There is only one way to block the Iranians from building a nuclear bomb, according to former ambassador John Bolton: Bomb them first.

“The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program,” Bolton wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times on Thursday. “Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure.”

The “inconvenient truth,” Bolton insists, is that “only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”

Such an attack would not need to destroy Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure, but instead, Bolton said, would break key links in the nuclear fuel cycle and set back Iran’s program by at least three to five years.