Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivered a stark warning Wednesday that Iran is now “frighteningly close” to obtaining weapons-grade uranium, underscoring just how volatile the nuclear standoff has become as President Trump pushes aggressively to force Tehran into surrendering its enriched stockpile.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wright said Iran’s current uranium reserves place the regime only weeks away from crossing the most dangerous threshold in the nuclear process.
“They are a small number of weeks away to enrich that to weapons-grade uranium,” Wright told lawmakers. “There’s still a weaponization process that happens after that, but they’re quite close.”
That assessment aligns with mounting concerns inside the Trump administration that Iran’s nuclear program has accelerated despite repeated military strikes, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure over the past year.
Special envoy Steve Witkoff previously revealed that Iran possesses enough uranium enriched to 60 percent purity to potentially produce 11 nuclear bombs if further refined to 90 percent — the level considered weapons-grade.
And here’s the part that keeps nuclear experts awake at night: once a country reaches 60 percent enrichment, the hardest technical part of the process is largely complete.
Getting from natural uranium to 60 percent is extraordinarily difficult. Moving from 60 percent to 90 percent is comparatively much easier and significantly faster.
Iran is currently believed to possess roughly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity.
“The Islamic Republic is only weeks away from making it weapons-grade,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said during the hearing, with Wright agreeing directly.
But the situation is even larger than the headline-grabbing 60 percent stockpile. Iran also reportedly possesses another 11 tons of uranium enriched to 20 percent — material that could eventually be processed further if the regime chose to continue advancing its program.
“They have some 20% enriched uranium, and that’s several more weeks behind the 60%,” Wright explained. “When you’re at 60%, you are way closer to 90% of the way there for the enrichment necessary for weapons-grade uranium.”
“It’s very concerning.”
That concern is driving Trump’s increasingly uncompromising stance on Iran’s nuclear material. The president has repeatedly insisted the United States will obtain Iran’s enriched uranium “one way or another,” though he has often left vague whether he means only the 60 percent stockpile or the regime’s entire nuclear inventory.
According to recent reports, U.S. negotiators are demanding Tehran surrender all enriched nuclear material as part of any permanent settlement.
Iran has so far resisted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly offered to help retrieve deeply buried uranium stored at sites damaged by U.S. and Israeli strikes if Iran agreed to relinquish the material, but negotiations remain highly unstable.
Trump claimed earlier this week that Iranian negotiators privately indicated they would eventually hand over what he jokingly called the “nuclear dust” before reversing course publicly and issuing a far more confrontational peace proposal demanding recognition of Iran as the victor in the conflict without nuclear concessions.
“They said, ‘You’re going to have to take it,’” Trump told reporters Monday. “The site was so obliterated that there’s only one or two countries in the world that could get it.”
The military dimension hanging over all of this is enormous. The United States and Israel previously struck Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer and later again during Operation Epic Fury. Since then, American surveillance has closely monitored the damaged sites through satellites and intelligence assets amid fears Iran could attempt to recover or relocate nuclear material.
At one point this year, Trump reportedly considered an extraordinarily risky ground operation involving U.S. troops entering Iranian territory to physically recover enriched uranium buried deep underground. Such a mission would have exposed American forces to both combat risks and potential radiation hazards inside hostile territory.
For now, diplomacy remains the preferred path — barely.
Negotiations between Washington and Tehran are currently being mediated through Pakistan, though Trump recently rejected Iran’s latest proposal as “unacceptable” and warned the fragile cease-fire remains on “massive life support.”
“They’ll either do the right thing, or we’ll finish the job,” Trump said Tuesday.
Vice President JD Vance offered a cautiously optimistic update Wednesday, saying negotiators have made “a lot of progress” but emphasizing that the president’s core demand has not changed.
“The red line is very simple,” Vance said. “He needs to feel confident that we’ve put a number of protections in place such that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
That sentence ultimately captures the entire tension surrounding the negotiations right now. Iran insists it has a right to nuclear development. The Trump administration believes Tehran is racing toward a bomb under cover of diplomacy. And sitting in the middle is a rapidly shrinking timeline measured not in years anymore — but potentially in weeks.
