Iran's nuclear weapon breakout is down to 1-2 weeks, Blinken issues stark warning

Amid the brewing tensions in the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran’s nuclear weapon breakout time is probably down to just one or two weeks. The breakout time refers to the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade material to develop a nuclear warhead.

This was the shortest breakout time assessment given by a US official over the matter. The comments from Blinken came amid reports that Iran is boosting its production of fissile material. “Where we are now is not in a good place,” the top US diplomat said at the Aspen Security Forum Friday, CNN reported.

“Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” he said. “They haven’t produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully,” the US diplomat furthered.

So what’s America’s plan? 

Blinken mentioned that the policy of the United States is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. He insisted that US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to accomplish their aims through diplomacy. The comments from Blinken came a year after a top US Defense Department official said that Iran could now produce “one bomb’s worth of fissile material” in “about 12 days.”

Since then, the Biden administration has engaged in more than a year of indirect negotiations with Iran which aimed at reviving the Iranian nuclear deal. In 2018, it was the United States that withdrew from the deal under former US President Donald Trump’s administration.

The effort to revive the deal collapsed further in late 2022 when the US accused Iran of making “unreasonable” demands related to a probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The UN watchdog was investigating the unexplained traces of uranium found at undisclosed Iranian sites.

Earlier this month, Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian suggested that his administration will be open to engagement with the West. However, a senior State Department official told CNN that they no longer believe that there can be a return to the nuclear deal of the past.

“We’re in a very different world, a lot of time has elapsed, and Iran has done a lot of things that make a return to JCPOA non-viable,” the official asserted. Similar assertions were made by State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “We have no expectations that this election will lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s direction or its policies,” the US official said earlier this month.

“At the end of the day, it’s not the president that has the ultimate say over the future of Iran’s policy; it is the supreme leader, and of course, we have seen the direction that he has chosen to take Iran in. Obviously, if the new president had the authority to take steps to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, to stop funding terrorism, and to stop destabilizing activities in the region, those would be steps that we would welcome. But needless to say, we don’t have any expectations that that’s what’s likely to ensue," he added.