Tehran ‘could have nuclear bomb in six months’: former IAEA director

A former IAEA deputy director says the country could have nuclear weapons ready by April and the missiles fired at Israel could be used to deliver them.

Iran could develop a nuclear bomb within six months, according to the IAEA.

Iran could be six months away from having ten nuclear warheads ready to fire, an official observer who has visited the regime’s sites has reported.

Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who oversaw its efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program, said the country could have the arsenal ready by April if it “rushed”.

The Finnish adviser said: “You cannot wipe out a country with those missiles but you can threaten it and be in a stronger position in negotiations.”

Officially, Iran claims that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes but Israel and many in the West see it as a front for weapons development.

An IAEA report in August said Iran had increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 per cent to almost 165kg, 20kg more than the UN’s nuclear watchdog reported in May.

Enrichment of about 90 per cent is required for a bomb. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has long warned that Iran could achieve that in a few months.

Heinonen, a fellow at the Stimson Centre in Washington DC, who has held many meetings with the regime’s nuclear officials, said the missiles fired at Israel on Tuesday night could be used to deliver nuclear weapons.

“You just put something different where the payload is and design the weapons package differently so it survives the flight,” he said. “That is why the US and UK are worried.”

He warned that officials in Iran had signalled that they had changed their defence doctrine to suggest the weapons could be used “if we don’t get what we want”.

Heinonen said the Iranians would be taking a “tremendous risk” by using nuclear weapons. They were more likely to use them as a “bargaining chip”. He added: “The US president will have to think that there is even a small possibility those weapons are used and they have to be prepared for that.”

President Biden has said he would not support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. He is the only one likely to have any sway over what Netanyahu does next. The US has already failed to persuade Israel – to which it gives billions of pounds for its defences – not to go into Rafah in Gaza owing to the risk of civilian casualties and not to invade Lebanon, which it did this week.

Any move by Iran to achieve a nuclear bomb risks being detected. Israeli hawks could urge Netanyahu to strike as Israel did previously in Iraq and Syria by bombing their nuclear facilities.

Analysts say hitting Iran’s enrichment facilities in mountainous regions of Natanz and Fordow could be “challenging” and have limited results.

After the first Iranian confrontation with Israel in April – when a symbolic strike was made on a radar tower at an airfield in Isfahan – a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said the country should revise its nuclear ambitions. A previous agreement to relax sanctions if Tehran reduced its stockpile of enriched uranium was ripped up by President Trump in 2018, effectively allowing enrichment to accelerate.

President Pezeshkian, of Iran, is believed to regard the growing stockpile as a bargaining chip for a new nuclear deal to ease the burden of sanctions.

But the threat to Hezbollah and Hamas posed by Israel’s military campaign may bolster the hawks in Tehran.

Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert, said the collapse of Hezbollah posed a threat. He added: “To compensate for that they’ve been speaking about an alternative, or another layer of deterrence, which could be nuclear.”

The Times