Iran passes law to increase uranium enrichment, bar nuclear inspectors
Iran passed a law yesterday to immediately begin enriching uranium to a level closer to weapons grade and to suspend the access of international inspectors to its nuclear facilities if sanctions are not lifted by early February, shortly after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The law was the clearest fallout yet from the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, which Iranian officials have promised to avenge.
The law orders Iran’s atomic energy agency to begin enriching uranium to 20 per cent immediately, returning Iran’s enrichment programme to the level that existed before the 2015 nuclear agreement.
While converting the entire stockpile could take six months, the order to do so could be seen as a provocation in the waning days of the Trump administration. President Donald Trump, who made containing Iran a main foreign policy goal, has considered attacking Iran during his lame-duck period.
The law sets a two-month deadline for oil and banking sanctions against Iran to be lifted before barring inspectors, creating a potential crisis for the early days of the Biden administration. The timing seems intended to press Biden to reenter the nuclear deal with Iran immediately.
The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said the measure was meant to send the West a message in the aftermath of the assassination that the “one-way game is over”.
Iran’s parliament, dominated by conservatives, initially passed the law in an angry session on Wednesday in which lawmakers fumed over the killing of the scientist. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a high-ranking official in the Defence Ministry, was killed in an ambush last weekend that intelligence officials attributed to Israel.
President Hassan Rouhani had opposed the move, calling it counterproductive.
“The government does not agree with this legislation and considers it damaging for diplomacy,” he said yesterday before the law was ratified.
However his government is now obliged to carry it out.
The order to enrich uranium at 20 per cent would be a concern because it is considered to be close to the threshold of bomb-grade uranium, which can be as high as roughly 90 per cent. Iran has said its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, though Israeli officials and some American intelligence officials believe that Iran has a secret weapons programme.
Iran had limited its enrichment to under 4 per cent under the nuclear agreement, which the Trump administration abandoned in 2018.
The law indicated the higher enrichment depended on continued sanctions against Iran and demanded that European nations that are still party to the nuclear agreement provide relief from the US sanctions.
The law also calls for storing 120kg per year of uranium enriched to 20 per cent for “peaceful purposes”.
It was not immediately clear how long it would take Iran to reach 20 per cent enrichment, but David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said it could be done in as fast as six months.