Iran ups uranium enrichment level

Deadline expires for Europe to offer new terms to nuclear deal

Iran announced late yesterday it will raise its enrichment of uranium, breaking another limit of its unravelling 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and further heightening tensions between Tehran and the US.

Government spokesman Ali Rabiei told a news conference that Iran will go beyond the limit of 3.67 per cent enrichment and the new percentage “will be based on our needs”.

The spokesman for Iran’s nuclear department, Behrouz Kamalvandi, said last night technical preparations for the new level of enrichment would be completed “within several hours and enrichment over 3.67 per cent will begin”. He said monitoring would show the increased level imminently.

Earlier, a top aide to Iran’s supreme leader had warned the Islamic Republic was ready to increase the level, just before a deadline it set overnight (NZ time) for Europe to offer new terms to the accord.

A video message by Ali Akbar Velayati included him saying that “Americans directly and Europeans indirectly

violated the deal”.

European parties to the deal have yet to offer a way for Iran to avoid the sweeping economic sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump since he pulled the US out of the accord a year ago, especially those targeting its crucial oil sales.

Velayati said increasing enrichment closer to weapons-grade levels was “unanimously agreed upon by every component of the establishment”.

“We will show reaction exponentially as much as they violate it. We reduce our commitments as much as they reduce it,” said Velayati, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s adviser on international affairs.

“If they go back to fulfilling their commitments, we will do so as well.”

Under the atomic accord, Iran agreed to enrich uranium to no more than 3.67 per cent — far below weaponsgrade levels of 90 per cent. Iran denies it seeks nuclear weapons, but the nuclear deal sought to prevent that as a possibility by limiting enrichment and Iran’s stockpile of uranium to 300kg.

Last week, Iran and UN inspectors acknowledged it had broken the stockpile limit.

“This would be a very worrisome step,” said Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ James Marin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.