CIA chief: Iran has never resumed its nuclear weapons program

The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, has said that "Tehran has never resumed the nuclear weapons program".

"Our best intelligence judgment is that the Iranians have not resumed the weaponization effort that they had underway up until 2004 and then suspended, so that's something; obviously, we at CIA and across the US intelligence community keep a very, very sharp focus on," the CIA Director said during the Aspen Security Forum celebrated in Colorado on July 20, according to Kommersant.

Reports have indicated that Burns explained the same last December at the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO Council even though the Biden administration and several top U.S. officials couldn't help to continue saying that Iran has been nearing a "breakout," which would mean that it would be capable of producing a nuclear bomb in weeks.

Israeli officials believe Iran could be weeks away from enriching uranium to a level sufficient for building a nuclear weapon. The amount of uranium Iran has already enriched to 20 per cent purity is critical, because when it reaches a certain threshold – known as "the significant quantity" – that stockpile can rapidly be enriched to the 90 per cent purity needed for a nuclear weapon. Iran possessing a stockpile of 220 kilograms of 20-percent enriched uranium would mean it had reached said quantity.