US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that his country’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal was “one of the biggest mistakes” by Washington in recent years.

According to The Iran Project, Blinken made the comment on Friday in reference to the Trump administration’s pullout in 2018 from the Iran deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Tehran and world powers clinched three years earlier to put restrictions on Iranian nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.

"One of the biggest mistakes that we’ve made in recent years, was throwing out that agreement and allowing Iran to get out of the box that we put it in," the top US diplomat said at the Aspen Security Forum, according to DPA.

He argued that the withdrawal has decreased the breakout time – the amount of time American officials refer to as the time Iran needs to produce material for a nuclear weapon – from “at least a year” to “probably one or two weeks”.

“They haven’t produced a weapon itself”, Blinken said, but their breakout time “is now probably one or two weeks.”

Blinken said that when the Biden administration took office, they tried to pursue again nuclear diplomacy with Iran, “because if you could at least take one problem off the board, that’s inherently a good thing.”

The comments by the top US diplomat comes as Iran has time and again said that nuclear weapons have no place in its nuclear doctrine and that it will never produce such weapons based on a religious decree by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

Iran also maintains that its nuclear program remains solely for peaceful purposes as it needs nuclear technology to meet domestic needs.