Israel says Iran was racing toward a nuclear weapon. US intel says it was years away

[sarisataka]

39. 1-2 times that weight

so a device weighing three tons- now by your admission shielded to a level to prevent detection. It would not even require a large vehicle to transport. A semi can carry upwards of 40 tons- that's 35+ tons of material to hide a bomb that is not giving off radiation.

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the people who maintain the doomsday clock:

How quickly could Iran build its first nuclear weapon? Look at China

How quickly could Iran make an atomic bomb once it has acquired enough weapons-grade uranium? Some nuclear experts argue it would take Iran anywhere between several months to up to a year. But China’s experience shows that Tehran could build a bomb much faster—in as little as three to five weeks.[1]

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Portions of Iran’s “nuclear archive,” which Israel seized in January 2018, clearly show Iran’s weaponization projects running in parallel with HEU projects under the “Amad Plan,” Iran’s code name for a crash nuclear weapons program that operated from 1999 to 2003. The Amad Plan aimed to produce five 10-kiloton nuclear weapons by early 2004, including four deliverable warheads for the Shahab-3 ballistic missile, and another one for testing underground.

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China’s insights. Given the similarities between Iran’s bomb and China’s 596/548 atomic bomb designs, the technical bottlenecks and timelines of China’s bomb development can shed light on Iran’s possible bomb development timelines.

The major hurdles China faced when making its first atomic bomb included the weapon design, neutron sources, the detonation wave focusing system, “cold” (or subcritical) tests, and uranium metal components production. All these are non-nuclear weapon components tasks that can be completed before HEU production, the most time-consuming step in the Chinese atomic bomb program. Once China produced HEU, it took abou three to five weeks from having sufficient UF6 gas to an assembled uranium bomb.

thttps://thebulletin.org/2025/01/how-quickly-could-iran-build-its-first-nuclear-weapon-look-at-china/

Three to five weeks is fairly imminent, unless one believes Israel should wait until Tel Aviv is leveled.