Iran Could Build Bomb After 13 Years — Barrack Obama

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Iran Could Build Bomb After 13 Years — Barrack Obama

President Barack Obama said Iran would be kept at least a year away from being able to build a nuclear weapon for more than a decade due to a framework deal agreed upon last week.

However, he conceded Tuesday the buffer period shrinks to almost nothing after 13 or more years.

Obama, defending an emerging deal agreed to by Iran and six world powers, was pushing back against critics’ claims that the deal fails to eliminate the risk because it allows Iran to keep enriching uranium.

The president told the American news media organization NPR that Iran’s capabilities will be capped for a decade at 300 kilograms - not enough to convert to a stockpile of weapons-grade material.

Justified concerns could rise in years 13 to 15, Obama said, when Iran could use “advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”

Breakout time refers to how long it would take to build a nuclear bomb if Iran decided to pursue one full-bore - in other words, how long the rest of the world would have to stop it. The framework deal expands Iran’s breakout time - currently two to three months - to at least a year.
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But that constraint would stay in place only for 10 years, at which point some restrictions would start phasing out, VOA said.

The admission comes as Obama seeks to sell the framework deal to critics and quiet a growing chorus questioning whether the deal his administration, along with other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, have negotiated merely delays the certainty of a nuclear-armed Iran. Obama has insisted that Iran will not produce a nuclear weapon on his watch, which ends in roughly 20 months, but has made no similar assurances about his successors.

“The option of a future president to take action if in fact they try to obtain a nuclear weapon is undiminished,” he said.

Obama also rejected a call by Israel that any final nuclear agreement with Iran include a “clear and unambiguous Iranian commitment of Israel’s right to exist.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued the demand Friday while strongly criticising the framework nuclear deal reached last Thursday at talks in Switzerland.