Is President Trump Setting The Timer Ticking On War With Iran?

President Trump said on Monday that the United States would engage in “direct” negotiations with Iran next Saturday in a last-ditch effort to rein in the country’s nuclear

program, saying Tehran would be “in great danger” if it failed to reach an accord, reported the New York Times.

As President Donald Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in early March 2025, "We’re down to final strokes with Iran. . . we’re down to the final moments. Final moments. Can’t let them have a nuclear weapon…We have a situation with Iran that something’s going to happen very soon. . . "

Iran is almost certain to resist dismantling its entire nuclear infrastructure, which has given it a “threshold” capability to make the fuel for a bomb in a matter of weeks — and perhaps a full weapon in months. Many Iranians have begun to talk openly about the need for the country to build a weapon since it has proved fairly defenseless in a series of missile exchanges with Israel last year.

How close is Iran to a deliverable nuclear weapon?

How long that would take is a matter of dispute: The New York Times reported in early February that new intelligence indicated a secret team of Iranian scientists was exploring a faster, if cruder approach to developing an atomic weapon.

According to our friend, former CIA operator Clare Lopez, that puts Iran very close indeed.

As Ms. Lopez explained in a must-read op-ed for NewsMax, while the intelligence community has projected an air of studied calm, that could be interpreted as verging on indifference, the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program continues to grow, for example:

In December 2024, at a press conference at its Washington, D.C. office, the NCRI provided an update on the Iranian regime’s renewed focus and accelerated development of Exploding Bridge Wire Nuclear Detonators (EBWs), a key element in the development of an implosion type nuclear weapon.

Writing about this in a December 26, 2024 article for this writer's Newsmax.com blog site, I noted that the IAEA had focused the regime’s work on EBWs as far back as in its November 2011 Quarterly Report.

Then, at a Jan. 31, 2025 press briefing, Deputy Director of the NCRI, Alireza Jafarzadeh provided "alarming new information about Iran’s race to fit nuclear warheads to its arsenal of solid-fuel Ghaem-100 ballistic missiles," which I again wrote about at this writer's blog site on Newsmax.

What was especially alarming about this new information is that the work Tehran is conducting to adapt its nuclear warheads to the nosecones of its missiles is being done at two special sites outside of Tehran that are specifically ballistic missile sites.

The two sites, at Shahrud and Semnan, are under the overall authority of Iran’s Organization for Advanced Defence Research (SPND in the Farsi acronym), itself a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

These are alarming and accelerating developments in Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

However, there are some indications that, far from being indifferent, the United States is preparing to make good on President Trump’s prediction of “great danger” to the Islamic Republica’s survival.

As Ms. Lopez documented, according to Military Watch Magazine, in late March 2025, the U.S. Air Force deployed "at least seven B-2 strategic bombers to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, with satellite imagery showing that at least three C-17 cargo planes and 10 aerial refueling tankers" arrived there from March 23-25 2025.

It’s worth noting that the B-2 bomber is one of the only aircraft capable of carrying the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, which can penetrate the most hardened, deeply-buried sites.

If they are "layered" in successive precision bombing attacks, observed Ms. Lopez, they can reach fortified bunkers far underground.

Writing for the New York Times David E. Sanger and Farnaz Fassihi concluded that Iran is coming to the table at all seems to be a recognition of its vastly weakened state. Its nuclear facilities have never been this vulnerable. And in addition to striking Iran’s air defenses in October, Israel also destroyed the missile-production facilities where Iran mixes rocket fuel. So Iran’s ability to produce new missiles has been temporarily limited.

But it is entirely possible, nuclear experts say, that the maximum Iran feels it can give will come nowhere near the demand that Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, has talked about: the full dismantlement of its nuclear facilities.

That would mean an end to the Natanz nuclear enrichment site, which the United States and Israel attacked with the Stuxnet cyber weapon 15 years ago, and which Israel has episodically sabotaged since. It would mean destroying the Fordow enrichment site, deep under a mountain on a military base. And it would mean taking apart a range of other facilities, spread across the country, under the eye of international negotiators.

The Iranians have a decades-long record of stalling and postponing any commitment to end or reduce their nuclear weapons program. If Mr. Trump does not achieve full dismantlement at the negotiations this coming Saturday how much longer does Iran have before the assets marshalled at Diego Garcia come into play?

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