“Open confusion” reigned today at the State Department after spokeswoman Marie Harf tried to withdraw a quote from President Barack Obama regarding Iran’s nuclear breakout time, advocacy group The Israel Project said.

In the interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, the President acknowledged that, after year 13, the current deal being worked out with Iran would not provide the international community with the promised 1-year warning should Iran decide to violate the deal and go for a nuclear weapon.

The President said that, “in year 13, 14, 15″ of the deal, “they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero,” and that the assurances of a 1-year warning time would be available to the international community for “at least well over a decade. And then in years 13 and 14, it is possible that those breakout times would have been much shorter.”

The Israel Project noted that “under that scenario there will be no way to physically prevent them from building a nuclear weapon, and they would be able to go nuclear at will.”

In the State Department’s attempted response to queries about the President’s statement on Tuesday, Spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the President was talking about a hypothetical sscneario in which the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) had not been enacted.

Harf asserted that while the President’s words “were a little mixed up there,” he was in fact “referring to a scenario in which there was no deal,” adding that the President’s scenario was “more of a hypothetical, ‘well look, without a deal, this is what could possibly happen.’ He was not indicating what would happen under an agreement in those years.”

More here.