Israeli DM Falsely Claims Iran ‘Just a Few Weeks’ From Material for a Bomb

Says Iran will soon hold material for its first bomb

Fresh off of reports that the Iran nuclear talks may be back on, Israel is back to vilifying them with misleading claims of Iran’s breakout capabilities. Defense Minister Benny Gantz is once again taking charge of this narrative.

Gantz claimed that Iran is “just a few weeks” away from having enough fissile material to build a single nuclear bomb. The claim is built around imagining Iran’s low-enriched uranium was at some higher enrichment level that would be usable for a weapon.

Iran’s lower enrichment levels are well-documented, and their stockpile is artificially large right now because the nuclear deal is stalled, and shipment abroad for reprocessing is also stalled by that.

Weapons-grade uranium is in excess of 90% enriched, of which Iran has none, nor has ever attempted to produce. The 60% uranium, the highest they’ve ever attempted to produce, is only about a 60 kg stockpile, far from the amount needed for a weapon even with further processing.

Israel’s claims that Iran is near some nuclear metric is always based on over-stated claims of what Iran has, and suppositions that the large steps between a civilian program and a weapon could be overcome in an instant.

In reality, Iran is nowhere near producing a weapon, and there is no evidence Iran is even attempting to do so. Repetition of the allegations is the only reason anyone treats the claims with any credibility, and even then it’s just repetition of years of lies.

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.