US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday said that Iran’s breakout time – the amount of time needed to produce enough weapons grade material for a nuclear weapon – “is now probably one or two weeks” as Tehran has continued to develop its nuclear program.
The assessment marks the shortest breakout time that US officials have ever referenced and comes as Iran has taken steps in recent months to boost its production of fissile material.
“Where we are now is not in a good place,” the top US diplomat said at the Aspen Security Forum Friday.
“Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” he said.
“They haven’t produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully,” Blinken added.
Blinken said the policy of the US is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and that the administration would prefer to stop that from happening through diplomacy.
Over a year ago a top US Defense Department official said that Iran could now produce “one bomb’s worth of fissile material” in “about 12 days.”
The Biden administration engaged in more than a year of indirect negotiations with Iran aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal, from which the US withdrew in 2018 under the Trump administration.
Those efforts collapsed in late 2022, as the US accused Iran of making “unreasonable” demands related to a probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN nuclear watchdog, into unexplained traces of uranium found at undisclosed Iranian sites. In the months that followed, the administration maintained that the Iran nuclear deal was “not on the agenda.”
Iran’s new president has suggested they are open to engagement with the West. However, a senior State Department official told CNN that they no longer believe that there can be a return to the nuclear deal because Iran has engaged in too many escalatory acts in the years since talks broke down.
“We’re in a very different world, a lot of time has elapsed, Iran has done a lot of things that make a return to JCPOA non-viable,” the official said.
The State Department also said that there is no anticipation that the recent election in Iran will change the country’s behavior.
“We have no expectations that this election will lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s direction or its policies,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said earlier this month. “At the end of the day, it’s not the president that has the ultimate say over the future of Iran’s policy; it is the supreme leader, and of course we have seen the direction that he has chosen to take Iran in. Obviously, if the new president had the authority to make steps to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, to stop funding terrorism, to stop destabilizing activities in the region, those would be steps that we would welcome. But needless to say, we don’t have any expectations that that’s what’s likely to ensue.”
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