Without presenting evidence, Israel’s high-ranking military official claimed this week that Iran has stored enough highly enriched uranium to build four nuclear bombs.
In yet another evidenceless claim about Iran’s nuclear program, the outgoing Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Aviv Kochavi, said this Monday that Iran has enough enriched uranium to build four nuclear bombs.
“Iran today has enough enriched material to produce four nuclear bombs, three at 20 per cent and one at 60 per cent,” Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported from a public statement issued by Kochavi’s office.
Kochavi also noted that to respond to this threat, the Israeli army has prepared three programs to launch an attack in Iran to destroy nuclear facilities supporting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear project; “If it comes to entering a major battle, military sites and additional sites will be included in the list of targets”, Kochavi said, referring to targets for the Israeli army in Iran.
Kochavi also added that the Israeli army “has improved its intelligence related to targets in Iran and prepared enough munition for all of them.”
No evidence to prove the claim
But despite the recent claims by Kochavi, there is no proved evidence to show that Iran is indeed going nuclear and intends to restore highly enriched uranium to build nuclear bombs. On the contrary, many US intelligence officials do believe that based on their assessments, Iran has no intention whatsoever to manufacture nuclear weapons.
In one of the latest remarks by the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, for example, he asserted back in July that Tehran has never resumed the nuclear weapons program.
“Our best intelligence judgment is that the Iranians have not resumed the weaponization effort that they had underway up until 2004 and then suspended, so that’s something; obviously, we at CIA and across the US intelligence community keep a very, very sharp focus on,” said the CIA Director during the Aspen Security Forum celebrated in Colorado back then.
Israel has a history of baseless accusations against Iran
Despite presenting no proven fact and evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is not peaceful, Israel has continuously been accusing Iran of building nuclear bombs during recent decades.
In 1992, Shimon Peres, the then foreign minister of Israel, said in an interview with French TV that Iran would be armed with a nuclear bomb by 1999. Three years later in 1995, Netanyahu predicted in his book “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracy Can Destroy the International Network of Terrorism” that Iran will have nuclear weapons in the next three to five years.
Ehud Barak, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel noted in 1996 that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons in the next four years.
On September 27, 2012, Netanyahu displayed a controversial caricature of a bomb during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly. His insistence on the claim that Iran is several months away from building a nuclear bomb
Also, in July of that year, Israeli military affairs analyst Alex Fishman announced that it would take Iran three months to acquire an atomic bomb and emphasized that Iran is only three months away from reaching the goal of enriching 25 kilograms of uranium to 90%, and this ratio is necessary to make an atomic bomb.
To date, however, no international or governmental organization in any country, including the US, has concluded that Iran has intentions to go nuclear and build nuclear weapons.
