IranIran “10 Weeks Away” from Weapon-Grade Uranium
Israel’s defense Minister Benny Gantz to foreign diplomats that Iran is now only ten weeks away – if it decided to move forward – from enriching sufficient quantities of uranium to weapon-grade level, so that it would have available the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon.
Last Friday, in the early hours of the morning, Iranian “suicide” drones exploded on the deck of the Mercer Street oil tanker in the Gulf as it was making its way to the UAE. Two men were killed – the Romanian captain of the ship and a British security officer.
Earlier Wednesday, Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid held a meeting in Jerusalem with the ambassadors to Israel of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, in which they shared with the ambassadors intelligence information showing Iran’s responsibility for the attack – and even named the two high-level commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard who ordered the attack.
Gantz and Lapind used the occasion to talk about more than last Friday’s Iranian attack on the oil tanker. They highlighted the growing pace, reach, and breadth of Iran’s military activity across the region, and especially Iran’s reliance on ever-more-sophisticated, home-made drones.
Iran has a fleet of hundreds of different unmanned aerial vehicles, most based reversed-engineered Western technology.
The second topic discussed by Gantz and Lapid was Iran’s steady advances toward becoming a nuclear weapon threshold state. Iran’s march toward the bomb was retarded by the 2015 nuclear deal, but since the Trump administration has withdrawn from the deal in 2018, Iran has felt free to violate the deal’s restrictions.
Gantz told the ambassadors that Iran is now only ten weeks away – if it decided to move forward – from enriching sufficient quantities of uranium to weapon-grade level, so that it would have available the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon.
Gantz’s reference to how close Iran is to be in possession of weapon-grade material echo the analysis by a respectable Israel think tank, Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (see “Iran’s Strategic Challenge to Israel,” HSNW, 4 August 2021)
