Berman's odd sense of time

The Qom facility isn't operational yet, and it's not expected to go online for another 18 months. Once it does, it will take many months to refine enough highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for a nuclear weapon. Remember, this is a small facility: It contains just 3,000 centrifuges, enough to produce (at most) two weapons' worth of HEU per year.

In order to produce that HEU, Iran will have to transfer large quantities of uranium to the facility. The IAEA would almost certainly detect such a large transfer.

Even if Iran manages to enrich HEU for a bomb, other not-inconsequential challenges remain, like the delivery system. It's one thing to have highly-enriched uranium. It's another thing entirely to put that uranium into a warhead and fit it on top of a missile.

Josh Pollack, writing at Arms Control Wonk, strikes the right tone:

Simply put, there is no credible explanation for the existence of the Qom facility--as described by Western officials yesterday--that doesn't involve the option to produce future production of HEU-based nuclear weapons.

This makes sense. The facility is probably military in nature -- for a longer treatment of this question, see Spencer Ackerman, who interviews several experts and concludes the facility is "being constructed to support a nuclear weapons program." But it is years away from actually producing a nuclear weapon.