Kahl said that “Iran’s nuclear progress since” the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal “has been remarkable.”
“Back in 2018, when the previous administration decided to leave the JCPOA, it would have taken Iran about 12 months to produce one fissile, one bomb’s worth of fissile material,” Kahl said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, using the acronym for the formal name of the deal: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“Now it would take about 12 days,” he said.
Biden administration officials have for months said that Iran’s breakout time — the amount of time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade material for one nuclear bomb — had dwindled to a matter of weeks. The breakout time does not mean that Iran could produce an actual bomb in that amount of time.
Kahl’s comments — set against reports of Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium in violation of the deal — present a striking picture of the challenges facing the increasingly defunct agreement.
“It is quite clear that Iran enriched uranium to near weapons-grade levels,” Kelsey Davenport, the Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association, told CNN.
She said Tehran may have been “testing political responses to higher levels of enrichment or it was experimenting…
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