Iran ramps up nuclear program, offers path to ease U. S. tensions

Foreign minister: “This needs no negotiations”

WASHINGTON » Days after President Donald Trump asked for options to take military action against Iran’s major nuclear site, the government in Tehran has sent conflicting signals, taking a major step to speed its production of nuclear fuel while also offering President- elect Joe Biden a way to defuse a confrontation.

On Wednesday, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iranian engineers had, for the first time, begun to put uranium into next- generation centrifuges that can enrich fuel faster than before. That move is explicitly prohibited in the 2015 nuclear accord, which Trump abandoned 2 ½ years ago.

When the agency issued a report last week noting that the high- speed centrifuges had been moved into the Natanz production site, “they had not started operations,” said Rafael Grossi, the leader of the inspection agency. “It is now happening.”

The move is something akin to waving a red flag in the faces of Trump and the Israelis.

But the provocation coincided with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, appearing to offer Biden a path for returning both sides to where they were when Biden left the vice presidency in January 2017.

In a video interview with an Iranian newspaper broadcast on Tuesday, Zarif described a way for the United States to recommit to United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iran, in return for an Iranian return to the limits imposed by the 2015 nuclear agreement.

“This needs no negotiations and needs no conditions,” Zarif said, but he offered few other details.

Zarif appeared to be offering to roll back the advances Iran has made over the past year, during which it has exceeded the production limits in the 2015 accord twelvefold.

Biden, in return, would have to issue an order ending all of the nuclear- related sanctions imposed by Trump.

But other Iranian officials have stopped short of saying they actually would reenter the nuclear deal as negotiated, and some officials have said the United States would have to pay reparations for oil sales lost because of Trump’s decision to reimpose sanctions.

That would be nearly impossible, as a political matter, for Biden.