Times of Israel editor David Horovitz asks “How close was Iran to the bomb, and how far has Israel pushed it back?” He answers the first question as follows:
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As far as I have been able to determine from interactions with several sources familiar with the matter, Israel’s intelligence assessments are that Iran was very close indeed to attaining nuclear weapons — as in, building and delivering a working bomb. Closer, that is, even than Netanyahu’s public estimate.
The Iranians have the enriched uranium, produced at their now largely destroyed main enrichment facility at Natanz. It has likely been stockpiled at the Isfahan site, also targeted by the IAF. In 2023, the IAEA reported evidence of uranium enriched further, to 83.7 percent purity, just short of weapons-grade, by the advanced centrifuges at the relatively invulnerable Fordo facility.
Critically, too, they have developed the highly complex nuclear detonator — the engineering device that causes the nuclear explosion of the bomb’s uranium core. And they have long had the missile capacity to deliver such a device.
Putting all the required components together, should Iran have chosen to do so, I was given to understand, was a matter of no more than two months, and possibly as little as a week.
Or, rather, it would have been — before Israel launched its attacks….
Whole thing here.
