Keeping close to, but not crossing, the threshold of building nuclear weapons gives Iran another way of threatening adversaries, including Israel, a Middle East scholar said Monday at an anti-nuclear event.
Iran “is getting advantages from having this program that everyone is very afraid of,” Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington and former leader of a bipartisan task force on Iran, said at a webinar hosted by Ploughshares Fund. “If it were actually to build the nuclear weapons it might actually lose some of those advantages in a curious way.”
Slavin said that Iran has enough 60% enriched uranium to make about 3 or 4 nuclear weapons.
“Do they want a bomb? They say they don’t… but clearly they are very, very close to that ability if they were to choose to do so,” Slavin said.
Slavin also said that the U.S. has seen “since October 7 that Iran has many other ways to deter attacks on Iran and also to threaten its adversaries in the Middle East.” That includes the drone and missile strikes Tehran launched in April, after Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria.
“As long as the conflict goes on in Gaza, and especially if it expands into Lebanon in a major way, there’s always the danger of this activity happening again,” Slavin said.
Meanwhile, the State Department reiterated in a recent press briefing that the Joe Biden (D) administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency will not allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon.
“As you have heard us say before, we do not see indications that Iran is currently undertaking the key activities that we would – that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” a spokesperson for the state department said in a press briefing last week, “but of course this is something we continue to monitor very closely.”
