WATCH: Tehran inches closer to nuclear bomb

JERUSALEM – Amid all the hullabaloo of a supposed hostage deal that never was between Israel and Hamas, the situation regarding Iran’s increasing proximity to achieving its nuclear goals have until recently flown somewhat under the radar. However, over the last week or so, several stories have emerged about just how close Tehran is to revealing it, too, has joined the nuclear weapons club.

On Wednesday, foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead argued the next administration – whether Republican or Democrat – would likely need to confront a nuclear-armed Iran, or take steps to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons, according to the Jewish Insider.

“My guess is that the next president will likely face a nuclear Iran – or face the alternative of war with Iran or accepting a nuclear Iran,” Mead said in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t think either candidate really knows what they would do under those circumstances, but I think that is something they are very likely to face.”

Other outlets including the Free Press and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have similarly posited Tehran’s acceleration toward confirming its development of nuclear weapons. The so-called civilized West has attempted with varying levels of success to either deal decisively or placate Iran’s nuclear ambitions for more than two decades. In an article for Slate magazine in 2010, English-American polemicist Christopher Hitchens wrote the following:

“When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn – to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency – that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an ‘international community.’ How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly.”

It could cogently be argued the notion of “international law” has already been discarded, especially since the events of Oct. 7, although the overall point about Iran’s clear intentions and their flouting of the rules governing the production of nuclear weapons still holds true.

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Michael Rubin, director of policy at the Middle East Forum, responded to questions from WorldNetDaily saying it was “almost inevitable” Iran will get the bomb.

“The question is whether they believe they gain more by dragging out the process and the degree to which they fear isolation following a nuclear breakout. The strategic question is whether the United States can delay Iran’s nuclear acquisition until after the regime falls. After all, the problem is less an Iranian nuclear bomb, than a nuclear bomb wielded by those embracing Ali Khamenei’s ideology.”

In a tantalizing response regarding Mead’s contention about the next U.S. president having to contend one way or another with a nuclear Iran, Rubin said the parlous condition of the Islamic Republic, which he labeled “terminally ill,” might cause the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, to simply throw caution to the wind and attempt to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.

“If the regime is collapsing anyway, what is to stop them doing that,” he asked rhetorically.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, released two reports in late August regarding Iran’s nuclear advances and non-compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT. The reports indicate “Tehran has added to key enriched uranium stockpiles and installed hundreds of fast uranium enrichment centrifuge machines. This provides the regime with the ability to rapidly make fuel for up to 15 nuclear weapons, according to new estimates issued by the Institute for Science and International Security,” as reported in an FDD news brief.

The IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors met Monday to discuss Iran’s continued failure to comply with the organization’s censure resolution of June 2023. The resolution demanded that Iran “cooperate with the IAEA to resolve a multi-year investigation into the regime’s nuclear weapons work, reinstate access for key agency inspectors, permit enhanced IAEA monitoring, and provide details on missing nuclear material and the construction of new nuclear facilities.”

Meanwhile, neither the United States nor its European partners seem likely to censure Iran at the next IAEA meeting, i.e. they seem consigned to the reality of the worst global state sponsor of global terrorism being able to hold the world to ransom due its possession of nuclear weapons.

“Facts are stubborn,” said FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz. “Most of Iran’s nuclear weapons expansion has occurred since the election of Biden-Harris and their decision to abandon the pressure strategy of the previous administration.”

None of this is conjecture, and recently translated Iranian parliamentary documents detail how Tehran is significantly expanding the funding and military pursuits of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Farsi language–based acronym, SPND.

“While the new Iranian legislation doesn’t specifically mention nuclear bomb development, it clearly states that SPND’s mandate is to produce advanced and nonconventional weapons with no civilian oversight,” according to the Free Press. “The legislation states that ‘this organization focuses on managing and acquiring innovative, emerging, groundbreaking, high-risk, and superior technologies in response to new and emerging threats.'”

The SPND is home to nuclear scientists, at least six of whom Israel has been accused of assassinating. This includes Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regarded as the chief of Iran’s nuclear program, who was killed in a daring operation in November 2020, which seemed to leap straight from the pages of a spy novel. Israel allegedly attempted to take out a sixth scientist as well, although that operation was unsuccessful.

This is also not to forget Mossad agents exfiltrated a half-ton of documents from a Tehran warehouse, which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used liberally in a presentation where he charged Iran with flat out lying about its nuclear ambitions – and he had the receipts to prove it. Rubin said Israel’s purported actions had succeeded in delaying Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, although he added the West’s tendency to “kick the can down the road,” does eventually lead into a cul-de-sac.

Indeed, even the U.S. is perturbed by Iran’s seemingly brazen dash for the bomb. In July, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a top intelligence body, released a report saying it could no longer verify Iran’s nuclear pursuits were for strictly civilian purposes. This seems like an extraordinary admission that Iranian claims of the peaceful use of nuclear power were taken at face-value.

Is Iran using Middle East instability as a shield for nuclear development?

There are also concerns in Washington and Jerusalem in particular that Iran is using the current situation in the Middle East, which it has deliberately fostered, to create a smoke screen for its nuclear ambitions. And if it succeeds in manufacturing nuclear weapons, many of the options – including military – still just about on the table will immediately be swept from the board.

Ironically, the relative ease with which U.S., Israeli, French, British, and other coalition partners managed to knock its ballistic missiles out of the sky in its unprecedented April 13 assault on Israel, may have worked to focus minds on the nuclear option even more intensely.

Also, between the recent Iranian presidential election – called after the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a May helicopter crash – and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, nuclear diplomacy has largely been stalled. This does not mean, however, the stockpiling of highly enriched uranium, nor the refinement of fissile material has been similarly paused. Evidence would suggest quite the opposite. Senior U.S. officials now say Tehran could produce weapons-grade fuel in just a few weeks. Iran has also moved ahead with developing a potential delivery system for an atomic weapon: test-firing the long-range Simorgh carrier rocket in January, reported the Free Press.

The elevation of one or other of the U.S. presidential candidates will produce wildly different approaches to the Iran nuclear problem; a President Harris will seek, like her predecessors, to return to the negotiating table and reanimate the failed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Meanwhile, President Trump 2.0 will inevitably seek to reinstate his maximum pressure policy, immediately cutting off billions of dollars in petro-dollars and other revenue, which the Biden-Harris administration has with criminal alacrity given to Tehran. As Mead points out, by the time January comes around it might be too late to do anything about it anyway.

And what of Israel? Rubin is under no illusions as to how difficult taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities would be: “The danger is that Israel can start such an operation but not finish it, simply because Iran is much larger than Iraq and Syria [Israeli fighter jets managed to take these out in one go], and its nuclear program much more dispersed. We’re not talking a single sortie but rather well over a thousand, especially given the need to take out command-and-control, anti-air defenses, and enemy airfields.”

However, he was unequivocal about what any Israeli leader would decide to do if Iran threatened the Jewish state. “Make no mistake, though. If Israel faces an existential threat, it will do what it needs to do; it is not simply going to acquiesce to its own destruction.”