MIT professor Theodore Postol claims Iran already has enough material for 10 to 11 nuclear weapons and warns any nuclear escalation could trigger mass destruction across the region.
The Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran. File photo: Reuters via ANI
MIT professor Theodore Postol, a longtime national security expert who has also advised the Pentagon, has issued a stark warning on Iran’s nuclear capability, claiming Tehran already has enough material for 10 to 11 nuclear weapons and could assemble them in a matter of weeks if it chose to do so.
Speaking in an interview on Glenn Diesen’s YouTube channel, Postol said the bigger danger is not just what Iran may already possess, but how badly its capabilities may have been underestimated. He argued that Iran’s missile, drone and nuclear potential has not been fully understood by the United States and Israel, and warned that any Israeli nuclear strike on Iran could trigger a catastrophic response.
Advertisement
Postol’s most striking assertion came early in the discussion, when he said Iran already has the material needed to move quickly towards a bomb. “They can make 11 atomic bombs with this material,” he said, referring to Iran’s stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium hexafluoride. He also said Iran was “already a nuclear threshold state”.
Advertisement
He argued that Iran does not need a vast visible facility to complete the final steps. According to Postol, the process of enriching uranium further, converting it into metal and assembling a working device could be done in relatively small underground spaces. He said such a weapon would not necessarily need testing before use.
“I do not need to test this weapon. This weapon never needs to be tested before I use it,” Postol said, while drawing a comparison with the Hiroshima bomb, which he noted was used without a prior full test of that specific design.
Postol said Iran already has the ingredients to move from threshold capability to an actual weapon in a short period if it decides to do so. “Yes, they do,” he said when asked if Iran likely had the nuclear material to build at least 10 weapons.
He went further, arguing that Tehran may not even need to openly develop a formal nuclear deterrent at this stage. “They don’t even need to develop a nuclear deterrent. All they have these materials,” he said.
Postol claimed Iran’s existing stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium hexafluoride was enough to produce several bombs once enriched further and converted into metal. He said Iran had 408 kilograms of the material, adding that “they have 11, if you do a more careful arithmetic”.
He also said the equipment required for the final stages could fit inside tunnels and other concealed locations. “A few hundreds of square meters of floor space is all you need,” he said, arguing that such work would not require a major above-ground facility.
According to Postol, one centrifuge cascade could take four or five weeks to enrich enough material to 90 per cent, but the timeline could shrink if Iran had multiple cascades operating at once. “If I have two or three of these cascades, I could do it in a few weeks,” he said.
He added that the West no longer has full visibility into Iran’s centrifuge construction after the earlier agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear activity broke down. Postol blamed both Donald Trump and Joe Biden for that outcome, saying Washington lost the ability to monitor crucial parts of Iran’s programme after the deal was not restored.
In one of his sharpest political comments, Postol said, “Biden deserves a large amount of the negative credit for this disaster having occurred. It’s not simply Trump.”
He also took aim at the wider US national security establishment, saying policymakers had mishandled the issue and failed to grasp the consequences of losing oversight of Iran’s enrichment capability.
The MIT expert also devoted a large part of the discussion to what he said could happen if Israel ever used nuclear weapons against Iran. His argument was that even if Iran has not yet assembled completed nuclear bombs, it could still respond after an attack because it already has the material, the know-how and, in his view, likely hidden equipment.
“An Israeli nuclear attack on Iran can be retaliated against,” Postol said. “The Iranians will be able to do it even if they have not yet built nuclear weapons.”
He said that the delay would make little difference in strategic terms. “Getting destroyed two or three weeks later is no different in the end from an immediate response,” he said.
Postol’s description of such a scenario was grim and detailed. He argued that even lower-yield nuclear weapons could unleash urban firestorms, devastating blast damage, lethal radiation exposure and radioactive rain, producing casualties on a massive scale in cities like Tel Aviv.
“Don’t do it. Don’t use nuclear weapons against Iran because there will be death and destruction on the scale of millions of people on all sides,” he said.
Towards the end of the interview, Postol argued that from the point of view of Israel and the United States, the war had already been lost in strategic terms. “I think the war from the point of view of the Israelis and the Americans has already been lost,” he said.
He said Israel could still survive as a state, but only if it abandoned what he portrayed as a reckless approach and moved towards a more credible diplomatic posture with Iran. He argued that Israel needed to accept Iran’s right to exist and stop operating through deception and surprise attacks.
Postol also claimed public sentiment in the United States had shifted sharply. He said many Americans, including American Jews, were no longer willing to be drawn into another war on Israel’s behalf and suggested Israel could not assume the same level of support in future that it had once enjoyed.
“The economy of Israel is a shambles,” he said, adding that Americans were increasingly “fed up with Israel”.
The interview, taken as a whole, offered one of Postol’s bluntest warnings yet. His central message was clear: Iran, in his assessment, may already be far closer to usable nuclear capability than many governments are willing to admit, and any move towards nuclear escalation in the region could end in mass destruction.
Advertisement
