According to Wednesday's statements of the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, Tehran has never resumed the nuclear weapons program; on the other hand Washington has claimed for four years that they had secretly continued it.
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"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.
Reports have indicated that Burns explained the same last December at the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO Council even though the Biden administration and several top U.S. officials couldn't help to continue saying that Iran has been nearing a "breakout," which would mean that it would be capable of producing a nuclear bomb in weeks.
Israeli authorities consider that claims go back even further. On the other hand, last fall, the Israeli military intelligence director Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman commented to Israel's Walla News: "to the best of our knowledge, the directive has not changed, and they are not heading toward a breakout. They are not heading toward a bomb right now: It may be in the distant future."
"There is an enriched amount [of uranium] in volumes that we have not seen before, and it is disturbing," said Hayman. "At the same time, in all other aspects of the Iranian nuclear project, we see no progress - not in the weapons project, in the financial area, not in any other sector."
The U.S. administration unilaterally pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with the Iranian government back to 2018, accusing Tehran of secretly having resumed its weapons program. As a result, Washington imposed "maximum pressure" economic sanctions on the southwest Asian nation.