In 2025, Iran were likely days, not years, from the bomb. By Nadhim Zahawi, a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK.
By mid-2025 Iran was assessed to have had nearly a thousand pounds of 60 per cent enriched uranium. This is so close to weapons grade, that American intelligence said that the Iranians could have fuel for a bomb in under a week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it could make enough for nine weapons. They were likely days, not years, from the bomb.
Now, picture what would have happened if they had actually crossed that line. A nuclear Iran doesn’t just get a weapon. It gets a shield. The IRGC and the Houthis could control the Strait of Hormuz (as well as the less often discussed Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Eritrea, connecting the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden), and forever dictate terms to ships with infinitely more certainty than their threats today are armed with. Hezbollah operates with nuclear cover. …
Worst of all, the conflict we have just seen to defang the regime suddenly becomes impossible. This is exactly why the ayatollahs wanted nuclear weapons in the first place. Then the axis of resistance, led by China and Russia, can hold the region to ransom and make any Western intervention in Ukraine, Taiwan or elsewhere even more difficult. …
Obama — whose side was he on?
The ayatollahs pursued a deliberate multi-track approach: building a regional proxy network of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, to name but a few, that made the cost of confrontation appear unbearable.
Then a stroke of unforgivable Western naïveté — Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This gave the Islamic Republic both international legitimacy and billions in sanctions relief, while tying Western hands. The JCPOA deliberately excluded both the missile programme and Tehran’s regional behaviour. Many of us warned at the time that Iran would use the breathing space to fund proxy operations and accelerate ballistic missile development. That is exactly what happened.
While the regime was playing a decades-long game of chess, Western capitals were obsessing over the press cycle for the next summit. …
Eurabia:
But with 46 million Muslims across the European continent, governments here that spent years courting those votes suddenly discovered they couldn’t behave robustly on Iran for fear of domestic violence and unrest. There have been at least 20 IRGC-linked plots foiled in Britain alone. German spooks have warned about Iranian attacks on Jewish institutions. French intelligence saw Iranian recruiters infiltrate the criminal underworld. Europe’s insane immigration problems have imported, along with the cultural issues and crime, the Iranian regime’s own enforcement arm.
The [UK] Government still refuses to proscribe the IRGC, hiding behind the legal distinction that it forms part of the Iranian state. Along with the refusal from either party to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, this is terror and cowardice from Britain’s legacy parties.
More evidence on Obama’s affiliation (by Sana Ebrahimi Ledene):
There used to be a rumor floating around among Iranians: that as part of the Nuclear Deal, Obama quietly handed out 3,500 green cards to regime officials and their families.
At the time I thought it sounded crazy.
But now with so many children of top regime figures, professors, researchers, lobbyists, comfortably living in the U.S. on green cards, it doesn’t sound like a rumor anymore. It actually feels real.
I came to America on a student visa. I had to go through an entire month of security clearances, background checks, interviews, the whole process. There’s zero chance these people got here through normal channels. No way.
A nuclear Iran could not be defanged, like North Korea. But Iran could also not be defanged if it had vastly more conventional missiles to rain down across the region. Starting recently, the Chinese were building those missiles, rapidly increasing the rate of Iranian missile production. This is presumably why the US acted now — a point the anti-Trump media has buried and would prefer you didn’t know.