A number of news outlets are reporting that Iran’s nuclear program has passed the point of no return as regards weaponization. Says the New York Times, “Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.”

The Times notes: “Even so, for President-elect Barack Obama, the report underscores the magnitude of the problem that he will inherit Jan. 20: an Iranian nuclear program that has not only solved many technical problems of uranium enrichment, but that can also now credibly claim to possess enough material to make a weapon if negotiations with Europe and the United States break down.”

A number of experts, including Richard Garwin, Siegfried Hecker, Thomas Cochran and Pete Zimmerman, are quoted as saying either that Iran is either there or almost there - though that doesn’t necessarily mean that a nuclear conflagration is imminent.

The Institute for Science and International Security argues that the IAEA report contains three important findings: “The first is that Iran continues to make progress on developing and operating its centrifuges and plans to significantly increase the number of operational centrifuges. The second is that Iran refused to allow the IAEA to make a scheduled visit to the Arak heavy water reactor that is under construction. The third is that Iran continues to resist efforts to address substantively its alleged nuclear weapons-related work, which the IAEA says remains of serious concern.”

What’s notable about all this is that a strong international consensus is emerging around Iran’s intentions: the question is not, as it was in the case of Iraq, whether they possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction, but when the threat will be formally constituted and how it will be deployed. Which is why a cluster of different states - the Arab regimes, the Europeans, Israel, Russia, China and, above all, the United States - are facing the kind of test which game theorists can only dream about.