Sure. I could speak a little bit on timelines.
I think it's very difficult to come up with any timeline that's very accurate, which is why, as Mr. McLaren says, there's a lot of disagreement. In effect, people use a timeline depending on the exact question they ask.
Ultimately, for Iran to pose a nuclear threat to Israel or to any other country, it would probably have to do three things. One is to make a political decision to develop a nuclear weapon, and we have no indication that they have made such a decision. That is something else to which we're not likely to get any insight; it's something they would hold as one of their most closely guarded state secrets.
The second thing they would have to do is take the nuclear material they have and change it into a form that's usable in a weapon. Right now they have material that they have enriched to a fairly low level. It could be used to make fuel for a reactor. They would have to enrich this up to a very high level, which is something they would do in one of the facilities that are currently safeguarded by the IAEA. In doing this, they would either first be observed doing it, or they would have to kick out the IAEA inspectors, which would set off significant alarm bells and we think would lead immediately to action at the Security Council.
They would also require some amount of time to do this. There's a large volume of material to be re-enriched. It's taken them over a year to create the amount they have, which is theoretically enough to make a weapon if made into the right form. We estimate that it would take them about half a year or so to reconfigure their plant to do this and another half-year or so to do the enrichment, so you're talking about at least a year of activity after they have made a decision that will cause them to be seen or reveal their intentions.
Finally, they would have to actually weaponize this material. We don't have any indication that they've mastered all the proper knowledge to make a weapon. A nuclear bomb is easy to make in theory, but quite difficult in practice. It's an extremely precise instrument, in effect, that you're creating. They would have to take this material, once they've gone through the stage requiring at least the year that I've spoken of, and physically manipulate it. Again many months would be required if they have done all the theoretical work beforehand and have that hidden.
How far along they are in some of this research is the sort of information we're trying to tease out in conjunction with the IAEA. If Iran answers all the questions and meets all the obligations in its relationship with the IAEA that a country like Canada has to meet, it would have to provide information sufficient either to reveal that it has carried out some of these experiments and studies, and thus implicate itself, or provide information sufficient to reveal that it hasn't gone down this way, and we would feel a little more at ease. It's because of our security concerns that we want to know more information about Iran's position, but it's also incumbent upon them to come clean with the agency for their own alleged purpose of only being interested in civilian aspects of nuclear power.