Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani announced Tuesday that the country will break, yet again, with the 2015 anti-nuclear proliferation deal it inked with the Obama Administration, and begin injecting uranium gas into 1,400 centrifuges — the first step to refining uranium for nuclear weapons.
Fox News reports that Rouhani did not say where the centrifuges are located or whether those centrifuges have been in operation before Tuesday. It is believed they are part of Iran’s Fordo nuclear energy complex, and that the centrifuges won’t be used to provide power, as Iran has repeatedly claimed.
“His remarks,” Fox News says, were “carried live on Iranian state television … a day after Tehran’s nuclear program chief said the country had doubled the number of advanced IR-6 centrifuges in operation.”
“Iran’s mission to the IAEA said, in a letter afterwards, that they would use UF6, or uranium hexafluoride, allowing the facility to produce enriched uranium, which can fuel nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons,” ABC News added.
Iran plans to flip the switch on injecting uranium gas into the centrifuges on Wednesday, giving Europen nations, who remain part of the 2015 deal, just over 24 hours to come up with a way to prevent the change. Iran suggested that European nations try to reason with the United States and force the Trump Administration to drop sanctions on Iranian oil, which the country says is choking off its economy.
“We know their sensitivity with regard to Fordo. With regard to these centrifuges, we know,” Rouhani said, implying that the situation could be remedied.
The European countries involved have not yet put foward a plan in response to Iran’s ransom threat. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear weapons watchdog, hasn’t weighed in. The last time the IAEA made any statement on Iran, it told the international community that Iran was complying with the 2015 agreement, though that determination remains in question.
President Donald Trump abandoned the Obama Administration’s Iran nuclear deal late last year, dropping the United States’ involvement in keeping Iran from refining uranium and obtaining nuclear weapons. The 2015 plan saw Iran promise to halt its uranium enrichment program and call off its pursuit of more nuclear weapons in return for the United States and the EU terminating sanctions.
The deal was in trouble before it was inked, though, according to the Atlantic, which called the deal “strategically and morally absurd” and lamented the Obama Administration’s “wishful thinking,” particularly its clearly mistaken belief that Iran’s government had somehow westernized since the Carter Administration and that its mullahs were seeking nuclear technology simply to improve the country’s electric grid.
The deal allowed Iran to continue to develop advanced centrifuges, on the promise that they would use that infrastructure for good, not nuclear proliferation, for a maximum of ten years (Iran was free, according to the provisions of the deal, to drop their compliance as early as 2025. At that point, the Defense Department estimated back in 2015, Iran could have a nuclear weapon in less than 18 months.
President Donald Trump got straight to that point in his speech announcing an end to the Iran deal last year, calling it “a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made” and “defective at its core.”