Israel strikes Iran: Why Tehran can make nuke bombs in days or weeks if it wants to

The world has been waiting and watching. How will Israel respond to Iran’s weekend attack? Now reports have emerged that the Jewish nation has struck despite discouragement from its Western allies.

Israel has reportedly carried out a strike inside Iran , a move that threatens a wider conflict in the region. Multiple explosions were heard near a military base in Isfahan, according to reports from Iranian semi-official FARS news, where fighter jets are located in the northwest part of the city.

Amid the escalation, the spotlight is on Iran’s nuclear facilities. On Thursday, a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said that Iran could review its “nuclear doctrine” amid Israeli threats. This raised concerns about Tehran’s nuclear programme, which it has said time and again was strictly for peaceful purposes.

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What does this threat mean? And does Iran have nuclear bombs? We explain.

What do we know about Iran’s nuclear programme?

In 1970, when Iran was ruled by the Shah, it ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP) with plans to expand its nuclear programme. These plans were discontinued following the Islamic Revolution, which resulted in the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and the establishment of an Islamic republic in 1979.

In the late 1980s, Iran established an undeclared nuclear programme called the AMAD project. It came under international pressure, paused its plan, and went on to sign an additional protocol to the NTP. This gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an inter-governmental organisation that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, more powers to verify the programme, according to a report in The Indian Express.

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In 2006, the United States, Russia and China joined Britain, France and Germany to form the P5+ group of nations, as it tried to persuade Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.

Three years later, under then-US president Barack Obama, the US conducted extensive one-on-one talks with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator. The first breakthrough was announced in 2013 when Iran and six nations of the P5+ group signed an interim agreement that temporarily curbed the nuclear programme. Some of Iran’s assets were unfrozen paving the way for further negotiations, the report says.

What is the Iran nuclear deal? How did it fall through?

In 2015, the Iran nuclear deal – formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOC] – was signed between Iran and P5 along with the European Union. Iran would limit its nuclear programme and would get relief from sanctions from the US and other nations.

The deal slashed Iran’s stock of enriched uranium, leaving it only with a small amount enriched to up to 3.67 per cent purity, far from the roughly 90 per cent purity that is weapons-grade.

The United States said at the time that a main aim was to increase the time Iran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb – the biggest single hurdle in a weapons programme - to at least a year, reports Reuters.

A year later, as the IAEA said that Iran had kept its word, most sanctions were lifted. This allowed Iran’s entry into the global banking system and it opened doors for the country to export crude oil and natural gas.

But when Donald Trump came to power, he pulled the US out of the deal in May 2018. He campaigned on a promise of withdrawing from the accord, as he felt it did not address Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its involvement in regional conflicts. He reimposed sanctions on Tehran that slashed its oil says and battered its economy.

Also read: Israel carries out strike against Iran: What could Tehran’s next steps be?

What happened after the deal fell through?

After the US withdrew from the pact, in June 2018, Iran announced it would expand its enrichment infrastructure within the limits of the JCPOA. However, it started breaching the restrictions on its nuclear activities and then pushed far beyond them.

In May 2019, Tehran said it would not abide by some of its commitments under the deal unless other members agreed to its economic demands. In July of that year, the IAEA warned that Iran had exceeded its enrichment limits.

Can Iran produce nuclear weapons?

Iran has now breached all the deal’s key restrictions, including where, with what machines and to what level it can enrich uranium, as well as how much material it can stockpile. Its stock of enriched uranium, which was capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran’s enrichment plants.

Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60 per cent purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the IEAE’s theoretical definition, reports Reuters. That means Iran’s so-called “breakout time”, the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days.

As a result of Iran ceasing to implement elements of the deal, the IAEA can no longer fully monitor Iran’s production and inventory of centrifuges and machines that enrich uranium. It can no longer conduct snap inspections. That has prompted speculation about whether Iran could have set up a secret enrichment site, but there are no concrete indications of one, the report says.

Also read: Is Iran close to building a nuclear bomb?

Can Iran produce nuclear weapons?

Aside from uranium enrichment, there is the question of how long it would take Iran to produce the rest of a nuclear weapon and potentially make it small enough to put in a delivery system like a ballistic missile, should it choose to. This is much harder to estimate as it is less clear how much knowledge Iran has, reports Reuters.

US intelligence agencies and the IAEA believe Iran had a coordinated nuclear weapons programme that it halted in 2003. It worked on aspects of weaponisation and some work continued until as late as 2009, the IAEA found in a 2015 report.

In March 2023, the top US military officer at the time, General Mark Milley, testified to Congress that weaponisation would take Iran several months, though he did not say what that assessment was based on.

In a quarterly report in February this year, the IAEA said, “Public statements made in Iran regarding its technical capabilities to produce nuclear weapons only increase the director general’s concerns about the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations.”

Diplomats said those statements included a television interview by Iran’s former nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi in which he likened producing a nuclear weapon to building a car, and said Iran knew how to make the parts needed, reports Reuters.

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Can Iran turn to its nuclear capabilities amid tensions with Israel?

A day before the Israel strike, the IRG commander spoke of “Iran’s nuclear doctrine”.

“The threats of the Zionist regime (Israel) against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to review our nuclear doctrine and deviate from our previous considerations,” Ahmad Haghtalab, the Guards commander in charge of nuclear security, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency on Thursday.

This remark has only added to speculation about Iran weaponising its nuclear programme

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the last say on what Tehran does next. While the country has always denied having a nuclear weapons programme, Khamenei has once said that if it wanted to world leaders “wouldn’t be able to stop us”.

With inputs from agencies