The new intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program convinced American officials that a secret team of the country’s scientists is exploring a faster, even if more rough approach, to the development of an atomic weapon if Tehran’s leadership decides to run for a bomb , according to the current and former American officials.
The development also comes among the signs that the new president of Iran is actively looking for a negotiation with the Trump administration.
The intelligence has been collected in the last months of the Biden administration, then transmitted to the national security team of President Trump during the transition of power, according to officials, who asked the anonymity to discuss sensitive details. The evaluation of intelligence warned that the engineers and scientists of Iranian weapons were essentially looking for a connection that would allow them to transform their growing supply of nuclear fuel into a weapon practicable in a few months, rather than a year or More – but only if Tehran did a decision to change his current approach.
US officials said they had continued to believe that Iran and his supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had not made that decision to develop a weapon, the officials in the interviews said in the last month. But the new intelligence suggests that, since the forces by prosecutor of Iran have been highlighted and that his missiles have not been able to pierce the American and Israeli defenses, the military are seriously exploring new options to discourage an attack on us or Israelis.
Iran, the officials said, remains on the nuclear threshold. Over the years since Trump left the 2015 nuclear deal, the country has resumed the production of uranium and now has a lot of fuel to create four or more bombs. But this is not enough to actually produce a weapon and the new test focuses on the last steps that Iran would need to transform fuel into one.
The tests are almost certainly intended to be part of the discussion on Tuesday between Trump and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is the first world leader to visit the White House from the inauguration of Mr. Trump two weeks ago. For years, the Israeli leader has walked to the limit of ordering an Israeli military strike on the nuclear structures of Iran, only to back away, often under pressure from his military and intelligence and the United States.
But the dynamic is now different, and Netanyahu’s calculations could also be.
Iran has never been weaker than it is today, according to American and Israeli officials. Hamas and Hezbollah, who financed and armed, have lost their leadership and their ability to hit Israel. The leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Moscow and his country is no longer an easy path for Iranian weapons.
In October, an Israeli return to Iran eliminated the missile defenses around Tehran and some of the nuclear structures. He also hit the gigantic mixing devices that produce fuel for new missiles, paralyzing Iranian production.
Trump has indicated that he is in a hurry to enter a direct conflict with Iran and seems open to a negotiation. When asked immediately after the inauguration if he would have supported an Israeli strike on the structures, he said: “We hope it can be resolved without having to worry. It would be really nice if this could be elaborated without having to take that further step. “Iran, he added, hopes that” make an agreement “.
The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who entered office in July after his predecessor was killed in a helicopter accident, repeatedly said that he too would like to negotiate a new agreement. But the story suggests that it may not be aware of what the body of the Islamic revolutionary guards is working on while preparing the nuclear option, former US officials and Iranian experts say.
“President Pezeshkian and Iranian Foreign Ministry probably have no knowledge of the internal nuclear resolutions of the regime,” said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at Carnegie Endowment for international peace.
“The Islamic Republic has long had two parallel regimes,” he said. “There is a profound state of military and intelligence forces, reported to Khamenei, who supervises the nuclear program and regional proxy and have the task of repression, taking hostages and murders.”
So, he said, there are diplomats and politicians “who are authorized to speak with the western media and the officials who have little or no knowledge of these activities” but have the task of denying them.
The US officials have long affirmed that Iran abandoned its weapons program in 2003, after the American invasion of Iraq. Other officials of the Iranian government have insisted that the country is pursuing civil nuclear technology.
However, there are few doubts about Iran’s long -lasting planning to produce a weapon. The Israel documents stole a raid in a warehouse in Tehran in 2018 described the technical efforts in detail.
If Tehran decides to change his policy and pursue a nuclear weapon, Western officials have long evaluated that it would only take days for Iran to enrich Uranium at a level of 90 percent, the purity generally necessary to produce A bomb. He has already done enough fuel, enriched 60 percent, to create four or five weapons.
But enriching the uranium to bomb the degree is not enough for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. And for years American officials said they would take a year to 18 months to transform that uranium highly enriched into a sophisticated head that can be mounted on a ballistic missile. Some Israeli estimates were even longer, upwards of two years.
The Iranians have known for years that this long time of development is a huge vulnerability. If the International Agency for Atomic Energy, which still leads limited inspections on the production of nuclear fuels, announced that Iran was producing bomb-ray level fuel at the purity of 90 percent-Israel and the United States have warned in the past which would most likely be forced to undertake military action.
So the best deterrent of Iran would be to convert that fuel into a working weapon. But he wouldn’t have much time.
US officials believe that Iran has the know-how to create an old-fashioned nuclear weapon, which could be put together much faster than the most sophisticated projects that Tehran has considered in the past. (Most likely he got the projects for such a weapon from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who sold the country projects for his nuclear centrifugues more than a quarter of a century ago.)
Such a weapon would not be able to be miniaturized to adapt to a ballistic missile. It would probably also be much less reliable than any more modern weapons design.
As a result, the weapon is unlikely to be an immediate offensive threat. But such a rough weapon is the type of device that Iran could build quickly, testing and declaring to the world that it had become nuclear energy, said the US officials.
While it would be difficult to use such a weapon against Israel, it could have a dissuasive effect, making it think of countries against Iran twice.