IRAN’S NUKESU.S. Mulls Iran’s Bomb-Making Scenarios Iran Nears Uranium Breakout Capacity

By Michael Lipin and Guita Aryan

Published 28 January 2022

With the United States warning that Iran is just weeks from developing the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, there is disagreement among Washington experts on the likelihood of Iran rushing to build such a weapon, and how the U.S. and its allies should deal with that risk.

With the United States warning that Iran is just weeks from developing the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, there is disagreement among Washington experts on the likelihood of Iran rushing to build such a weapon, and how the U.S. and its allies should deal with that risk.

[Iran] is getting to the point where its breakout time, the time it would take to produce fissile material for a bomb, is getting down to a matter of a few weeks,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a virtual event Monday.

The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating indirectly since last April to see if they can secure a mutual return to compliance with a 2015 deal in which Tehran promised to curb nuclear activities that could be weaponized in return for sanctions relief from the U.S. and other world powers.

I think that will be decided in the next few weeks, because again, given what Iran is doing, we can’t allow this to go on,” Blinken said.

Iran says its nuclear activities are for civilian use and denies seeking nuclear weapons.

The U.S. left the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump said it was not tough enough on Tehran and unilaterally reimposed U.S. sanctions. Iran retaliated a year later by starting a process of increasingly exceeding JCPOA limits on its nuclear work.

The U.S and Iran decided to start indirect talks in Vienna last year, through the mediation of world powers, after President Joe Biden succeeded Trump and pledged to rejoin the JCPOA if Iran would return to limiting its nuclear activities under the deal.

The agreement was intended to prevent Iran from producing enough highly enriched uranium to make one nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency says 25 kilograms of the uranium-235 isotope, which is accumulated when about 28 kilograms of uranium is enriched to 90% purity, is the breakout quantity at which the “possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded.”

Israel long has viewed a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat because of repeated calls by the Islamic Republic for the destruction of the Jewish state. Israeli officials have estimated it would take Iran two years after attaining a breakout capacity to develop, if it wanted, a nuclear-armed missile that could reach Israel.