Is It Too Late To Deal With Iran?

The New York Times is reporting that Iran now has sufficient nuclear materials to make a nuclear weapon. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the news coming out of Tehran for years now. They've been hell bent on building enrichment facilities - huge cascades of centrifuges - that extend beyond merely seeking civilian nuclear capabilities and into nuclear weapons development.

The Times also claims that the experts believe that this is a symbolic milestone, but the threat is quite real. The Jerusalem Post notes that the milestone involves having low-enriched uranium, which by itself isn't suitable for a nuclear weapon. That would require additional processing time in the thousands of centrifuge cascades operating around the clock. If the Iranians have solved technical problems in keeping those cascades operating 24/7/365, the time in which it takes to enrich the uranium to weapons grade decreases tremendously.

Iran isn't merely developing its nuclear capabilities in a vacuum. It's developing the missile technology to deliver the weapons at targets as far away as Europe. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have a successful warhead design, and so far there have been no nuclear tests to confirm that they have a working nuclear weapon design.

The problem with all that is the Iranians were on the AQ Khan nuclear network, and have had access to North Korean and Pakistani missile and nuclear technology. The Iranian missiles are largely based on North Korean designs, and the Iranian centrifuges are believed to be based on Pakistani designs.

Thus, it is a matter of time before Iran does have the capability to launch and deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere in the Middle East.

Does it mean that the window of opportunity to deter Iran's nuclear intention has passed? No. As I note above, Iran is still not in possession of a working nuclear weapon, and while it may be difficult if not impossible to destroy all of Iran's nuclear infrastructure in a preemptive strike, particularly because Iran has learned from the Osirak mission of 1981 where Israel destroyed the Iraqi nuclear program before it could go active and has distributed the production facilities around the country and many are deep underground. However, the workers and those with the technical know-how are an Achilles heel to any project of this magnitude and any preemptive strike must take that into account. Destroying the infrastructure might set back the project by months or years, but destroying those with the know-how could permanently eliminate the threat.

UPDATE:
For its part, Israel says that it is ready to deal with an Iranian threat.