NEW YORK -- Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday continued his aggressive defense of the nuclear agreement recently reached with Iran. Pushing back against mounting criticism from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several pro-Israel lobbying groups in the U.S., Kerry framed the nuclear accord as a boon for Israeli national security.

"For Israel, for the region, we started with a two-month breakout time," Kerry said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the estimated amount of time it would take Iran to create enough fissile material to fuel a bomb.

"With this agreement, for ten years, the breakout time will be one year or more," he continued. "Let me ask you a very simple question: Is Israel safer with a one-year breakout time or a two-month breakout time?"

In a dig at Netanyahu's 2012 warning that Iran would have a nuclear weapons capability by the following year, Kerry challenged his critics to come up with a better way to curb Iran's nuclear program.

"We've seen the Prime Minister draw a cartoon of a bomb at the U.N. and so on and so forth," he said. "But what's happened? What has anyone done about it? Anybody got a plan to roll it back?"