00:00During the State of the Union on February 24th, President Trump issued a dire warning about Iran,
00:05claiming the country was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program
00:08and working to build an intercontinental missile that could inevitably reach the United States.
00:13They've already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas,
00:18and they're working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.
00:23They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program,
00:28and in particular, nuclear weapons, yet they continue starting it all over.
00:35We wiped it out and they want to start all over again,
00:38and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions.
00:43Last year, the U.S. dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs on Iran's nuclear sites
00:48in what was dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer,
00:50the biggest ever attack by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers
00:54and the longest flight the aircraft has made since 2001.
00:57But according to the Trump administration,
00:59Iran has been laboriously rebuilding its nuclear facilities
01:02and threatening U.S. national security.
01:04Iran poses a very grave threat to the United States and has for a very long time.
01:08They are in possession, first and foremost, after their nuclear program was obliterated,
01:13they were told not to try to restart it,
01:15and here they are, you can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it.
01:18Iran possesses a very large number of ballistic missiles,
01:22particularly short-range ballistic missiles that threaten the United States
01:26and our bases in the region and our partners in the region.
01:30The principle is very simple.
01:31Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
01:33If they try to rebuild a nuclear weapon, that causes problems for us.
01:37In fact, we've seen evidence that they have tried to do exactly that.
01:40So the president is sending those negotiators to try to address that problem.
01:44As the president has said repeatedly,
01:45he wants to address that problem diplomatically,
01:48but of course the president has other options as well.
01:50So how worried should the U.S. be about Iran's weapons capabilities?
01:54We asked an expert.
01:55I'm Andrea Stricker.
01:56I'm the deputy director of the nonproliferation program
01:59at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
02:01At the State of the Union,
02:03Trump really mentioned the growing threats from Iran's nuclear and missile programs.
02:08He focused on whether Iran is reconstituting a nuclear weapons pathway.
02:13Since Operation Midnight Hammer,
02:15through open-source satellite imagery,
02:17there have been signs that Iran is rebuilding at some of the destroyed sites.
02:22There's one in particular that it's been rebuilding
02:25that actually Israel eliminated in October of 2024,
02:29called Talagan 2.
02:30It's within the Parchin military complex,
02:33and that's where Iran used to conduct weaponization-related experiments.
02:37So part of the process to build a nuclear weapon.
02:40They're almost done rebuilding that facility,
02:43and it seems to resemble the facility that they previously had
02:48where they conducted those experiments.
02:50Trump may also be worried about a new facility
02:54that Iran has continued to work on
02:56that the U.S. did not strike during June 2025 strikes.
03:00It's called the Pickaxe Mountain Facility,
03:04and it's near the Natanz nuclear complex.
03:07And it is possibly a new enrichment plant
03:10for the production of weapons-grade uranium, even,
03:14that would be more deeply buried than the Forda Enrichment Facility
03:17at more than 100 meters below a mountain.
03:20It is possible that the United States may decide
03:23to strike that mountain facility
03:25if it does conduct new strikes.
03:27Iran remains far from nuclear weapons.
03:30It is likely around two years away
03:32from being able to make a nuclear weapon at this point,
03:35based on the damage to its fuel production capabilities,
03:39its weaponization abilities,
03:41and then also the people who were assassinated
03:44who would have to assemble a nuclear weapon.
03:47In question, however,
03:48is the status of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile.
03:52That's uranium enriched to 60%
03:54that Iran could turn into weapons-grade material
03:57within a matter of days.
03:59Now, it would still need to be able to weaponize
04:01or fabricate that fuel into a nuclear device.
04:04And so it does remain far from nuclear weapons,
04:07but the more activities that it takes
04:09to rebuild these capabilities
04:11or see what might have survived the strikes,
04:14the closer it would be able to get.
04:16He also mentioned Iran's growing
04:18intercontinental ballistic missile threat,
04:21indicating that soon Iranian missiles
04:24would be able to reach the U.S. homeland.
04:27Iran has been working toward an ICBM
04:29or intercontinental ballistic missile
04:31under the guise of a space launch program,
04:35so shooting these types of weapons into space,
04:37and so it can progress that program
04:39while appearing to do something benign.
04:43The United States is trying to negotiate a deal
04:45with the Iranians in Geneva,
04:47but the two sides reportedly remain very far apart.
04:51The U.S. has insisted that Iran
04:53verifiably abandon uranium enrichment,
04:55while the Iranians want to retain
04:57some form of limited enrichment.
04:59But leaving any type of enrichment in Iran
05:02enables it to go up to weapons-grade
05:05at a time of its choosing,
05:07potentially just waiting out the Trump administration
05:09for the next three years.
05:11If we're talking about a scale of Iran's lethality
05:14as far as dashing to nuclear weapons,
05:17we can't rule out that some country
05:19like Russia, North Korea, or China
05:21could provide it with a leg up
05:23in terms of enriched uranium fuel,
05:26weaponization help,
05:27or even in the case of North Korea,
05:29a full nuclear weapon.
05:31However, working on its own,
05:33Tehran does remain far from the nuclear threshold,
05:35but that does not mean that the United States
05:38is going to let it regather that capability
05:40right under the watchful eyes of satellites.
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