Iran's attack on Israel shines spotlight on Tehran's advancing nuclear weapons program

JERUSALEM — With all eyes focused on a brewing high-intensity war between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state of Tehran’s illicit nuclear weapons program has come under the microscope.

Iran’s sprawling aerial attack, with over 300 suicide drones and missiles, on Israel has raised pressing new questions about the Islamic Republic’s capability to fire a nuclear weapon at the Jewish state. For Israel, as the country’s former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said, Iran with an atomic weapon would mean a "nuclear Holocaust" for the Jewish state.

On Sunday, after rejecting calls that the Biden administration was too soft on Tehran, the White House National Security Communication spokesperson, John Kirby told Fox News' Shannon Bream that "Iran is so much dramatically closer to a potential nuclear weapon capability than they were before Mr. Trump was elected."

David Albright, a physicist who is the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital that "Iran would need a year or more to build a semi-reliable warhead for a ballistic missile and about two years to reconstitute the Amad Plan so as to be able to serially produce reliable warheads for ballistic missiles, i.e., have a fully developed nuclear weapons production complex."

Iran's regime pursued an atomic weapons program code named the Amad Plan from the late 1990s to early 2003.

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In February, Reuters exclusively reported that Iran had enriched uranium well beyond the need for commercial nuclear use. The IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told Reuters that while the pace of uranium enrichment had slowed slightly since the end of last year, Iran was