Blinken made the comment Friday in reference to the Trump administration’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Tehran and world powers agreed to three years earlier to impose restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
“One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in recent years was to scrap that deal and allow Iran to break out of the box we’d put it in,” the US top diplomat said at the Aspen Security Forum, according to DPA.
He said the withdrawal had reduced the breakout time – the amount of time U.S. officials refer to as the time it takes Iran to produce material for a nuclear weapon – from “at least a year” to “probably a week or two.”
“They haven’t built a weapon yet,” Blinken said, but their development time “is now probably a week or two.”
Blinken said that when the Biden administration took office, it tried to resume nuclear diplomacy with Iran, “because if you could at least get one problem off your back, that was inherently a good thing.”
The top US diplomat’s comments come after Iran has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons have no place in its nuclear doctrine and that it will never produce such weapons based on a religious decree by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
Iran also maintains that its nuclear programme remains for peaceful purposes only, as it needs nuclear technology to meet its domestic needs.
IRNA
