Bloomberg misleads public over Iran's nuclear capabilities

Bloomberg yesterday ran the headline 'Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, US Says' with the following reported underneath:

Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said.

Iran will move to "industrial scale'' uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today.

"Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days,'' Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow.

However, later in the report Raedmaker reports that the Iranians currently only have 164 centrifuges in operation today and his '16 days' response was to how soon Iran could produce a nuclear weapon once it reached the "industrial scale" capacity. Seven paragraphs into the article, Raedmaker predicts that it would take at least 13 years for them to reach this stage. So why did Bloomberg choose to use such a misleading headline and spend the majority of the article pressing home this sensational statement? While this is something we have come to expect of British tabloids, it is disappointing to see an organisation that calls itself the "leading global provider of data, news and analytics" following the same path.