Reservist IDF spokesman Doron Spielman challenged the suggestion that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme served civilian energy purposes on Piers Morgan Uncensored, arguing that the scale of Iran’s enrichment activity, which he placed at close to 90 percent purity far exceeded any conceivable civilian requirement and constituted, in practical terms, a weapons programme in everything but name.
Spielman made the argument in direct response to what he characterised as persistent attempts by critics of the military campaign to downplay the severity of Iran’s nuclear activities. He rejected the view — associated with the JCPOA framework and supported by various international bodies — that Iran’s nuclear programme could be managed through diplomatic constraint rather than military action, insisting that the evidence of intent was unambiguous and had been available for years to anyone willing to look at it honestly.
“Iran has already developed almost 90 percent enriched uranium, which is 20 times the amount you need for an atomic weapon,” Spielman stated. “Is that for civil uses?” He argued that the gap between the enrichment level required for civilian nuclear power — approximately 3 to 5 percent — and the level Iran had reached was so vast as to eliminate any innocent interpretation of the programme’s purpose.
The argument was central to Spielman’s broader case that the war was not a war of choice but a necessary preemptive action against a regime on the verge of crossing an irreversible threshold. He argued that the alternative to preemption was not peaceful coexistence with a nuclear-armed Iran but an eventual confrontation under far worse conditions — potentially involving an actual nuclear strike rather than a conventional military campaign.
Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan disputed both the figures and their significance, arguing that Iran’s enrichment levels had risen specifically as a consequence of the Israeli government and Trump administration’s destruction of the JCPOA. He noted that under the deal, Iran had been constrained to 3.67 percent enrichment with no pathway to weapons-grade material. The decision by Netanyahu and Trump to tear up that agreement, Hasan argued, had directly driven Iran to the enrichment levels now being cited as a justification for war.
He also cited the 2025 annual threat assessment of the US Director of National Intelligence, which stated that the United States continued to assess Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that supreme leader Khamenei had not reauthorised a weapons programme suspended in 2003. Hasan argued that the contrast between the US intelligence community’s formal assessment and the rhetorical claims being made by Israeli officials and their supporters illustrated the extent to which the public justification for the war had been constructed around contested — and in some cases contradicted — intelligence.