U.S. Says Iran Could Expedite Nuclear Bomb

by William J. Broad, Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger and written by Mr. Sanger.

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded in recent months that Iran has created enough nuclear fuel to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon. But new intelligence reports delivered to the White House say that the country has deliberately stopped short of the critical last steps to make a bomb.

In the first public acknowledgment of the intelligence findings, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency declared on Wednesday that Iran now had what he called a “possible breakout capacity” if it decided to enrich its stockpile of uranium, converting it to bomb-grade material.

The statement by the ambassador, Glyn Davies, was intended to put pressure on American allies to move toward far more severe sanctions against Iran this month, perhaps including a cutoff of gasoline to the country, if it failed to take up President Obama’s invitation for serious negotiations. But it could also complicate the administration’s efforts to persuade an increasingly impatient Israeli government to give diplomacy more time to work, and hold off from a military strike against Iran’s facilities..

In interviews over the past two months, intelligence and military officials, and members of the Obama administration, have said they are convinced that Iran has made significant progress on uranium enrichment, especially over the past year.

.... The intelligence updates for Mr. Obama follow the broad outlines of the conclusions delivered to President George W. Bush in 2007, as part of a 140-page National Intelligence Estimate. It was based on information gathered by American spy agencies that had pierced Iran’s military computer networks, coming up with surprising evidence that the country had halted its weapons-design effort four years earlier. ....