WAS IRAN MONTHS AWAY FROM PRODUCING A NUCLEAR BOMB?

Israel has struck several nuclear facilities in Iran as part of a largescale air campaign that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said is necessary to "roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival".

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After the first wave of attacks on Friday damaged the Natanz uranium enrichment plant and assassinated leading nuclear scientists, Netanyahu said Israel had acted because "if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time".

"It could be a year. It could be within a few months," he warned.

Iran's Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Sunday that Israel had "crossed a new red line in international law" by attacking nuclear sites, and that Iran was launching missiles and drones at Israel in response. He also insisted that the Iranian nuclear programme was peaceful, and that his country's doctrine was "rooted in our belief in the prohibition and illegitimacy of nuclear weapons".Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, although it neither confirms nor denies this. Is there evidence Iran had a nuclear weapons programme? Netanyahu said Israel "struck at the heart of Iran's weaponization programme" when it targeted Natanz, and that the nuclear scientists it killed were "working on the Iranian bomb".The Israeli military said it had accumulated in recent months intelligence showing that "concrete progress" had been made "in the Iranian regime's efforts to produce weapons components adapted for a nuclear bomb", including a uranium metal core and a neutron source initiator for triggering the nuclear explosion.