Washington:
The United States still believes that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon despite Tehran’s recent strategic setbacks, including Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leaders and two largely failed attempts to attack Israel, two US officials said to Reuters.
The comments from a senior Biden administration official and a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) echoed public comments earlier this week from CIA Director William Burns, who said the United States would not had seen only evidence that the Iranian leader had reversed. his 2003 decision to suspend the armaments program.
“We believe that the Supreme Leader has not made a decision to resume the nuclear weapons program that Iran suspended in 2003,” the ODNI spokesman said, referring to Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The intelligence assessment could help explain U.S. opposition to any Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack Tehran carried out last week.
President Joe Biden said after that attack that he would not support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites, but did not explain why he had reached that conclusion. His comments sparked fierce criticism from Republicans, including former President Donald Trump.
U.S. officials have long recognized that an attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program could only delay the country’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb and even strengthen Tehran’s determination to do so.
“We’re all watching this space closely,” the Biden administration official said.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Tehran has repeatedly denied ever having a nuclear weapons program.
Iran’s most important ally has been weakened
In recent weeks, the Israeli military has inflicted heavy casualties on Hezbollah, the most powerful member of the Iran-backed network known as the Axis of Resistance. The group’s setbacks include the killing of leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike last month.
The weakening of a key Iranian ally has led some experts to speculate that Tehran could resume efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb to protect itself.
Beth Sanner, a former US deputy director of national intelligence, said the risk of Khamenei reversing his 2003 religious ruling against nuclear weapons “is now greater than it has been” and that if Israel were to attack nuclear facilities, Tehran would likely follow through start building nuclear weapons. a nuclear weapon.
However, that would still take time.
“They can’t get a weapon in one day. It will take months and months and months,” said Sanner, now an employee of the German Marshall Fund.
Iran is now enriching uranium to 60% fissile purity, close to 90% of weapons grade, at two sites, and in theory the country has enough material enriched to that level, if further enriched, for almost four bombs, according to a benchmark from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog.
The expansion of Iran’s enrichment program has cut the so-called breakout time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for an atomic bomb to “a week or a little longer,” according to Burns, from just over a year in 2015. agreement that Trump withdrew from when he became president. Making a bomb with that material would take longer. How long is less clear and subject to discussion.
Possible Israeli attack
Israel has not yet announced what it will target in retaliation for Iran’s attack last week with more than 180 ballistic missiles, which failed largely due to interceptions by Israeli air defenses and by the US military.
The United States has privately urged Israel to calibrate its response to avoid sparking a broader war in the Middle East, officials say, with Biden publicly voicing his opposition to a nuclear attack and concerns about an attack on the Iranian energy infrastructure.
However, Israel views Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat.
The conflicts in the Middle East between Israel and Iran and Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen have become campaign issues ahead of the November 5 presidential election, with Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, positioning themselves as pro-Israel.
At a campaign event last week, Trump mocked Biden for opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, saying, “That’s the thing you want to hit, right?”
Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence officer and government official, said Iran still has room to offset setbacks to its allies and missile force without having to resort to developing a nuclear warhead.
“The Iranians need to recalculate what’s next. “I don’t think they will rush to develop or boost the (nuclear) military capability program at this point,” he said.
“They will look around to see what maneuvering space they can move into.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)