Two and Half Days to a Bomb?

By Zelma @ Adobe Stock

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig spent his column taking a victory lap after President Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, explaining that he has been calling for this for years, and that Iran was a mere “two and a half days” from having enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb. He writes:

Since late 2011, I have been publicly arguing that U.S. military strikes on Iran’s key nuclear facilities were the only way to keep Tehran from the bomb. I took a lot of heat from academic and think tank colleagues for holding this view, but events to this point have proved me right and the critics wrong.

Some argued that the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran and that the only thing worse than Iran with the bomb was bombing Iran. But every U.S. president disagreed, declaring a nuclear-armed Iran to be unacceptable. Trump was crystal clear in his repeated declarations that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Many hoped that Washington could resolve the Iranian nuclear issue at the negotiating table—myself included—but more than two decades of negotiations failed to end the Iranian nuclear threat. The Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is a case in point. It permitted Iran to maintain a robust nuclear program with limits that expired over 10 to 15 years. It was a temporary Band-Aid that paved a patient pathway to an Iranian bomb. This week, even while at war with Israel and with a credible threat of U.S. military force hanging over his head, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, still stubbornly refused to negotiate away the country’s uranium enrichment program.

Critics of military action have long argued that there was still time to address this issue through other means, but the clock ran out this week. Iran’s breakout time to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb had shrunk to two and half days.

For evidence of this imminent threat, Kroenig links to a CNN article, which, in an infographic, explains that “Iran could have enough enriched uranium in two and a half days for one nuclear weapon.” When was the data from the graphic from? May 17, 2025. For those of you counting, yes, that’s a lot further back than two and a half days.

Kroenig appears to try to mitigate the cognitive dissonance by writing:

Reports that the U.S. intelligence community had assessed that Khamenei had not yet made a final decision to build nuclear weapons were so precise as to be misleading. Khamenei spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to get one screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb. He was not going to stop at this point.

So Iran could have been dangerous, at some point, if it chose to. But if the United States government knew that Iran’s nuclear program was an imminent threat, why would it sit back and watch as the Israelis fight Iran on its own for days? If the threat was so imminent, wouldn’t America want to join in and fight Iran as soon as possible in order to eliminate the threat?