ISIS estimates Iran could build a nuclear bomb within a month.

ISIS estimates Iran could build a nuclear bomb within a month.(JPost).

Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb within a month, USA Today reported on Thursday, citing a report by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

"Shortening breakout times have implications for any negotiation with Iran," the report stated. "Breakout" time is the time require to convert low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade.

"An essential finding is that they are currently too short and shortening further," ISIS President David Albright, a former IAEA inspector, stressed in the report.

This assessment means that Tehran would have to destroy more than half of its 19,000 centrifuges to extend the time it would take to build a bomb to six months, Albright wrote.

Albright said nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic should seek out ways to lengthen the breakout times and shorten the time that inspectors could detect breakout.

The report is based on the most recent Iranian and UN reports on Tehran's centrifuge equipment for producing nuclear fuel and its nuclear fuel stockpile.

On Tuesday, Iranian lawmaker Hossein Naqavi said Tehran has stopped enriching uranium up to 20 percent, the level of enrichment that according to experts approaches what is required for nuclear weapons, according to a report published in The New York Times.

Hosseini said Iran had enough enriched uranium to produce fuel for a nuclear test reactor in Tehran, which produces medical isotopes, according to the report.

“The issue of suspending or halting enrichment is meaningless because no production is taking place at the moment,” the report quoted Hosseini. 

The ISIS report was published amid reports that the White House is pressing Senate to hold off on a package of tough new sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program.

A Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations said now is not the time to delay fresh sanctions. "I don't understand why you would weaken the sanctions now, or you would not strengthen the sanctions," Elliot Abrams, an aide on the Middle East to former President George W. Bush, told the Reuters Washington Summit on Thursday. "The sanctions are what brought the Iranians to the table."Read the full story here.