Iran ups nuclear ante as talks on Vienna deal resume
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES » After a monthslong hiatus, Iran has returned to negotiations in Vienna aimed at reviving its cratered nuclear deal with world powers. But Tehran isn’t slowing down the advances in its atomic program, further raising the stakes in talks crucial to cooling years of tensions boiling in the wider Mideast.
The case in point? Iran’s underground nuclear facility in Fordo.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body charged with monitoring the Islamic Republic’s program, acknowledged Wednesday that Iran began feeding a cascade of 166 advanced IR-6 centrifuges with uranium there. The agency said Iran plans to enrich uranium there up to 20% purity — a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%.
Tehran’s diplomatic mission to Vienna sought to downplay the acknowledgement on Twitter as “an ordinary update in line with regular verification in Iran.” However, even in clinical language the announcement offers a stark contrast to what existed under the 2015 nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
The deal halted all enrichment at Fordo, which sits under a mountain near the holy Shiite city of Qom, some 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Tehran. The accord also called for Fordo to become a research-anddevelopment facility. The deal focused on Fordo because the site long has been a major point of contention for the West. It is about the size of a football field, large enough to house 3,000 centrifuges, but small and hardened enough to lead U.S. officials to suspect it had a military purpose when they exposed the site publicly in 2009.
Then-President Barack Obama, alongside France’s president and Britain’s prime minister, dramatically announced to the world Iran had built the site after years of tensions over Tehran’s program.
“As the international community knows, this is not the first time that Iran has concealed information about its nuclear program,” Obama said at the time.
Iran asserted Fordo’s secret construction came as part of its “sovereign right of safeguarding … sensitive nuclear facilities through various means” as it faced the threat of military attack. But burying the facility under some 80 meters (260 feet) of dirt and rock while not informing international inspectors as required only heightened Western concerns. U.S. intelligence agencies and international inspectors believe Iran had an organized nuclear weapons program until 2003.
Now, just days into the new negotiations in Vienna, Iran has acknowledged the higher enrichment there with advanced centrifuges also barred by the accord. It may be another hard-line negotiation tactic like the others embraced by the diplomatic team under new President Ebrahim Raisi.