There’s a lot of discussion about nuclear weapons timelines in Iran, and I thought it’d be interesting to lay out the most-comparible timeline to nuclear capability, that of Pakistan. This can hopefully serve as a factual anchor for our future discussions.<\/p>\n
Obviously, Iran – assuming they got full cooperation from Pakistan’s experts – could move faster. The interesting question is “how much faster?<\/i>” given the technical issues involved in implementing both enrichment and weapons production.<\/p>\n
I’ve based the timeline below on two sources: William Langweische’s article on AQ Khan in the Atlantic<\/a>, and the Nuclear Weapons Archive<\/a>, a very useful site founded by Gary An, a student, and now operated by Carey Sublette.<\/p>\n Here’s Pakistan’s timeline (I’ve bolded the date that marks where in the process Iran is generally believed to be today):<\/p>\n 1972 – PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto starts Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program So for Pakistan, it seems that it took 7 or 8 years to go from first enrichment to reasonably reliable – and hence usable – weapons, with few measurable waypoints along the way (I’m presuming that we are likely to have means sensitive enough to detect an inert test – which is a test of a weapon with unenriched uranium to make sure that the mechanics work).<\/p>\n Then the interesting questions become: “How far is Iran really down the road today?” and “How much faster than Pakistan can they get to the end?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal sets out Pakistan’s nuclear timeline in the hopes that it will be useful to those discussing Iran’s likely timeline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1974 – India detonates it’s first nuclear weapon; AQ Khan, working in the Netherlands, meets Bhutto and begins assembling data on enrichment technology
\n1975 – AQ Khan moves from the Netherlands to Pakistan
\n1976 – AQ Khan founds Engineering Research Laboratories to build an enrichment facility
\n1978 – prototype and first enrichment<\/b>
\n1981\/2 – first weapons-grade uranium
\n1983 – ‘inert test’ of bomb design
\n1984 – production levels of 90% enriched uranium
\n1985\/6 – weapons produced<\/p>\n