Amos Yadlin.

Iran could have its first atomic bomb within four to six months if the regime in Tehran took the decision to go ahead and make a bomb, former IDF Director of Military Intelligence Amos Yadlin said on Monday.

Speaking at a press conference at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, a national security think tank which he heads, Yadlin said that Israeli’s binary decision “whether to bomb or to live with an Iranian bomb” will come up at the end of summer this year.

“In the past few years Iran has completed all of the necessary stages it needs to break out to a nuclear weapon,” Yadlin said, according to Israel Hayom. “They have all the tools they need to produce a nuclear weapon once they decide to do so. The main reason they haven’t constructed a bomb yet is that their breakout period is still too long. They want to be able to break out within a shorter time frame. They don’t have sufficient numbers of the right centrifuges to break out sooner. The Iranians currently have over 10,000 centrifuges in two locations and it is quite possible they will make the decision to break out in 2013. This will necessitate an American and Israeli operation.”