Israeli nuclear physicist Dr. Naama Charit Yaari doesn’t know for sure if Iran has really enriched uranium to 84% purity or left its supplies at “only” 60% as it has claimed. But she told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Monday that the bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima, Japan that ended World War II had uranium with 80% purity, and if the Americans had had time to reach 93% or 94%, the damage would have doubled.
The International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) revealed this week that Iran has enriched uranium to the highest level ever – to 84%, which is close to the weapons’ grade of 90% – but the Iranian government quickly denied it for an unknown reason.
“So far, we have not made any attempt to enrich above 60%,” Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said on Monday, according to the official IRNA News agency. “The presence of particles above 60% enrichment does not mean production with an enrichment above 60%,” Kamalvandi added.
Not surprisingly, the Iranian regime has not produced the necessary documents to announce its plans to raise uranium-enrichment levels at two of its nuclear facilities in Fordow and Natanz.
Charit Yaari is Israel’s representative in the UN Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty that works to prevent experiments on nuclear weapons and not where they work on uranium. She is also a UN nuclear inspector who has made dozens of visits to Jordan, Russia, South Korea and other countries and is head of physics innovation initiatives at the Davidson Institute of Science Education, the educational arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
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