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minister very subtly rolled his finger, letting Aitan know to speed things up. Aitan returned to the immediate question. “With those assumptions, if the Iranians start with one hundred twenty kilograms of twenty percent enriched uranium, they can produce twenty kilograms of ninety percent uranium inside Fordow in less than a month.” Yavi Aitan let that sink in for a moment. “If they can upgrade their centrifuges as they are trying hard to do – and we are trying hard to keep them from doing – the process inside Fordow would take under a week.” The room was quiet, each man’s thoughts lost in a different scenario. But each scenario had the same bad ending.
    Aitan then added an exclamation point. “Keep in mind that it takes a lot more work to enrich raw uranium to twenty percent than to enrich from twenty to ninety percent. That is a simple mathematical consequence of how much uranium you are dealing with at each step in the process. I can illustrate this best by working backwards. You need about twenty kilograms of ninety percent U-235 for a warhead. To get that, you need to start with about one hundred twenty kilograms or so of twenty percent U-235. To get those one hundred twenty kilograms, you need to start with about four thousand kilograms of three point five percent U-235. And to get those four thousand kilograms, you need to start with at least twenty thousand and as much as twenty-six thousand kilograms of natural uranium, depending on th e efficiency of your facility.”
    Aitan paused briefly, allowing time for everyone to run the math through their heads. Then he continued. “Once Iran starts to enrich to twenty percent, which I expect to occur in the near future, I become very worried about their ability to break-out from there. At twenty percent, they will have done the hardest part of the enrichment process.”
    Zvi Avner suppressed a smile. This was going better than he planned. “Thank you, Yavi. As usual, you have summarized the situation perfectly. We are indeed counting on the GBU-28, which I think everyone here knows has not yet been delivered to us.” Avner had returned to the script that was running through his mind. “But even if we had it in our inventory, it’s not capable of destroying Fordow. So when the Persians bring Fordow online in eighteen months or less, they are immune. We cannot destroy Fordow.”
    Avner paused for effect before continuing. “We have been working with the Americans and independently to enhance the penetrating power of the GBU-28 with the use of depleted uranium and an alloy in the head of the bomb. But it appears the best that we wi ll do is add about five meters.
    “However, there is a new weapon the Americans are working on. They call it the massive ordinance penetrator, or MOP. Officially it’s the GBU-57 and it’s a beast. It weighs almost fourteen thousand kilograms and will penetrate the Fordow facility without a problem. It was first tested two years ago. But there is a hitch. We don’t have a bomber that can carry it. This …”
    Cohen spoke up. “This is why the president politely refused to sell us this bomb. He said that since we don’t have the airplane that can deliver it, he couldn’t approve the sale to us.” Cohen simply shook his head as he thought about it. “The only good news is that I did get him to agree to accelerate the delivery of GBU-28s to us. God willing, we will finally receive these bombs sometime this summer.”
    Avner was thinking of his next sentence when Cohen added another thought. “But I should be fair to the president. We discussed Fordow and he did agree to publicly reveal the site later this year if the next round of Geneva negotiations fail.” There was brief laughter which Cohen couldn’t ignore. “Hey, maybe we will get lucky and the president will be able to call me a putz.”
    Raibani could not restrain his sarcasm this time. “And maybe Ahmadinejad will convert to Judaism.”
    “Better chance of