Worrying discovery of Iran's nuclear activity could 'upend' US assessment of weapons capability: expert

US and Israeli officials will meet at the White House on Thursday to discuss Iran's nuclear program after intelligence agencies discovered information about Iran's capabilities, Axios reported Tuesday.

US and Israeli intelligence agencies have uncovered information about Iran's acquired computer modeling programs that could be used to help develop nuclear weapons. The purpose of the program remains unclear, with officials reportedly divided over whether it is benign or whether it represents further nuclear ambitions in Iran.

“For years now the intelligence community has assessed that Iran is not actively working to develop nuclear weapons, that it is building assembly lines for fissile material but we have had no indication of active weapons development. If true, it would ignore it. . assessment and suggests that Iran has a shorter runway for the bomb than previously reported,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Washington-based nonpartisan national security think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment on the Axios report, but they did not immediately respond.

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Goldberg, who served as director of Iranian weapons of mass destruction prevention for the White House National Security Council from 2019 to 2020, criticized President Biden's administration for rolling back former President Trump's “maximum pressure” policies. He argues that Iran is “building an assembly line in front of us” for the bomb.

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The Trump administration focused on limiting Iran's ability to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed for a bomb. Goldberg said Iran has secured that power under the Biden administration. Still, the process of making weapons takes time.

“The administration estimated it could be about 18 months while the Israelis said a year or less. But if the weapons are already under way, if the computer modeling is already perfected, that time frame could be even shorter,” Goldberg said.

The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday that its inspectors had verified that Iran had begun feeding uranium into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges. Its Natanz enrichment facility. Cascades are a group of centrifuges that spin together to enrich uranium gas more quickly.

So far, Iran is enriching uranium to 2% purity in those cascades. Iran has already enriched uranium to 60%, a short, technical step away from the weapons-grade level of 90%.

Iran plans to install 18 IR-2m centrifuges at Natanz and a cascade of eight IR-6 centrifuges at its Fordow nuclear site. Each centrifuge in this class enriches uranium faster than Iran's baseline IR-1 centrifuge, which remains the workhorse of the country's nuclear program.

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Earlier this week, a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “The United States continues to have deep concerns about Iran's nuclear program, as we have made clear to the IAEA for many years and continue today. Iran's record speaks for itself. Continued failure to demonstrate that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.”