Iran close to ‘nuclear breakout’ – Blinken

Iran could be in a position to build a nuclear weapon within a matter of weeks or even days, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned. Tehran has been increasing its stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium since Washington unilaterally pulled out from the landmark Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

In an apparent jab at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who spearheaded US withdrawal from the accord, Blinken told the Aspen Security Forum on Friday that Iran had dramatically reduced the time needed to produce the fissile material needed to make a nuclear bomb.

After “the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, [Iran] is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” the top US diplomat said.

Blinken stressed that Iran had not yet “produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully.”