Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will present President Joe Biden with a plan to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb when the two meet in Washington later this week.
“We will present an orderly plan that we have formulated in the past two months to curb the Iranians, both in the nuclear sphere and vis-à-vis regional aggression,” Bennett told the government at the start of its weekly meeting on Sunday.
Bennett also said the U.S. overtures towards re-entering the tattered JCPOA 2015 nuclear deal were completely irrelevant in light of Iran’s continued aggression.
“Iran is behaving in a bullying and aggressive manner throughout the region. I will tell President Biden that it is time to stop the Iranians, to stop this thing, not to give them a lifeline in the form of re-entering into an expired nuclear deal – it is no longer relevant, even by the standards of those who once thought that it was,” he said.
The Biden administration has attempted to reenter the accord by holding indirect talks in Vienna for the past several months, but the efforts were frozen after hardliner Ebrahim Raisi’s appointment as Iranian president. The Trump administration withdrew from the Obama-negotiated deal in 2018.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog last month reported that Iran had produced enriched uranium to more than 60% purity, a short step from weapons-grade. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also said Tehran has produced 200 grams of enriched up to 20 percent, the ingredient comprising the core of a nuclear bomb. Under the deal, Iran is barred from producing the metal and the U.S. has said Tehran “has no credible need to produce uranium metal.”
“Iran is advancing rapidly with uranium enrichment and has already significantly shortened the time that it would take for them to accumulate the material required for a single nuclear bomb,” Bennett said.