The amount and sophistication of centrifuges at Tehran’s disposal are critical variables in debates over what concessions the Islamic regime must make in order to meet the half-dozen or so United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions calling on the country to verifiably halt its nuclear weapons program. At stake is how long it would take Iran to achieve an ‘undetectable breakout’, wherein it would enrich its uranium stockpile to weapons grade purity.

U.S. lawmakers and analysts have called on Iran to among other things halt all uranium enrichment and plutonium-related activity, and to export all enriched material oversees. Iran, in contrast, is expected to arrive at the upcoming October 15 talks in Geneva with a basket of concessions that would allow the regime to continue enriching material up to 3.5% and would see it remove only material that was enriched beyond 3.5% from the country. Analysts have consistently outlined, however, that permitting Iran to retain 3.5% enriched material would still put it in a position to conduct an undetectable breakout: because Iran has spent the last several years installing more centrifuges as well as more advanced centrifuges, it has the capability to dash across the nuclear finish line even starting with a stockpile of merely 3.5% enriched material.

Those calculations, more over, are based only on known Iranian facilities. The American intelligence community and theU.N.’s nuclear watchdog believe to be perhaps more than a dozen undisclosed nuclear facilities scattered around Iran.

Now an Iranian dissident group is accusing Tehran of moving nuclear infrastructure from one secret facility to a nearby defense military complex:

An exiled Iranian opposition group said on Thursday it had information about what it said was a center for nuclear weaponisation research in Tehran that the government was moving to avoid detection ahead of negotiations with world powers… The Paris-based NCRI, citing information from sources inside Iran, said a nuclear weaponisation research and planning center it called SPND was being moved to a large, secure site in a defense ministry complex in Tehran about 1.5 km (1 mile) away from its former location. It said the center employed about 100 researchers, engineers and experts and handled small-scale experiments with radioactive material and was in charge of research into the weaponisation of nuclear weapons.

A NCRI spokesman told a news conference that “There is a link between this transfer and the date of Geneva (talks) because the regime needed to avoid the risk of visits by (U.N. nuclear) inspectors.” The reference is to talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of nations – the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany – scheduled for next week.

[Photo: 14febahrainet / YouTube]