Muhammad Al-Baradei: If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least... Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has...
Interviewer: How much time would it need?
Muhammad Al-Baradei: It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.
Interviewer: Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months...
Muhammad Al-Baradei: Or one year, at least...
Interviewer:... to produce [nuclear] weapons?
Muhammad Al-Baradei: It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon.
[...]
So, he admits that Iran could move towards a weapon and be there within 6-12 months? Anyone else alarmed by this? Everyone else is talking about Iran getting it within 5-10 years. This is the head of the IAEA, you know, the guys in CHARGE of finding this stuff out?
But on the flip side, these guys also didn’t know about the Syrian nuclear site until it was splashed across the front page of CNN, so I have little faith that they’ll DO anything about it.
U.N. nuclear inspectors headed on Monday for an alleged nuclear site in Syria that the United States says housed a secretly built reactor nearing completion when it was bombed by Israel nine months ago, a diplomat said.
Syria denies it has any covert nuclear weapons program and says the Israelis hit an ordinary military structure being built at al-Kibar, in the northeastern desert.
Neither Syria nor the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued any information about the visit of the inspectors since they arrived in Damascus on Sunday.
"The visit (to the alleged nuclear site) is today," said a senior diplomat in Europe familiar with the IAEA.
The team led by Olli Heinonen, head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's global inspectorate, was also due to hold talks with Syrian officials before returning to Vienna on Wednesday.
Syria's silence on the visit, which it agreed with the IAEA on June 5, indicates how sensitive the issue is for President Bashar al-Assad, who has yet to retaliate for the Israeli raid.
The IAEA put Syria on its proliferation watch list in April after receiving intelligence photographs from the United States said to show a reactor that could have yielded plutonium, a nuclear bomb fuel.
Washington said Syria, an ally of Iran whose own nuclear program has been under IAEA investigation since 2003, had almost completed the plant with North Korean help. Pyongyang evaded IAEA checks and test-exploded a nuclear device in 2006.
Syrian officials have accused the United States of fabricating evidence in collusion with Israel, believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power.
U.S. nuclear analysts say satellite images since the Israeli strike show the bombed site had been razed and a new building erected there, perhaps to cleanse traces of nuclear activity.
Damascus has denied concealing anything from the IAEA in possible violation of its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has condemned the Israeli raid and criticized the United States for failing to share its intelligence material on Syria with his agency much earlier.
But he has dampened expectations that the IAEA will find conclusive evidence so long after the September 6 bombing.
"It is doubtful that we will find anything there now, assuming there was anything there in the first place."
Of course.
Travis
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