November 21, 2008	Friday	Ziqa'ad 22, 1429

NEW YORK, Nov 20: Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, the New York Times reported on Thursday citing nuclear experts analysing the latest report from global inspectors.

The data detailing the development were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz.

The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630kg, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium, the newspaper said.

“They clearly have enough material for a bomb,” Richard L. Garwin, a top nuclear physicist who helped invent the hydrogen bomb and has advised Washington for decades, told the Times. “They know how to do the enrichment. Whether they know how to design a bomb, well, that’s another matter.”

Iran insists that it wants only to fuel reactors for nuclear power. But Israel and many western nations, led by the United States, suspect that its real goal is to gain the ability to make nuclear weapons.

The newspaper observed that for President-elect Barack Obama the report underscored the magnitude of the problem that he would inherit on Jan 20 – an Iranian nuclear programme that had not only solved many technical problems of uranium enrichment, but that could also now credibly claim to possess enough material to make a weapon if negotiations with Europe and the United States broke down.

American intelligence agencies have said Iran could make a bomb between 2009 and 2015. A national intelligence estimate made public late last year concluded that around the end of 2003, after a long effort, Iran had halted work on an actual weapon. But enriching uranium, and obtaining enough material to build a weapon, is considered the most difficult part of the process.

Siegfried S. Hecker of Stanford University and a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory said the growing size of the Iranian stockpile “underscored that they are marching down the path to developing the nuclear weapons option.”