As it turns out, the Obama administration has known for years that Iran was only three months away from enriching enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb but only declassified that information at the beginning of April as negotiators reached a preliminary nuclear agreement.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told Bloomberg reporters and editors on Monday that the administration has known how close Iran really is to the nuclear breakout point for "quite some time."
"They are now they are right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000. Plus all the ... R&D work. If you put that together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3 months," Moniz said.
Despite the classified U.S. assessment of a two- to three-month breakout period, publicly, Obama has maintained an air of ignorance even as close allies like Israel have repeatedly sounded the alarms.
Bloomberg reports: "When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune. He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.
"Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency."
In October 2013, Obama told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Iran is still "a year or more" away from producing a nuclear weapon, acknowledging that the U.S. assessment was at odds with the Israeli assessment. In the same month of that year, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon warned that Iran needed as little as one month to produce enough material for a nuclear bomb, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued similar warnings.
Bloomberg's report indicates that Obama knew all along that Israel was correct in its estimate but publicly insisted otherwise to maintain a sense of diplomacy, only deciding to recently declassify the more alarmist and accurate two-to-three month figure as a selling point for the nuclear deal currently being finalized by negotiators.
