It is five minutes past midnight in Armageddon and the Biden Administration continues to dither in how to decisively respond to Iran’s hastening pursuit of nuclear weapons. For nearly a year and a half, we cautioned this moment was fast approaching in time.
Now it is here. Washington finds itself in overtime and losing. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in a position to achieve a nuclear breakout as soon as New Year’s Day.
On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed our worst suspicions concerning the pace of Iran’s nuclear weaponization program. “Iran,” it concluded, “has increased the rate at which it is producing near weapons grade uranium in recent weeks, reversing a previous slowdown that started in the middle of this year.”
According to the IAEA, Iranian enrichment of Uranium-235 to near weapons-grade level had increased to an estimated 9 kilograms per month by the end of November. It takes just five times that amount of uranium, enriched to 90 percent, to sustain a nuclear chain reaction for one nuclear bomb.
Do the math based on Iran Watch’s estimates of its current centrifuge capacity, and Iran is now capable of enriching sufficient mass to 90 percent for three nuclear bombs in less than one week. Tehran could have a fourth bomb in one to two weeks more, and a fifth within roughly one month’s time.
Khamenei’s growing military partnership with Russia in Ukraine, and its continued alliance with North Korea, Iran now has sufficient access to the technical and manufacturing assistance needed to fit nuclear warheads to ICBMs for land, air or even potentially sea-based launches using Iran’s submarines. (Tehran is known to be working on sub-based ballistic and cruise missile capabilities.)
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the funding and planning of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. Tehran’s plunging of Gaza into war undermined U.S. efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Iran-sponsored militias including Hezbollah and the Houthis are actively attacking U.S. military and naval forces in Iraq, Syria, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden.
As his country nears a nuclear breakout, Khamenei is only becoming bolder. On Dec. 23, the Pentagon reported that the Chem Pluto, a chemical tanker sailing from Saudi Arabia to India, was struck in the Indian Ocean “by a drone launched from Iran.” Iranian threats against the West and Europe are also starting to come fast and furious. On Christmas Eve, Tehran threatened to close the Straits of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.
Iran will become bolder still if allowed to achieve nuclear status. We are on borrowed time now, rapidly approaching the point wherein a kinetic response will be the only option remaining.
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane was right in early December when addressing Iran-backed attacks on U.S, forces. It is past time for the Biden administration to escalate against Iran in order to “shut them down.”
The same must now be said regarding Khamenei’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. The U.S. must escalate to ensure that Iran does not become a nuclear power...
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