Returning early from the Group of Seven summit in Canada early on
Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump told reporters he believed
Iran was “very close” to building nuclear weapons.

His comments were in keeping with increasingly threatening social media
posts and language from Trump against Iran in recent days during
Israel’s escalating conflict with its longtime Middle Eastern rival.

Since Friday, Israel has bombed Iran’s top nuclear facilities and has
killed at least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful and for
civilian purposes. It points to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s edict
against nuclear weapons to back up its assertion.

But Trump’s comments on Monday echoed the claims made on multiple
occasions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for more than two decades – and repeated by him during the current conflict – to justify military action against Iran.

“In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before:
steps to weaponise enriched uranium,” Netanyahu said on Friday after the first wave of missiles struck Iranian nuclear facilities.

So is Iran indeed close to building a nuclear bomb as Trump and
Netanyahu claim? And are there parallels between the accusations against
Iran and the fraudulent allegations of nonexistent WMDs used by the US
and its allies to attack Iraq in 2003?

What does US intelligence say about Iran’s nuclear programme?
On March 25, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, unambiguously told members of the US Congress that Iran was not moving
towards building nuclear weapons.

“The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized
the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003,” she said, referring
to a collection of US spy agencies that collaborate to make such
assessments.

But Gabbard also said there had been an “erosion of a decades-long taboo
in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening
nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus”.

Iran’s “enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons,” she added.

On Monday, when reporters quoted Gabbard’s testimony to Trump, he said:
“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having” a nuclear weapon.

Gabbard, when asked about Trump’s comments, told reporters that she and
the US president were aligned – but did not explain how, given their differing assessments of Tehran’s nuclear programme.

What does the US military think?
On June 10, three days before Israel launched its attacks on Iran, Erik Kurilla, the commander of the US military’s Central Command, told a
Senate committee that Tehran was “continuing to progress towards a
nuclear weapons” programme.

On the surface, that assessment appears to be at odds with Gabbard’s
from March. But Kurilla did not say that the US military thought Iran
currently had a programme to develop nuclear bombs – but that it was progressing towards such a stage.

What the general did do was to question why Iran had high levels of
enriched uranium. “Stockpiles of enriched uranium continue to accumulate
in facilities across the country under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme,” he said. “Iran continues to gain knowledge and skills
directly linked to nuclear weapon production.”

What is uranium enrichment, and what has Iran been doing?
Iran has been enriching uranium at up to 60 percent purity – and that
has concerned the IAEA and critics of Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Uranium enrichment is the process of increasing the concentration of the uranium-235 isotope in natural uranium, which normally contains only
about 0.7 percent U-235. To build a nuclear weapon, uranium must be
enriched to about 90 percent U-235. Once enriched to those levels,
uranium is considered “weapons-grade”.

Once uranium is enriched to 60 percent, it reduces the time required to
reach weapons-grade, which is why higher enrichment levels attract
greater scrutiny from watchdogs like the IAEA.

Iran denies pursuing nuclear weapons and asserts its legitimate right,
as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment.

Does the IAEA think Iran is building nuclear weapons?
Addressing the UN watchdog’s Board of Governors on June 9, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said Iran had accumulated 400kg (880lb) of uranium enriched to 60 percent.

“While safeguarded enrichment activities are not forbidden in and of themselves, the fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in
the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60
percent remains a matter of serious concern,” he said in a report to the Board of Governors.

On Thursday, a day before Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the IAEA board passed a resolution censuring Tehran and accusing it of violating its safeguards-related commitments to the UN agency.

But in an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Grossi was emphatic that Iran’s alleged violations of its assurances had not led his agency to conclude
that Tehran was building bombs.

“We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Can Iran build nuclear weapons soon – and how soon?
In his June 10 testimony, Kurilla claimed that if Iran were to decide to “sprint to a nuclear weapon”, it had enough stockpiles and centrifuges
to produce up to 25kg (55lb) of weapons-grade uranium in “roughly one
week” and enough to build up to 10 weapons in three weeks.

But Grossi, in the CNN interview on Tuesday, suggested a very different timeline.

“Certainly, it was not for tomorrow, maybe not a matter of years,” he
said. “I don’t think it was a matter of years.”

And neither Kurilla, a military commander, nor Grossi, the boss of the
UN’s nuclear regulator, have indicated how long they think it might take
a country to actually build atomic weapons once they have a stockpile of weapons-grade uranium, even if that were Iran’s intention.

Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the US-based nonprofit Arms Control Association, suggested Israel also knows that
Iran has no imminent ability to build a bomb.

“If there was truly an imminent proliferation risk, if Israel really
thought that Iran was dashing towards a nuclear weapon, I think there
would have been a much more sustained campaign trying to disrupt
activities at Fordow and other activities at the Natanz site,” she told
Al Jazeera, referring to Iranian nuclear facilities.

Are there echoes of 2003 and WMDs in the current debate?
To several observers of the Middle East, there are.

In the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the US and the United
Kingdom asserted that Iraq possessed WMDs, including chemical and
biological weapons, and that it was pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

These claims were central to justifying military action under the
argument that Iraq posed an imminent threat to regional and global
security. The US intelligence assessments at the time, including the
2002 National Intelligence Estimate, supported this view although with
varying degrees of confidence.

After the invasion, extensive searches found no active WMD programmes in
Iraq.

Subsequent investigations, including those by the US Senate Intelligence Committee and the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, concluded that the intelligence
was deeply flawed and was politicised by leaders to overstate Iraq’s WMD capabilities to build a case for the invasion.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/18/is-iran-very-close-to-building-a-nuclear-bomb-as-trump-claims

Not to mention that Trump himself started all this with scuttling the
JCPA, which was monitored and working.

Iceberg would be mortified to know his beloved Trump is one of the
neocons he so despised.

--
"Sinners don't make demands. They make confessions"
-- Septa Unella

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