Reports are slowly beginning to leak about the speech that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will give next week at the United Nations. In addition to reviewing how the North Koreans strung along the West while developing nuclear weapons, Netanyahu will make specific arguments about Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Both Iran’s uranium track and plutonium track – its enrichment facility at Natanz and its plutonium reactor complex at Arak – are likely to get name-checked:

According to the official, Netanyahu will demand at the UN that the Islamic Republic: cease all enrichment of Uranium and agree to the removal of all enriched uranium from its territory; dismantle its nuclear facility in Qum and its newest generation of centrifuges at Natanz; and stop building the heavy water reactor at Arak.

Iran’s progress at Natanz – where it is installing advanced IR-2m centrifuges – was a subject of particular concern in a recent analysis by the U.S.-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). At stake is when Iran will have a sufficient number of centrifuges of sufficient sophistication to conduct an undetectable breakout. The answer is very soon:

Based on an ISIS assessment, Iran is expected to achieve a critical capability in mid-2014, which is defined as the technical capability to produce sufficient weapon-grade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a nuclear explosive, without being detected. Iran would achieve this capability principally by implementing its existing, firm plans to install thousands more IR-1 centrifuges, and perhaps a few thousand IR-2m centrifuges, at its declared Natanz and Fordow centrifuge sites. Iran’s criticality date could be achieved a few months earlier if Iran successfully deploys and operates several thousand IR-2m centrifuges and continues installing thousands of IR-1 centrifuges. A priority is preventing Iran from achieving a critical capability via non-military means.

Iranian scientists would not even need to enrich at a pace that was undetectable by the West. They would only have to enrich at a pace faster than the West could detect, diplomatically mobilize, confirm, mobilize more, and then act. IAEA officials cited by the ISIS stressed that the process may add another month to Iran’s window for enrichment:

Breakout times at critical capability would be so short that there simply would not be enough time to organize an international diplomatic or military response. Olli Heinonen, former head of safeguards at the IAEA and a well-respected, seasoned, former inspector of Iran’s nuclear program, has cautioned those that believe the IAEA will necessarily sound the alarm quickly. The IAEA processes, which stress caution and substantiation of information, may delay two to four weeks the inspectors reaching a course of action in response to being denied access to a site and calling together its Board of Governors, he wrote in an email to one of the authors. (ISIS assumes that word of the breakout would leak out quickly to the United States and its allies.) The Board, as well as the United Nations Security Council, may then ask Iran to halt the activities, he added. But IAEA inaction or caution could make an international response all but impossible before Iran has produced enough weapon-grade uranium for one or more nuclear weapons.

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