Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations has drawn a lot less attention than it deserved. It’s doubly unfortunate that most of that attention has come from people who ignored the entire speech except to make fun of Netanyahu for using a cartoonish bomb drawing to illustrate where a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear weapons development must be drawn.
Netanyahu’s speech was apparently intended to garner international support for a clear limitation — that red line — on Iran’s nuclear weapons program before it progressed past the point where it could be stopped with military action. To show where the red line should be drawn, he explained the four stages in Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Three involve uranium enrichment, to low, medium and high levels. Iran has completed the first stage of uranium enrichment and is about 70 percent of the way to the second stage. The third stage, producing the highly enriched uranium that is the fissile material in a weapon, would take only a few months or even weeks to complete.
