Iran has announced that it is now enriching uranium to 20%. Joe Biden is about to be sworn in as President of the United States. If those two things don’t terrify you, I don’t know what will.
Natural uranium is useless in the construction of an atomic bomb. In order for the uranium to be useable the concentration of the Uranium-235 isotope, a tiny fraction of what is found in uranium ore, must be dramatically increased. The precise level of enrichment necessary is a state secret, but most open sources use figures somewhere between 80 and 90 percent.
A number of techniques can be used to carry out this enrichment. All follow the same trajectory, however. Most of the time it takes to reach the desired enrichment level and create what is known as highly enriched uranium (HEU) is invested upfront. Just getting to 3.5% enrichment eats up 75% of your time. By the time 20% enrichment is reached, you are 90% of the way through the entire process.
In short, once the Iranians have uranium in hand, which has been enriched to the 20% level, they are virtually done. What remains of the process from that point forward can be accomplished in almost no time. Some experts believe it might take less than thirty days for the Iranians to sprint to the finish line and have material in hand usable for a nuclear weapon.
We don’t really know right now how close the Iranians are to that 20% mark, only that they have officially announced they are going there. We do know that the Iranians have in hand ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons and we must assume, based on past intelligence, that they have completed the engineering work necessary to construct the weapon into which HEU will be placed.
We may, in other words, be within a few months of the day when Tehran possesses the capability to obliterate Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh and a host of other Middle Eastern cities.
And the man who we must depend on to save us from this eventuality is Joe Biden.
Scared yet?
Last time Joe was involved in dealing with the Iranians was when he was Vice-President. At that time, he and Barack Obama presided over what may very well be the most disastrous foreign policy agreement in American history, the Iran nuclear deal. It is not just that the deal did nothing to restrain the Ayatollahs or their thuggish henchmen in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It rewarded them for their behavior and turned them loose to set the Middle East on fire.
Iran received in excess of $150 billion. It was released from sanctions. It was emboldened and encouraged. From Yemen to Syria to Iraq the Middle East paid the price, as the IRGC, Hezbollah and a host of other Shia militias spread chaos and destruction.
Barack and Joe did nothing.
Iran is believed to have on hand 2.4 tons of enriched uranium. They have formally declared their intention to enrich at least 120 kilograms a year of that stockpile to the 20% level. They have also made clear their intention to put an end to United Nations inspections of their nuclear facilities. Iran has thousands of centrifuges at work all day every day enriching uranium, and it recently informed the United Nations it is preparing to bring thousands more online.
For his part, Biden has already made clear it will be a priority of his administration to return to the failed Iran nuclear deal as quickly as possible. One hundred and fifty Democratic Congressmen have signed on to a letter urging him to do so. Biden’s pick for his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, has likewise stated that the new administration will seek to return to the terms of the Iran nuclear deal as rapidly as possible.
The stench of Biden’s weakness and willingness to capitulate is palpable and unmistakable to the Ayatollahs. They remember Joe well, and they know they can walk right over him. The timing of their announcements is no accident.
The Trump administration is on its last legs. When Trump leaves the White House, the crippling sanctions that have bankrupted Tehran’s terror machine will go with him. The willingness to strike Iranian master terrorists like Soleimani will evaporate. It will back to business as usual, with an American President who kowtows to Islamic extremists and responds to violence and intimidation with appeasement.
Tehran sees its window of opportunity. It intends to exploit it to the fullest. While Joe is fumbling around in the White House trying to organize his team and mouthing platitudes about the need for civilized dialogue and new understandings, the ayatollahs are going to present us with a new, ugly reality. One day soon, unless we are extraordinarily lucky, a nuclear test will take place in the deserts of Iran, and Khamenei will announce to the world that Tehran now holds the fate of much of the Middle East in its hands.
Iran is about to acquire the bomb, and the only one who can stop it is Joe Biden…
