US Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned lawmakers on Wednesday that Iran is “frighteningly close” to developing nuclear weapons, CNN reported.
Speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Wright said: “They are weeks, a small number of weeks away to enrich [their uranium] to weapons-grade uranium. There’s still a weaponization process that happens after that, but they’re quite close to constructing nuclear weapons.”
Iran currently has a stockpile of enriched uranium to 60% purity and could rapidly increase enrichment to the 90% threshold considered weapons-grade.
Wright said that Iran also has a large stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium, calling it “very concerning.”
Asked by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal on whether President Donald Trump would have to go after all of Iran’s uranium stockpiles to stop the enrichment, Wright said that he thinks “that’s the wise strategy.”
“Ultimately, the goal is to prevent future enrichment of uranium as well. Yes, to have a safe world, we need to end their nuclear program.”
On Tuesday, Iran threatened to produce weapons-grade uranium in response to reports that Trump is seriously considering a resumption of military operations.
“If the United States or Israel launches another attack on Iran, Tehran could move toward producing weapons-grade uranium,” the spokesman for the Iranian Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Commission warned.
“One of Iran’s possible responses to another attack could be enrichment to 90%,” Ebrahim Rezaei wrote in a Persian-language post on X. “We will examine the matter in parliament.”
(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)
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3 Responses
So both Wars didn’t set them back at all? Where’s this coming from
So he is confirming that the Iranian nuclear program was NOT OBLITERATED last summer.
Wright mentioned the fact that there is the weaponization process Iran has to master, but he dismissed that saying they are still very close to a nuclear weapon. Fact is he doesn’t at all know how close Iran is to mastering the ability to use enriched material to set off a nuclear explosion or to make a bomb so small it fits on a war head. A major focus of the bombing campaigns was to destroy facilities that had very complex and hard to replace equipment needed to figure out the weaponization process, like timing an explosion to the billionth of a second for example.
In addition he has no idea whether Iran currently has scientists that have the know how of how to do this because the top ones working on this have been killed and he can have no idea about the skill set of those who remain.
It is also not even clear that he believes this as he had every reason to make this claim to support Trump’s urgency in trying to force Iran to reach an agreement even at the cost of a major energy crisis across the world. So just because an official in the Trump government made this claim does mean it is so.