Bloomberg claims Iran can make bomb in 16 days

Another case of the media attempting to wag the world.

Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said.

Iran will move to "industrial scale" uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today.

"Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days," Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow.

The title of the piece is extraordinarily misleading because the claim is NOT that Iran could make a bomb 16 days from now, but that IF they employ 54,000 centrifuges, THEN they could make enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb 16 days from then. BIG DIFFERENCE!

Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use. The process involves placing uranium hexafluoride gas in a series of rotating drums or cylinders known as centrifuges that run at high speeds to extract weapons grade uranium.

Iran has informed the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to construct 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz NEXT YEAR, Rademaker said.

"We calculate that a 3,000-machine cascade could produce enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within 271 days," he said.

That means roughly two years from now. The media can't be trusted.