The deal that President Donald J. Trump abandoned in 2018, limited Tehran’s ability to install new centrifuges and forced it to send 97 percent of its nuclear fuel abroad. Mr Biden’s refusal of Iran’s request to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the list of terrorist organizations, along with the flow of new revenue to Tehran as a result of today’s rising oil prices, contributed to the stalemate in the talks.
Iranians are now looking for new pressure points, including excavations at a mountain factory near Natanz. And last week, Iranian authorities turned off 27 cameras that gave inspectors an insight into Iran’s fuel production.
The decision to cut off the cameras that were installed as part of the nuclear deal was particularly worrying for Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN agency responsible for nuclear inspections. If the cameras remain off for weeks and it is impossible to trace the location of the nuclear materials, “I think that would be a fatal blow” to hopes of renewing the agreement, Mr Grossi said last week.
But this is much more than an inspection dispute. In the eyes of experts, Tehran has come to the point of what Robert Litvak, who wrote in detail about the Iranian program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scientists in Washington, called “a nuclear-threshold country whose uranium enrichment program creates an inherent option – hedging – for the production of nuclear weapons “, without actually taking the last step.
“Iran’s move to Natanz,” he said of the plant under construction, “increases pressure on the United States to reach a new deal, stressing the risk of a nuclear breakthrough if diplomacy fails.”
A tunnel complex appears on a mountain slope
For decades, a barren piece of land near Natanz has been at the center of Iran’s nuclear efforts. The country has always insisted that its underground “pilot plant” there works only for the production of nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes – the production of nuclear energy. Evidence, some of which was stolen from Israel from a warehouse in Tehran, suggests otherwise: that Iran has had plans for two decades to build a bomb if it concludes it is in its best interest.
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