After years of claiming that economic sanctions were creating the opportunity for President Obama to negotiate with Iran over the regime’s nuclear program, the administration is now claiming that the failure of those sanctions necessitates negotiating.
Vice President Joe Biden declared today that Iran has already “paved a path” to a nuclear bomb, in an apparent attempt to rebut Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that the deal currently being negotiated would result in the regime obtaining those weapons.
“Let’s get something straight so we don’t kid each other,” Biden said, per the Washington Examiner. “They already have paved a path to a bomb’s worth of material. Iran could get there now if they walked away in two to three months without a deal.”
That means that Iran’s attainment of a nuclear weapon is proceeding on schedule, as predicted in 2009 by the U.S. intelligence community.
#related#“We judge Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon sometime during the 2010- 2015 time frame,” then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the Senate in 2000. “INR judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.”
Obama’s team suggested in 2011 that his policies were slowing Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. “Put simply, the Iranian regime has not yet fundamentally altered its behavior, but we have succeeded in slowing its nuclear program,” then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said at the Brookings Institution. “The international community has the time, space and means to affect the calculus of Iran’s leaders, who must know that they cannot evade or avoid the choice we have laid before them.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.