At the rate the Iranian uranium enrichment program is progressing, Iran could be producing military-grade uranium by the end of this year and nuclear warheads one year from now, according to a senior Israeli defense official. The Jerusalem Post reports:

With Iran racing forward with its nuclear program, Israel now believes the Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year ….The new assessment moves up Israel’s forecasts on Tehran’s nuclear program by almost a full year—from 2009 to the end of 2008. According to the new timeline, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year.Iran, a senior defense official said on Tuesday, had encountered numerous technical obstacles on its way to enriching uranium but was now on track to master the technology needed to enrich uranium within six months.

Since the United States released a National Intelligence Estimate (nie) last December claiming that Iran halted its secret nuclear weapons program four years ago, America has toned back its opposition to the Iranian nuclear program. Without the threat of a U.S. invasion looming over them, apparently the Iranians have felt free to pursue their uranium-enrichment program like never before.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triumphed the report as a great victory for Iran within days of the nie’s release and emphasized that Iran would not retreat “one step” in its uranium enrichment program. Spurred on by this “victory,” Ahmadinejad announced that Iran needed to build 50,000 more centrifuges in order to meet its enriched uranium needs.

Now, only five months later, a senior Israeli defense official is saying that Iran might only be one year away from producing a nuclear warhead. This fact should have been obvious, because it is well known that the hardest part of constructing a nuclear bomb is obtaining weapons-grade uranium. Once America and the Western world let Iran develop its uranium enrichment program to the point where it could produce weapons-grade uranium, it would only be a short time before a nuclear bomb could be assembled.

An Iranian bomb is an enormous threat. Will it take the detonation of an Iranian nuke on a U.S. or Israeli city to wake us to that fact?

For more information on Iran’s nuclear aspirations, read “Intelligence Estimate Puts Enormous Faith in Iran.”