General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of US Central Command told Time magazine yesterday that Iran is close to having a bomb and that the US military is ready with its plans should President Joe Biden issue the order to execute. “Our president said they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “The diplomats are in the lead on this, but Central Command always has a variety of plans that we could execute, if directed.”
“They’re very close this time,” McKenzie says. “I think they like the idea of being able to break out.”
Time cites David Albright’s Wasington, D.C.-based Institute for Science and International Security as estimating that Iran could have its first nuclear device in a month, under a “worst-case breakout estimate,” its second weapon within three months, and its third in five.
Even if Tehran decides to mass enough fuel for a bomb, McKenzie says, Iran hasn’t yet standardized a design for a warhead that’s small enough to be affixed atop any of its arsenal of 3,000 ballistic missiles. Neither has it yet shown the capability to build a reentry vehicle that can survive the atmospheric friction of reentry. “We haven’t seen any of that,” McKenzie says. “That’s what’s going to take a little time for them to build.”
But while Tehran may have not yet solved the problem of mating a nuclear device to a missile, the missiles it has are very accurate. “Those missiles hit within tens of meters of their targets,” McKenzie said in reference to the Jan. 8, 2020, Iranian retaliatory attack on a U.S. base in Iraq following the U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani. “The one thing the Iranians have done over the last three-to-five years is they built a very capable ballistic missile platform.”
