The Iran Deal in Six Minutes 1

On 14 July 2015, the United States, Iran, and five other participants signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran commits itself to verifiable restrictions and even reversals of its programs in the nuclear energy area. The six states other than Iran-France, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Russia, and the United States-are variously characterized as the "P5+1" or "EU+3." In addition to the individual states, the European Union was also represented. In return for accepting the restrictions on its programs, Iran was freed from sanctions imposed by the international community and individual states related to its non-compliance with its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).The purpose, of course, is to delay the time at which Iran could have material for a nuclear weapon, and to have Iran formally renounce the research, development, manufacture, possession, and use of a nuclear explosive device. Without detailing nuclear weapon stockpiles in the world today, it is useful to list the date of the first and most recent explosions and number of nuclear explosive tests by country (Table).Iran had a substantial program for enrichment of the fraction of U-235 in normal uranium from its natural 0.71% concentration to 5% for fuel for power reactors and to 19.97% for fuel for "research reactors." Until 2003, Iran had elements of a program to acquire nuclear weapons, although it is unclear whether this program was a tentative one meant to explore the possibility, or to obtain the ability to make but not deploy, nuclear weapons.As sanctions were applied by the United States, the EU, and the United Nations, Iran abated its nuclear weapon program as indicated by the following statement of the U.S. intelligence community in 2007:* We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons . . .* We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.However, enrichment proceeded unabated, from about 164 gas centrifuges when such matters were first discussed with Javad Zarif in 2005,2 to 19,000 centrifuges at the time of signing of the JCPOA.With the evolution of normal industrial technology and communication and resources via the Internet, as well as the scurrilous pro-proliferation campaign that was constituted by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, selling to Libya and other states information about not only the gas centrifuge enrichment technology he had stolen from EURENCO but also the design of the Pakistani nuclear weapon, the best option to prevent additional states from acquiring nuclear weapons is to (a) persuade them of the reality that nuclear weapons are likely to make them less secure rather than more secure; and (b) limit access to technology for both the enrichment of U-235 and the production of the other common fissile isotope, plutonium-239, that can be separated from uranium fuel exposed in nuclear reactors-the approach used by the United States for the Trinity explosion in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, and to destroy the city of Nagasaki on August 9 of that same year.The plutonium route is the most straightforward and has the additional problem that normal nuclear power plants invariably make plutonium in very large amounts that can be used in weapons, despite the fact that the high-exposure fuel is not the most preferred type for nuclear weaponry. Here are some numbers from the International Atomic Energy Agency: the "significant quantity" (SQ) of uranium contains 25 kg of U-235, and for plutonium, the SQ is given as 8 kg.Spent fuel downloaded from a normal commercial power reactor contains about 160 kg of fissile plutonium for a year's worth of operation of a 1000-MWe power plant. Furthermore, diversion of the input to the reactor can also contribute to nuclear weaponry because it is typically enriched to about 5% U-235, and a supply of 1000 kg of U-235 per year (as 5%) is required for each 1000-MWe power plant. …