Ex-CIA chief: Deal leaves Iran ‘far too close’ to nuke
Goal of permanent agreement should be to maximize the amount of time Tehran needs to break out to a bomb, Michael Hayden says
The preliminary deal between Iran and world powers grants Iran the ability to remain a nuclear threshold state that would require only a brief window in order to break out to a nuclear weapon, a former CIA and NSA director said in an interview.
“Right now, the Iranians are far too close to a nuclear weapon,” Gen. Michael Hayden told Fox News on Sunday. “We have hit the pause button. Now we’ve got to negotiate hitting the delete button with them.”
Iran and the six world powers — the US, Russia, China, France, the UK and Germany — struck an interim deal last week by which Iran agreed to cap its uranium enrichment program at 5 percent and to dilute its current stockpile of enriched uranium to below 5%. In turn, the US and world powers would provide Iran with billions of dollars in relief from sanctions.
Hayden pointed out that while past UN Security Council resolutions have stipulated that Iran must give up entirely its uranium enrichment program, the deal struck in Geneva tacitly recognizes the Iranians’ right to enrich by stating that the sides will “come to an agreement on their right to enrich.”
“At the end of the day, Iran is going to be a nuclear threshold state,” he said. “Now, if you think that’s condemnatory of what’s going on, what we have to do is push that threshold back as far as possible, and that will identify — that will define — whether this was a good or bad idea.”
While many have hailed the agreement as an achievement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to rail against it and publicly savaged the accord as a “historic mistake.” Officials in Jerusalem have castigated President Barack Obama in no uncertain terms, saying he oversaw a failed negotiating process with Iran under which, they claim, Iran’s nuclear weapons drive is not being thwarted while the sanctions pressure against Tehran is collapsing.
Meanwhile, the White House is facing challenges from the Senate, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers has been working on an agreement aimed at passing a new sanctions bill against Iran before Christmas, despite the Geneva deal.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
