A Great Leap Forward

Iran's ability to enrich uranium continues to progress on a daily basis. The IAEA has found that the Iranians have been able to overcome problems with their centrifuge cascades, which enrich uranium and allow Iran the ability to process uranium to weapons grade if given sufficient time.

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials.

The findings may change the calculus of diplomacy in Europe and in Washington, which aimed to force a suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities in large part to prevent it from learning how to produce weapons-grade material.

In a short-notice inspection of Iran’s operations in the main nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday, conducted in advance of a report to the United Nations Security Council due early next week, the inspectors found that Iranian engineers were already using roughly 1,300 centrifuges and were producing fuel suitable for nuclear reactors, according to diplomats and nuclear experts here.

Until recently, the Iranians were having difficulty keeping the delicate centrifuges spinning at the tremendous speeds necessary to make nuclear fuel and were often running them empty or not at all.

If we're hoping that Iran is slowed by technological hurdles or that saboteurs are able to thwart the enrichment program, then you're not facing reality. There is little to suggest that anyone is doing anything other than talking and wishing the situation go away. Yet, the Iranians are moving closer to their holy grail every day.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Iranians would suspend enrichment activities, and there is nothing that the US or anyone else would do short of military action that would alter Iran's ambitions. Sanctions will not work. Iran already has the centrifuges and the uranium ore. They've got the oil, and they have the willpower to see this through. And every week means they're able to move that much closer:

“They are at the stage where they are doing one cascade a week,” said one diplomat familiar with the analysis of Iran’s activities, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information. A “cascade” has 164 centrifuges, and experts say that at this pace, Iran could have 3,000 centrifuges operating by June — enough to make one bomb’s worth of material every year. Tehran may, the diplomat said, be able to build an additional 5,000 centrifuges by the end of the year, for a total of 8,000.