No single threat to Israeli—and perhaps global—security has generated as much controversy in the last decade as Iran’s nuclear program. Iranian officials insist the program is peaceful. International observers, Israeli intelligence, and U.S. foreign-policy stewards are skeptical. But behind the diplomacy, spycraft, jockeying, and feinting lies the science of nuclear reactors and weapons: the specific engineering hurdles, the physics of fission, the “weaponization” of minerals required to produce as complex a device as a nuclear bomb. In this excerpt from Nuclear Iran, physicist Jeremy Bernstein unpacks what we know about the centrifuges at Natanz to take an informed guess at how likely Iran is to have enough weapons-grade uranium to make a nuclear warhead.
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