Robert Peters, Nicole Robinson
Introduction
Iran can produce nuclear weapons far more rapidly than expected. In late April 2024, a senior Iranian lawmaker stated that there is only a “one-week gap from the issuance of the order to the first test” of a nuclear bomb.REF In July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to corroborate this statement in part when he announced that “instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, [Iran] is now probably one or two weeks away.”REF
An August 2024 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report all but confirms these statements. As of August 17, Iran had 363.1 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60 percent—an increase of 49.8 pounds since the U.N. agency’s May 2024 report.REF Uranium that is “enriched up to 60% purity is just a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.”REF Higher levels of enriched uranium have already been detected by IAEA inspectors. In February 2023, it was reported that “[i]nspectors from the [IAEA had] found uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% in Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear site.”REF This finding confirms that Iran is closer than ever to reaching the 90 percent that it needs to produce a nuclear weapon.
On July 23, 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released an unclassified report on Iran’s nuclear program.REF This report does not include the following key sentence that appeared in the ODNI’s February 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”REF That same week, Senator Lindsey Graham described the classified version of ODNI’s Iran report as “stunning” and said that Iran “could use these three of four months before our election to sprint to a nuclear weapon.”REF As the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies recently noted, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/report/iran-inching-toward-nuclear-weapons-breakout-what-does-mean-the-united-states