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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

They said they weren't working on nukes, and our intelligence community released assessments which agreed.

The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.

> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader

Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.

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>It also isn't nearly enough to make nukes

Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.

That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.

>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?

Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.

That's a common misconception. You can't make the calculation purely on the mass of raw material needed to get a X kg of Y% material.

Every enrichment process drops in efficiency as the enrichment increases, asymptotically approaching that process's enrichment ceiling.

That's why nobody uses thermal diffusion to enrich uranium: It's by far the easiest method (you can do it with 1800's technology), but the practical maximum enrichment fraction is too low for anything useful (other than providing feedstock to better enrichment processes).

That's also the reason a centrifuge enrichment plant uses warehouses full of cascaded centrifuges: The centripetal force inside the centrifuge is working against a diffusion gradient, so each stage only gives a small percentage decrease of the "derichment" fraction.

Once you pass 50%, you stop looking for U-235 needles in a haystack to keep and start looking for U-238 needles in a haystack to throw away.

Ah but the geniuses Trump and Netanyahu assassinated the Iranian leader who had issued a fatwa banning nukes as unislamic so now all bets are off.

I like that he had banned nukes in 2003 but for some reason, Iran covertly construction Fordow starting in 2006. I guess he was just not as Supreme of a leader as he thought he was, somehow all those people just decided to hollow out a mountain and install centrifuges there.

Iran started domestic enrichment in the 1980s. It was not banned in any fatwa, nor the JCPOA.

Ok but how is that a rebuttal to anything I said?

Fatwa was put in place in 2003, Fordow construction was started 2006.

In the words of Obama in 2009: “The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program,” then US President Barack Obama said in 2009

So who do I believe; a Supreme Leader who says they will not build nuclear weapons or my lying eyes...

Or perhaps you are saying that the Supreme Leader didn't have control over his country and some rebel faction was able to build that with out his knowledge?

Iran didn't ban centrifuges. That's the rebuttal; their original ban on nuclear weapons still holds, and has held for 2 decades. Verbatim, it is still true.

Unless you have irrefutable proof that Iran has built a nuclear weapon, then you're admitting that diplomatic deescalation worked as a nonproliferation strategy.

The intelligence assessment was very careful about what it said.

>A U.S. intelligence assessment says Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons at the moment but has ramped up activities that could help it develop them. https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506...

So they were not actively building a nuke, only getting all the pieces together to build one ready....

Prior to the deal: >Iran initially possessed centrifuges sufficient for one nuclear weapon, but not for nuclear power. https://web.archive.org/web/20190709050018/https://www.polit...

After the deal was broken by Trump and Biden was trying to restart it.... >2023 : An IAEA report on the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant found that two cascades of IR-6 centrifuges were configured in a way "substantially different" from what Iran had previously declared. Iran claimed the difference was due to a human error.

>On 4 March(2023), Grossi met with Raisi and other top Iranian officials. Earlier, IAEA had detected uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% at Fordow. In the meantime, Iran gave assurances that it would reinstall monitoring equipment at sensitive locations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal

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