Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said something that has become well-known for more than three decades: “Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.”
Netanyahu has consistently asserted that Tehran is only a few years away from launching a nuclear weapon in his 1992 speech to Israel’s Knesset as an MP. We can anticipate that Iran will be able to develop and produce a nuclear bomb independently in three to five years, he declared at the time. In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism, he later made the prediction.
Netanyahu’s interactions with American officials have been influenced by the perception of an imminent threat. He made an appearance before a US congressional committee in 2002, arguing that Iraq and Iran were waging a nuclear war against one another. No weapons of mass destruction were discovered until the US-led invasion of Iraq began soon after.
He told members of Congress that Iran was only one or two years away from nuclear capability in a US State Department cable that was released by WikiLeaks in 2009.
Netanyahu famously blasted a cartoon of a bomb at the UN General Assembly to back up his claim that Iran was ever more close to the nuclear threshold. They will have finished the medium enrichment by the spring, or at most by the summer, he predicted in 2012.
Israel has attacked Iran in recent years, more than 30 years after Netanyahu first issued his first warning, but Netanyahu maintains that the threat is still pressing. Iran could develop nuclear weapons in a very short amount of time, he claimed recently, citing his recent assertion that the process could take months or even weeks.
Despite claims made by the US Director of National Intelligence earlier this year that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, these assertions still persist.
Source: Aljazeera
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