(TIP)–An analysis posted online earlier this week by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) concludes that Iran is “expected to achieve a critical [nuclear] capability in mid-2014,” which the organization defines “as the technical capability to produce sufficient weapon-grade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a nuclear explosive, without being detected.” The technical question at stake involves the amount of time it would take Iran to dash across the nuclear finish line, once a political decision is made to do so. The political question at stake is over whether that time window would be sufficiently wide enough to allow the West to detect and intervene after Tehran has made a decision to break out but before it has succeeded. Analysts David Albright and Christina Walrond found—given the number and type of centrifuges at Natanz, Fordow, and any other centrifuge site Iran may now be constructing—that by 2014 Iran’s “breakout times at critical capability would be so short that there simply would not be enough time to organize an international diplomatic or military response.”