Bill Broad and David Sanger report that Iran is set to make a major announcement.

Iran is expected to declare in coming days that it has made a huge leap toward industrial-scale production of enriched uranium — a defiant act that the country’s leaders will herald as a major technical stride and its neighbors will denounce as a looming threat.”

I was holding off blogging about this, waiting for the Robot Economist to make good on his threat to photoshop an image appropriate for the caption “MC Ahmadinejad seyz the rims keep spinnin’ even after the centrifuges stop.”

But Steve Clemons calls and I have a little bit of a scoop.

The announcement—which has been bouncing about in the press—is likely to be that the Iranians installed a pair of 164 centrifuge cascades at the underground Fuel Enrichment Plant near Natanz.

(Okay boys, start painting the giant targets on the roof).

Anyway, that isn’t the scoop. The scoop is that, in advance of the February 24th deadline set by UN Security Council Resolution 1737 for Iran to “suspend … all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development …” the Iran Atomic Energy Organization will declare that Iran has mastered cascade operations, has enough enriched uranium for current purposes and that it will place it’s cascades in warm standby.

I’ll write more on warm standby tomorrow, but today I want to focus on Iran’s technical progress—essential to understanding what a “warm standby” suspension might mean.

The claim that Iran has mastered cascade operations is a bit of political theater, as the story Broad and Sanger and another by Peter Beaumont in The Observer make clear.

Broad and Sanger are general in describing technical troubles suffered by Iran, simply quoting IISS’s Mark Fitzpatrick on delays. (You can read Fitzpatrick’s assessment, “Assessing Iran’s Nuclear Programme” in Survival 48:3, Autumn 2006, full text.)

Broad and Sanger do, however, report one useful nugget of information: that IAEA inspectors confirmed that Tehran successfully manufactured “parts for about 3,000 centrifuges…”

Whether those parts are up to snuff is another question. A couple of months ago, I noted that Iran has components for 5,000 centrifuges—but that many of those components are of poor quality:

... Iran probably doesn’t have enough components or the ability to manufacture them. Albright and Hinderstein cite “senior diplomats in Vienna” as claiming that Iran has “components for up to 5,000 centrifuges” and “other senior diplomats” suggesting that some components are of poor quality and that Iran has components for an additional 1,000 to 2,000 centrifuges.

Hard to know which components are scarce, although Mark Hibbs has been all over this story about the export of ball bearing preforms to Pakistan and the question of whether Iran can indigenously manufacture it’s P-1 centrifuge.

[Yeah, okay, pretty much igore the next five paragraphs and read “Bellows, Bearings and Rotors” instead.]

Paul Beaumont emphasized the issue of the bearings in his article in The Observer:

Instead, say experts, the break-up of the nuclear smuggling organisation of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadheer Khan has massively set back an Iran heavily dependent on his network.

A key case in point is that Tehran originally procured the extremely high-quality bearings required for the centrifuges’ carbon-fibre ‘top rotors’ – spinning dishes within the machines – from foreign companies in Malaysia.

With that source closed down two years ago, Iran is making the bearings itself with only limited success. It is the repeated failure of these crucial bearings, say some sources, that has been one of the programme’s biggest setbacks.

[As an aside … Beaumont also mentions a second issue —Iran’s lack of access to maraging steel—which is not precisely relevant. Iran’s centrifuges are the relatively crude P1 design, which uses aluminum. Of course, a shortage of aluminum er, maraging steel means that Iran has to use P1 design.]

Anyway the bottom line, at least for today, is that until Iran demonstrates that it can manufacture large numbers of high-quality centrifuge components, the claim that they will install 3,000 machines seems far-fetched.