The nuclear deal with Iran only delays that country from eventually acquiring a weapon, President Barack Obama admitted in an interview Tuesday.
The capability could come as early as year 13 of the agreement, leaving a problem for a future president to tackle given the deal allows Tehran to continue enriching uranium.
"What is a more relevant fear would be that in Year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero," Obama said in an interview with NPR, according to
Fox News.
The admission comes after critics of the deal have accused the administration of merely delaying the likelihood that Iran would acquire a weapon. Obama has insisted that the country would not get a weapon during his tenure but has not made guarantees past that time.
The current deal sets a breakout time from the current two to three months to at least a year, capping the amount of uranium the country can produce to a level below that which would allow them to convert it to weapons-grade material.
But the constraint only lasts 10 years, at which point a number of restrictions would be phased out, Fox reported.
"The option of a future president to take action if, in fact, they try to obtain a nuclear weapon is undiminished," Obama said.
Iran has always insisted that it does not want to acquire a nuclear weapon but that claim is doubted by the international community. Obama has emphasized that the deal would rely on inspections, not trust.
"I think there are hard-liners inside of Iran that think it is the right thing to do to oppose us, to seek to destroy Israel, to cause havoc in places like Syria or Yemen or Lebanon," Obama said, according to Fox News. "If they don't change at all, we're still better off having the deal."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vigorously opposed the deal and has called for any Iran nuclear deal to recognize Israel's "right to exist." Obama said it would be a "fundamental misjudgment" to link the two issues.
"The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won't sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment," he said, according to Fox News.
Obama also told NPR, "I want to return to this point: we want Iran not to have nuclear weapons precisely because we can't bank on the nature of the regime changing. That's exactly why we don't want to have nuclear weapons.
"If suddenly Iran transformed itself to Germany or Sweden or France, then there would be a different set of conversations about their nuclear infrastructure."
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