‘One or two weeks’ – Blinken says Iran is close to building a nuclear bomb

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that Iran could produce fissile material for a nuclear bomb “within a week or two.”

“We’re not in a good place right now,” Blinken said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

He explained that because of the end of the nuclear deal, it would previously have taken Iran at least a year to produce the fissile material needed to build a nuclear bomb, but now it might only take a week or two.

Blinken stressed that although Tehran has not yet developed a nuclear weapon, the situation is being closely monitored.

“They haven’t produced the weapons themselves, but we’re certainly going to watch this very, very closely,” Blinken reportedly said. He reiterated the United States’ determination to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons and expressed a preference for resolving the issue through diplomatic means.

More than a year ago, a senior U.S. Defense Department official said Iran could now produce “a bomb’s worth of fissile material” in “about 12 days.”

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According to CNN, the Biden administration has spent more than a year in indirect negotiations with Iran aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal, which the United States withdrew from in 2018 during the Trump administration.

Those efforts failed in late 2022 as the United States accused Iran of making “unreasonable” demands for an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog, into unidentified traces of uranium found in Iran’s undisclosed nuclear facilities. In the months that followed, the U.S. government insisted that the Iran nuclear deal was “not on the agenda.”

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However, a senior US State Department official reportedly told CNN that they no longer believe a return to the nuclear deal is possible because of Iran’s escalatory actions since the breakdown of talks.

“We are in a very different world now, a lot of time has passed, and Iran has done a lot of things that make returning to the JCPOA unfeasible,” the official said.

(Computer, AJA)