A report published this morning by the Washington Institute (WINEP) seeks to provide some context for next week’s meeting in Vienna of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors. The board will meet to discuss the IAEA’s recent report on Iran’s nuclear program. The co-authors of the WINEP write-up – Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA deputy director-general, and Simon Henderson, the director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at WINEP – point out that journalism about the IAEA report has been somewhat tangled:

The latest International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran, which the organization’s board of governors will discuss in Vienna next week, shows that Tehran has continued to build its nuclear capabilities, particularly its capacity to suddenly break out from its treaty commitments and build a nuclear weapon if it so desired… Interpreting the significance of the IAEA’s August 28 report has proven difficult for non-experts: for example, compare the recent New York Times headline (“Iran Slows Its Gathering of Uranium, Report Says”) with one from the Financial Times (“Iran Boosts Advanced Uranium Enrichment Capacity, UN Report Shows”).

At stake is a distinction between the amount of nuclear material Iran has and the regime’s technological capacity to quickly enrich that material. The NYT headline focuses on the former. The FT headline highlights the latter.

Experts and analysts have increasingly emphasized that issues of critical capacity – the FT’s focus – are at the core of the policy debate over Iran. At some point Iran will have locked in a sufficient number of centrifuges to rush across the nuclear finish line without the West being able to detect or stop the dash, once a political decision to do so has been made.

The recent IAEA report revealed that Iran has installed 18,000 IR-1 centrifuges and over 1,000 of its advanced IR-2m centrifuges, which can enrich uranium at a pace orders of magnitude faster than the IR-1’s. Given the report, and without a change in the regime’s behavior, it will have locked in enough sophisticated technology by mid-2014 to conduct an undetectable breakout.

The IAEA is also expected to discuss other elements of the report. Iran’s progress in developing materials for a plutonium bomb has increasingly alarmed diplomats. The IAEA also continues to express frustration over Iran’s efforts to quite-literally pave over evidence of experiments that they conducted potentially geared toward toward “development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

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