WarSclerotic

Panetta: Iran could produce a nu… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Iran would be able to produce a nuclear bomb within a year, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said during an interview with CBS News Sunday night.

“The consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb and then possibly another one to two years in order to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort in order to deliver that weapon,” Panetta said.

Reiterating the US position on Iranian weapons – expressed in a previous CBS interview a month earlier – Panetta asserted that the United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, and will take “whatever necessary steps to stop it.”

“That’s a red line for us,” he said. “And it’s a red line obviously for the Israelis so we share a common goal here. If we have to do it, we will do it.”

“If they proceed and we get intelligence that they’re proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it,” he continued.

When questioned as to whether this included military steps, Panetta repeated a refrain used constantly by both US and Israeli leaders: “There are no options off the table.”

This entry was posted on January 30, 2012 at 9:31 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.