While uranium enriched to 60% is not usable, Iran's nuclear program is approaching the 90% threshold required to produce nuclear weapons. With its current stockpile, Iran could be capable of producing "more than nine" bombs, the European troika (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) told the IAEA Board of Governors on Thursday, June 12.
According to European diplomats, there is no doubt that "Iran has continued its nuclear escalation unabatedly, even further beyond any credible civilian justification."
That being said, it remains very difficult to know how much time Tehran would still need to acquire the bomb. According to Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, who spoke to
Le Monde, the estimated timeline, prior to the Israeli attack, was "a year or a few months." However, he added some nuance: "Iran has been a few months away from the nuclear bomb for 15 years."
Objectively assessing Tehran's potential to acquire the bomb is all the more complex because the regime deliberately maintains a degree of opacity.
In its June 2025 report, the IAEA denounced maneuvers aimed at preventing it from conducting its "verification activities" on site, or the inability to "provide (…) technically credible explanations for the presence of uranium particles (…) at several undeclared locations." The agency mentioned a series of "concealment efforts," notably "extensive sanitization" and the "provision of inaccurate explanations" by authorities, preventing the IAEA from having "assurance that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful."
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