Energy secretary: Iran ‘frighteningly close’ to nuclear weapon despite Operation Epic Fury

Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned on Wednesday that Iran is “frighteningly close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon, nearly three months after the United States launched a war to irrevocably halt the Islamic Republic from crossing that ominous Rubicon.

Wright, referring to Iran’s current stock of nuclear material, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “They are weeks — a small number of weeks — away to enrich that to weapons-grade uranium.” But the energy secretary added that a months-long weaponization process would still be required beyond that point.

Iranian nuclear activity steadily increased in the years since President Donald Trump abrogated the Obama-era accord in his first term. Nuclear analysts contend this decision removed key guardrails and freed the regime to enrich uranium at higher levels, expand production, and develop more advanced centrifuges.

Tehran is estimated to have amassed approximately 12 tons of uranium at varying degrees of purity.

Uranium is generally said to be of “weapons-grade” when it is enriched to 90% purity or higher. At present, Iran is believed to have come close to this threshold but not reached it.

The Islamic Republic’s leadership has long insisted it does not intend to develop a nuclear weapon and instead wants to keep enhancing its fissile technology for peaceful purposes. These protestations are widely dismissed by the nation’s many adversaries, including the U.S.

Wright, in an exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said that roughly a ton of Iran’s 60% uranium is “only weeks away” from weapons-grade level, with the remaining 11 tons of 20% material just a few weeks behind.

“Unenriched uranium, it’s a long process to get it to weapons-grade,” he explained. “But when you’re at 60%, although the numbers don’t sound that way, you’re way more than 90% of the way there for the enrichment necessary for weapons-grade uranium. Very close. Twenty percent uranium, which they also have a lot of, is far along as well.”

Wright concluded: “It’s very concerning.”

Much of the material is believed to be entombed within fortified tunnels near the Isfahan nuclear facility, which survived last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer. The U.S.-led raid involved more than 125 U.S. military aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers that dropped 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on deeply buried targets.

Trump repeatedly claimed the relatively brief air campaign “obliterated” the sites, but intelligence assessments concluded that while Midnight Hammer severely set back Iran’s capabilities, it did not destroy them.

The Trump administration has since invoked Iran’s purportedly imminent nuclear threat as the premise for the military action that began at the end of February, dubbed Operation Epic Fury.

Matthew Bunn, professor of the practice of energy, national security, and foreign policy at Harvard University, told Military Times that Iran still retains enough highly enriched uranium to proceed swiftly toward making more than a dozen nuclear bombs.

“They could move fairly quickly to build nuclear weapons should they choose to do so,” he said. “The reason they haven’t done so, in part, is because they feared exactly what happened: if their facilities were detected, they would get blasted before they could finish.”

Senior Trump administration officials have publicly weighed deploying forces deep inside Iran to seize the Iranian stockpiles by force.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March, “People are going to have to go and get it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters the following month, “They will either give it to us, or we’ll take it out.” The president, on Sunday, said that Iran’s nuclear enrichment site was under close surveillance by the Space Force – and that “we’ll get at that at some point, whenever we want.”

Bunn argued against such a high-risk military operation, warning it could result in significant American casualties. He insisted that it wouldn’t “solve the problem” and diplomacy is the only viable long-term solution.

“You just can’t bomb knowledge away,” he said, pointing to the thousands of scientists and engineers working within Iran’s nuclear apparatus. “If I’m the Iranians, I take my knowledge that I now have of advanced centrifuges and how to make them and how to operate them, and my other deep underground facilities, and start enriching some more uranium and set up my facilities using that material.”

Absent a durable agreement and rigorous monitoring, Bunn said, nothing would prevent the Iranians from picking up where they left off.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales, in a statement to Military Times, asserted, “The Iranian regime knows their current reality is not sustainable. President Trump holds all the cards and keeps all options on the table as negotiators work to make a deal.”