Wall Street Journal: Dangerous situation.. Iran on the verge of making a nuclear bomb

The American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, said that Iran is very close to possessing a nuclear bomb, and this requires the United States to rethink how to monitor it.

She explained that a new report – by veteran nuclear inspector David Albright and his colleague Sarah Burkhard, a researcher at the Institute for Science and International Security – reached this conclusion, which confirms that Tehran has come a long way in this field, to the point that its manufacture of a nuclear bomb could happen at any time.

In its editorial, the newspaper’s editorial board noted that the U.S. intelligence position had been that the nuclear weapons program had been halted, but that this was no longer the case. A July report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that Iran “has undertaken activities that have put it in a better position to produce a nuclear weapon, if it chooses to do so.”

“If we only knew”

The report did not address what those activities were, or how long it would take Tehran to produce such a weapon. Had we known, Albright and Burkhard wrote, “some uncomfortable truths would have emerged: Iran could do so very quickly, the bomb-building process would have been difficult to detect in its early stages, and any attempt to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels might have been thwarted.”

According to the editorial, US intelligence did not show much concern about nuclear armament when Iranian enrichment was not advanced.

For Iran to reach the “breakout point” — enriching uranium to make a nuclear bomb — it would have had to hide the operations at its many facilities for months so that they would not be discovered, according to the editorial board of the American newspaper, which says that (foreign) intelligence agencies had a good chance to detect them and enough time to respond.

Very important expansion

“This has changed over the past two years, but dramatically in the past few weeks,” the analysts wrote. Iran has been allowed to enrich uranium to the breakout point and has recently expanded a critical fortified complex near the village of Fordow in the southern province of Qom.

“Ironically, Iran can now advance rapidly, within days, using the underground Fordow facility,” the report says.

The analysts also wrote in their report that “we cannot rely on the breakthrough as the main indicator that Iran is rushing toward a nuclear bomb.” The newspaper commented that Iran could claim this even near the end, as it is confident that no one will be able to detect it in time.

Within 6 months

The experts' report said that if the United States is serious about preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, “disclosure of nuclear weapons activities becomes increasingly important as an incentive to act.”

Albright and Burkhard said much of the information they learned came from the Iranian nuclear archive that Israel stole and smuggled out of Tehran in 2018.

They warned that Iran could build a “dirty” nuclear bomb much sooner than previously estimated. The Institute for Science and International Security, founded and chaired by former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright, concluded that Iran “could do so in six months, and it may now be shorter.”