National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan presented President Biden with options to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities during a secret meeting held a few weeks ago, Axios reported on Thursday.
The report said the US was considering bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran moves toward making a nuclear weapon, but there’s no evidence Iran has decided to take that step, a fact recently acknowledged by the CIA.
Sources told Axios that Biden did not greenlight a strike on Iran during the meeting and did not make any final decision. The report said the purpose of the meeting was only to discuss how they would respond if Iran began enriching uranium at 90%, the level needed to produce a weapon.
One source said there are no “active discussions” about bombing Iran before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.
Israel has reportedly been considering strikes on Iran’s nuclear program during the US transition period and saw the regime change in Damascus as a potential opportunity to do so since it took out Syria’s air defense following the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Trump transition team was also considering the idea of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The report said Trump had discussed the possibility with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Iran is currently enriching some uranium at 60%, a step that it took in 2021 in response to an Israeli sabotage attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, that Trump withdrew from in 2018 with encouragement from Netanyahu, capped Iran’s uranium enrichment at 3.67%.
Israeli aggression in the region has prompted calls from members of Iran’s parliament to rethink the ban on building nuclear weapons, but there’s no sign that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is considering lifting his 2003 fatwa that prohibited the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Iran is also a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and all of its nuclear facilities are for civilian purposes. In contrast, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT and has a secret nuclear weapons program that the US does not officially acknowledge. It’s estimated that Israel has somewhere between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads.
