Russia’s leading nuclear scientist said on Monday that it was just a question of time before Iran developed a nuclear weapon and it should be stopped, the Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday.

Yevgeny Velikhov, a leading physicist and close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Iran, facing a showdown with the United States over its nuclear ambitions, clearly has the know-how to make atomic weapons.

“From a scientific point of view of course they could create nuclear weapons,” Velikhov, president of Russia’s Kurchatov Institute, told reporters. “When they could do it is a more difficult question.”

The United States and European Union powers suspect Iran wants to build nuclear arms while Tehran says its nuclear fuel program is meant only for civilian power generation.

“If they have decided to create nuclear weapons, then they could create them,” said Velikhov, who was part of Putin’s 2004 re-election campaign team.

Western powers persuaded the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran over its refusal to stop enriching uranium in centrifuge machines. The program remains at the research stage but Iran aims to ramp it up to “industrial-scale” enrichment later this year.

Russian officials have said it would take Iran years to assemble nuclear warheads and that Tehran has a right to develop civilian nuclear power.

But analysts say Moscow has toughened its policy toward Iran including a delay to the Bushehr nuclear power station which Russia is helping build over concerns about Tehran’s nuclear program and worries about a war in the Gulf.

Most diplomats and nuclear experts believe Iran remains a few years away from bomb capacity as it has yet to overcome technical problems such as older centrifuges prone to cracking and overheating, and impurities in uranium feedstock.

They cannot rule out Iran might have made more progress at secret military facilities, but there is no intelligence pointing to clandestine activity at this time.

Velikhov, who devoted his life to nuclear technology, said the world’s nuclear powers should reject nuclear weapons.

“I consider biological, chemical and nuclear arms should be forbidden and that the holding and development of nuclear weapons should be considered a crime against humanity.

”I think all states should reject nuclear weapons, including the U.S. and Russia,“ he said.

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