This is the closest that Obama has come to admitting that
his deal is a dead end.
Even if it works as he has billed it, it passes the buck while
promising that the time for action will always exist… unless there’s a
miscalculation, in which case, Boom.
Defending an emerging nuclear deal, President Barack
Obama said Iran would be kept a year away from obtaining a nuclear
weapon for more than a decade, but conceded Tuesday that the buffer
period could shrink to almost nothing after 13 or more years
Obama, whose top priority at the moment is to sell the framework deal
to critics, was pushing back on the charge that the deal fails to
eliminate the risk because it allows Iran to keep enriching uranium. He
told NPR News that Iran will be capped for a decade at 300 kilograms —
not enough to convert to a stockpile of weapons-grade material.
“What is a more relevant fear would be that in Year 13, 14, 15, they
have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at
that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero,”
Obama said.
Although Obama acknowledged that Iran’s breakout time could shrink,
he said at least the world would have better insight into Iran’s
capabilities because of extensive inspections in the earlier years.
“The option of a future president to take action if in fact they try to obtain a nuclear weapon is undiminished,” Obama said.
Of course it will be diminished because all this assumes that we know
the full extent of Iran’s capabilities. There’s no certainty that we do
or that we will. Sanctions relief makes it easier for Iran to scale up
its nuclear capabilities while playing the same familiar games. The
breakout time will have the most optimistic possible projections because
Hillary Clinton certainly won’t want to be pushed into a corner of
having to do something about Iran. And so the buck will get passed until
the boom.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom
Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing
a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st
century.
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