Why the Next President Should Start Worrying and Fear the (Iran) Bomb

The United States is sleepwalking into a nuclear Iran, having largely ignored this growing problem for years. Tehran has advanced its program so aggressively and assiduously that there is now a high risk it could achieve all the necessary elements of a nuclear weapon, with no certainty the outside world could detect such moves quickly and accurately enough to stop them.

Preventing a nuclear Iran must be a day one issue for the next president. With Iran perched on the nuclear precipice, the next commander-in-chief will enter the White House with no time and little margin for error, as he or she inevitably wades through the demanding processes of staffing a new administration, getting it up to speed, and dealing with myriad other priorities. For that reason, it is highly urgent that both presidential candidates already have a serious, comprehensive strategy to address this threat the moment either of them assumes office in January.

The costs and risks of continued inattention and inaction can easily be gleaned from Iran’s escalating nuclear advances in the absence of clear policy, let alone pressure, from the United States. Since President Trump’s 2018 decision to leave the JCPOA nuclear deal, the “breakout time” for Iran to produce one bomb’s worth of fissile material shrunk from 12 to roughly 3-4 months by the time President Biden took office. After candidate Biden telegraphed his overwhelming desire to address this problem solely via JCPOA reentry talks, with no backup plan, Tehran accelerated its nuclear program before he even took office. Iran then supercharged this drive over the past two years as it became starkly obvious the administration was not willing to pivot to its promised “Plan B” of economic and military pressure. In November 2020, Iran needed a full year to roll out three bombs’ worth of fissile material; today it can make that much in a week or two, and thirteen total in just three months.

In parallel, there are growing indications of Iran’s capability and intent to “weaponize” the nuclear material it has produced by converting it into a device capable of producing a nuclear explosion. Though the exact extent of progress is unknown to outside observers, American and Israeli officials increasingly indicate their concerns that the regime has inched increasingly close to completing this crucial step. In a stark departure from past assessments, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently warned Iran has undertaken activities that “better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Preventing Tehran from stepping across the nuclear weapons threshold requires dependable and timely detection as a prerequisite to potential action, but Iran has also successfully concealed many of its advances from prying eyes. The closer Tehran has moved to the nuclear threshold, the more it has violated its safeguards agreements with impunity. This makes its ultimate achievement of nuclear weapons capability increasingly undetectable by either the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is charged with monitoring Iran’s progress, or national intelligence services – and thus unpreventable. Prevention is complicated further by the fact that many countries’ ultimate decisions about going nuclear involve political as well as technical considerations that may not proceed logically or generate clear intelligence signals. Tellingly, U.S. intelligence has a spotty track record historically of gauging and predicting others’ nuclear progress.

The window for preventing a nuclear Iran will narrow further as these capabilities and uncertainties continue growing – especially if Tehran and other adversaries try to seize on any perceived instability or lack of leadership surrounding the presidential transition in Washington. Staying the course by doing nothing, while repeating tired pledges about “not allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons,” will be more freefall than autopilot as Tehran’s ongoing progress further contradicts core U.S. commitments and rings increasingly hollow in the ears of friends and foes around the world. Permitting Iran to continue working its way across this threshold will also embolden it to continue deepening ties with other U.S. adversaries and destabilizing the Middle East, in turn compounding the existing challenges confronting American leadership and credibility in overlapping crises from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.

As Vice President Harris and former President Trump prepare for their first debate tomorrow, JINSA’s Iran Policy Project is issuing this new paper to highlight the need for a focused approach that can actually fulfill America’s longstanding, bipartisan pledges across multiple Presidential administrations to prevent a nuclear Iran. Showing how the main drivers of Tehran’s remarkable progress toward the bomb are surging into the expanding vacuum of consistent and determined U.S. prevention policy, this paper aims to stimulate pressing, and long overdue, critical thinking about the heavy lifting, tough decision-making, and wider implications involved in countering a problem that both presidential aspirants – and a resounding majority of the American electorate – see as a primary national security threat. Building from this assessment, JINSA plans to issue a follow-on report with detailed policy recommendations for the incoming administration.

Click here to read the report.