I. INTRODUCTION

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Notes

¹Seymour M Hersh, ‘The Iran Plans: Would President Bush Go to War to Stop Tehran from Getting the Bomb?’, New Yorker, 17 April 2006.

²International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), ‘Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and Relevant Provisions of Security Council Resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, GOV/2012/37, 30 August 2012, p. 3.

³LEU ordinarily refers to any uranium enriched below the level of 20 per cent, and HEU (highly enriched uranium) to any uranium enriched to a greater degree. Here, the term MEU (medium-enriched uranium) is used to denote uranium enriched to that boundary level, so as to capture an important difference between this and lower-grade quantities.

⁴Seyed Hossein Mousavian, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), p. 1.

⁵Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 2.

⁶In this study, the term ‘weaponisation’ denotes the fabrication of a usable nuclear device.

⁷James Dobbins, Alireza Nader, Dalia Dassa Kaye and Frederic Wehrey, Coping with a Nuclearizing Iran (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011), p. ix.

⁸Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference’, The White House, 4 March 2012.

⁹A Significant Quantity is defined by the IAEA as ‘the approximate amount of nuclear material for which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded’. The present threshold for uranium is 25 kg of Uranium-235 (U-235) in HEU or 75 kg of U-235 in MEU (which would be present in roughly 380 kg of MEU). These thresholds are contested by critics, who argue that they should be revised downwards considerably. See IAEA Safeguards Glossary: 2001 Edition, International Nuclear Verification Series No. 3 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2002), p. 23.

¹⁰Jacques E C Hymans, ‘When Does a State Become a “Nuclear Weapon State”? An Exercise in Measurement Validation’, Nonproliferation Review (Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2010), p. 161.