US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Iran is advancing its nuclear program in increasingly dangerous ways, and its malign activities in the region have also increased.

In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Blinken reiterated that the US policy remains preventing the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear bomb, noting that the 2015 agreement, JCPOA, had managed to “put Iran’s nuclear program in a box”.

Admitting that Iran is closer than ever to threshold capability to build atomic bombs, he said, “Iran is getting closer and closer to the point where they could produce on very, very short order enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon”.

He said that Washington is in this “challenging situation” due to “one of the worst decisions made in recent American foreign policy” that was walking away from the nuclear agreement, officially known as the JCPOA.

Blinken said “the best thing for our security and the security of our allies and partners in the region” is getting back to the JCPOA “in the weeks ahead – not months ahead, weeks ahead” since Iran is “making advances that will become increasingly hard to reverse because they’re learning things, they’re doing new things” without the constraints of the deal.

He repeated earlier statements that the US is lookingat other options if it can’t get back to mutual compliance in a few weeks.