Former head of the Iraq Survey Group David Kay says Iran is 2 to 5 years from nuclear weapons.
But he also says we should not even think about a military strike until after one of our cities is nuked.
“My personal guess is they are two to five years away from having a sufficient amount of fissile material and weapon design work to put them in a place where you believe they have the capability of putting a warhead on the end of a missile,” Kay said.
Kay said there is “virtually no possibility” Iran will give up its uranium enrichment program, which can be used to fuel civilian reactors for domestic energy use as well as make fissile material for warheads.
He dismissed the notion that a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would be effective or useful. He said it would only delay the development of a weapon by one to two years at the most, and would unite Iran’s people more firmly behind its leaders.
Kay would only advocate a military attack “if I found the Iranians had transferred a nuclear weapon to a third party, a terrorist organization or another state,” or if it used a nuclear weapon in an attack.
A reminder: it’s been four months since Mohamed ElBaradei said on Al-Arabiya television that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within 6 months.
(Hat tip:Chuckles our #1 Contributor)
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the crux of the problem was that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations.
