Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, having mastered the technology since last August, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog warned in an interview published today. However, Mohamed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general, stressed that Iran was still years away from developing a nuclear weapon.
"The intelligence, the British intelligence, the American intelligence, is saying that Iran is still years, five to 10 years, away from developing a weapon," he told the Financial Times in an interview on the eve of Wednesday's deadline for Tehran to suspend its enrichment work. But Mr ElBaradei said he expected Iran to ignore the deadline.
He said Iran could install a network of 3,000 centrifuges - enough to begin producing fissile material for a bomb - within months. "It could be six months, it could be a year," Mr ElBaradei said. However, he added, "there's a big difference between acquiring the knowledge for enrichment and developing a bomb".
Since August last year Iran has been using centrifuges at a pilot plant in the town of Natanz to enrich uranium. It has refused to halt this process, insisting its purposes are purely peaceful.
Mr ElBaradei also said that the efforts of the IAEA to prevent nuclear proliferation were not helped by Britain's decision to update its Trident nuclear deterrent. "When you see here in the UK the programme for modernising Trident, which basically gets the UK far into the 21st century with a nuclear deterrent, it is difficult then for us to turn around and tell everybody else that nuclear deterrents are really no good for you," he said.
Speculation has been growing that the US is drawing up contingency plans for an air strike against Iran's nuclear programme, despite repeated public denials by the Bush administration. Last night, the BBC reported that a list of targets had been compiled and that air strikes would be triggered if Iran was linked to a major attack on American forces in Iraq, or if US intelligence assessed that Tehran posed a "perceived nuclear threat" to the US.