded them.
The Islamic Republic has now violated all key restrictions of the deal, including where, with what machinery and to what level it can enrich uranium, as well as how much material it can stockpile.
Its stockpile of enriched uranium, which was limited to 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the UN nuclear watchdog, which inspects Iran's enrichment facilities.
Iran is now enriching uranium to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if further enriched, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition.
This means that the so-called "breakthrough time" Iran's yield—the time it would take to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb—is close to zero, possibly a matter of weeks or days.
The IAEA is inspecting Iran's declared enrichment sites: an above-ground facility and a larger one underground at its compound in Natanz and another hidden in the mountains at Fordo.
As a result of Iran ceasing to implement elements of the deal, the IAEA can no longer fully monitor Iran's production and stockpile of centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium, and can no longer conduct surprise inspections. This has sparked speculation that Iran may have set up a secret enrichment facility, but there is no concrete indication of one.
Turning uranium into a weapon
Aside from enriching uranium, there is the question of how long it will take for Iran to produce the rest of a nuclear weapon and potentially make it small enough to put in a delivery vehicle like a ballistic missile if it chooses. This is much more difficult to assess as it is not as clear how much knowledge Iran has.
U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA believe Iran had a coordinated nuclear weapons program that it halted in 2003. It was working on aspects of the weapons and some work continued until 2009, the IAEA found in a 2015 report Mr.
Iran denies ever having a nuclear weapons program, although Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said that "if we wanted to, world leaders could not stop us.
Estimates of how long it will take for Iran to develop a working nuclear weapon generally vary between months and about a year.
In March 2023, the top head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, General Mark Milley, testified before Congress that it would take Iran several months to build a weapon, although he did not say what this was based on. assessment.
In a quarterly report in February this year, the IAEA said: "Public statements made in Iran about its technical capabilities to produce nuclear weapons only heighten the Director-General's concerns about the correctness and completeness of Iran's safeguards declarations."
Diplomats said those statements included a televised interview by Iran's former nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, in which he compared the production of a nuclear weapon to building a car and said Iran knew how to make the necessary parts.