Iran steps further from nuclear deal
Iran announced plans on Wednesday to reactivate its most sensitive nuclear production site — a deep, underground uranium enrichment center — in a step that dismantles more of the last major restrictions on the country under the 2015 nuclear deal.
The facility, known as Fordow, buried under a mountain to protect against bunker-busting weapons, lay hidden from inspectors for years. The revelation of its existence a decade ago touched off a crisis with the
West that led to threats from Israel to destroy the facility.
The atmosphere created by the revelation led, six years later, to the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. Under that deal, in exchange for the lifting of Western economic sanctions, Iran agreed that no fissile material — the makings of bomb fuel — would be put in the centrifuges spinning at the site.
In a speech Tuesday, however, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said that his patience had run out and that Iran would begin to inject uranium gas into the more than 1,000 centrifuges that remained inside the mountain. But he made it clear that this step was part of a pressure campaign to force Europe to make good on its promises to compensate Iran for the cost of harsh sanctions that the U.S. imposed on Iran after President Donald Trump abandoned the 2015 deal.
Mr. Rouhani said Iran was reactivating Fordow, which is adjacent to an Iranian military base, precisely because it was considered such a hard military target. Its renewal as a nuclear production site, he suggested, could be easily reversed — part of the carefully calibrated strategy Iran is pursuing to pressure the U.S. and its allies just as the American-led sanctions on Iran’s oil shipments are intended to pressure Tehran.
“We know how sensitive they are to the Fordow facility,” Mr. Rouhani said. But he made clear that he regarded Fordow as a bargaining chip, saying that when the U.S. begins “living up to their commitments” to suspend sanctions if Iran complies with the deal, “then we will stop feeding gas to the centrifuges.”
It was the third time in six months that Mr. Rouhani had announced a careful series of escalations of Iran’s nuclear capacity. On Monday, Iran said it was already producing enriched uranium at an ever-faster pace at its primary nuclear enrichment center at Natanz. In recent weeks, it has also discussed rebuilding a plutonium reactor that was disabled under the agreement before it ever went into operation. That process is likely to take years.
None of these steps immediately gets Iran the makings of a bomb. But taken together, they create the condition that the threeyearlong negotiating process was intended to stop, at least for a while: Iran’s ability to develop the material for a bomb in a year.