White House Falsely Claims Iran Could Have Nuclear Weapon in ‘Weeks’

Supports reports Biden may be about to ditch talks

Adding to speculation that the US is preparing to back out of the Iran nuclear deal, White House spokeswomen Jen Psaki is now claiming that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon within a matter of weeks.

Psaki claimed it “definitely worries us,” and that’s probably going to be an excuse to step up claims of a deadline for the nuclear deal, at a time when Iran wants talks, but nothing seems to be happening.

The claims about a nuclear weapon are very false. Iran has never produced any weapons grade uranium. The highest grade they are producing is 60%, and it took them multiple months to produce 7 kg, which is nowhere near enough for a weapon, even if it had been enriched to 90%.

When they come up with “within weeks” estimates, it tends to be built around the idea that at some point, all of the uranium would cumulatively be enough for a single weapon, if enriched to a level Iran has never attempted, and totally ignoring all of the other steps to a deliverable weapon, which take months if not years.

This “weeks” estimate almost certainly came out of Israel, as they’ve been pushing rapid breakout periods all year to try to undercut the nuclear negotiations. The Israeli government has been making breakout projections on Iran for 40 years, none of them grounded in reality, all of them wrong.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.