If you believe Iran's claim their program is peaceful, someone might want to ask why they need 6 tons of enriched uranium to power one reactor.

Reuters:

Iran has significantly stepped up its output of low-enriched uranium and total production in the last five years would be enough for at least five nuclear weapons if refined much further, a U.S. security institute said.

"This total amount of 3.5 percent low enriched uranium hexafluoride, if further enriched to weapon grade, is enough to make over five nuclear weapons," ISIS said in its analysis.

This is nearly 750 kg more than in the previous IAEA report issued in February, and ISIS said Iran's monthly production had risen by roughly a third.

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think-tank which tracks Iran's nuclear program closely, based the analysis on data in the latest report by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which was issued on Friday.

Progress in Iran's nuclear activities is closely watched by the West and Israel as it could determine how long it could take Tehran to build atomic bombs, if it decided to do so. Iran denies any plan to and says its aims are entirely peaceful.

During talks in Baghdad this week, six world powers failed to convince Iran to scale back its uranium enrichment program. They will meet again in Moscow next month to try to defuse a decade-old standoff that has raised fears of a new war in the Middle East that could disrupt oil supplies.

Friday's report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a Vienna-based U.N. body, showed Iran was pressing ahead with its uranium enrichment work in defiance of U.N. resolutions calling on it to suspend the activity.

It said Iran had produced almost 6.2 tons of uranium enriched to a level of 3.5 percent since it began the work in 2007 - some of which has subsequently been further processed into higher-grade material.

The Iranians are still a few years away from being able to marry a nuclear warhead to one of their missiles. And it would be tough for them to continue to enrich uranium to the 85-90% necessary to build a bomb without us, the Israelis, or the IAEA finding out about it.

But why wait until it gets to that point? This is the "redline" Obama talks about when he says that Iran building a nuclear weapon is unacceptable. Israel's threshhold is far lower, knowing that once the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, Iran becomes an intolerable threat.

Negotiations aren't going anywhere but as long as Iran is talking, no one is going to bomb them. That's why the west is still negotiating - and why Israel waits in the wings, still undecided about whether to take out as much Iranian nuclear infrastructure they can.