UN's Nuclear Watchdog Says Iran Escalated Uranium Enrichment
Iran has escalated its uranium enrichment with advanced machines at its underground Fordow plant, the UN atomic watchdog, IAEA, said in a report on Saturday.
Iran has escalated its uranium enrichment with advanced machines at its underground Fordow plant, the UN atomic watchdog, IAEA, said in a report on Saturday.
Western diplomats have long expressed concern about devices this cascade, or cluster, of centrifuges is equipped with.
The use of these so-called modified sub-headers means Iran could switch more quickly and easily to enriching to higher purity levels.
Iran’s move came ten days after indirect talks with the United States in Doha with the mediation of the European Union failed. The US said that Tehran did not come to the meeting in a serious negotiating posture and had simply repeated “extraneous” demands.
While Iran is required to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency about such a switch, if it chose not to, it might escape detection for some time as there is currently a lag between Iran's enrichment and IAEA inspectors' verification of what is produced.
"On 7 July 2022, Iran informed the Agency that, on the same day, it had begun feeding the aforementioned cascade with UF6 enriched up to 5% U-235," the confidential report to IAEA member states said. Reuters reported on the development after seeing the IAEA report.
UF6 refers to uranium hexafluoride gas which is fed into centrifuges to be enriched.
In a report on June 20 also seen by Reuters, the IAEA said that months after Iran informed it of its intention to use the cascade, Iran had begun feeding UF6 into it for passivation, a process that comes before enrichment.
The IAEA verified on July 6 that passivation had ended, Saturday's report said.
"On 9 July 2022, the Agency verified that Iran had begun feeding UF6 enriched up to 5% U-235 into the cascade of 166 IR-6 centrifuges with modified sub-headers for the declared purpose of producing UF6 enriched up to 20% U-235," it said.
Iran is already enriching to up to 60% elsewhere, well above the up to 20% it produced before its 2015 deal with major powers that capped its enrichment level at 3.67% but still below the roughly 90% of weapons grade.
The move is the latest step of many to breach and move well beyond the restrictions which the 2015 deal imposed on Iran's nuclear activities. It comes as talks to revive that deal are at an impasse and Western powers have warned time is running out to reach an agreement.
An agreement was said to have been close in March, after 11 months of talks in Vienna, but the negotiations stopped and remained stalled. The agreement would have removed major US economic sanctions, but Iran insisted that sanctions not directly related to the nuclear dispute should also be removed. On major cluster of sanctions target the Revolutionary Guard, but these are related to its role in terrorism and regional destabilization.
The United States pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump, re-imposing sanctions against Tehran that the deal had lifted.
A year later, Iran began retaliating by breaching the deal's restrictions on the level of uranium enrichment. Tehran further escalated enrichment as Joe Biden won the US presidential election and embarked on talks with Iran and other JCPOA signatories to revive the agreement.
Now, Iran has accumulated enough 60-percent enriched uranium to be able to take the next step of enriching the fissile material to 90 percent purity needed for one nuclear bomb.
With reporting by Reuters
The spokesman for the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Relations Committee Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini says Iran's nuclear negotiators could have done better Doha.
Speaking to the centrist Entekhab news website in Tehran, Meshkini said the Iranian team's presence in Doha was uncalculated and that the team did not have a roadmap. He further charged that the Iranian Foreign Ministry lacks a roadmap about how to go about with the negotiations.
The United States' special representative for Iran Robert Malley has described the talks in Doha as "a waste of time" and said that Iranians first need negotiations among themselves. This comes while Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdolahian has characterized the negotiations in Doha as "positive".
Meshkini told Entekhab: "The Iranian Foreign Ministry still lacks a framework for the talks and does not know how to get concessions." He said that the Foreign Ministry needs "a deep transformation" without which the Islamic Republic will find it difficult and costly to pursue its strategy.
He added that developments in the region gave Iran the upper hand, but Tehran needs a roadmap to take advantage. On the other hand, Westerners are more experienced than Iranian negotiators and their moves are based on seeking concessions.
Meshkini concluded that the parliament should pass laws similar to the 2020 legislation that ordered the government to reduce its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal and push the government to come up with an authoritative roadmap for the talks.
Meanwhile, foreign policy commentator Amir Ali Abolfath told the conservative Nameh News website that those interested in solving the nuclear issue, including European officials, should go to Washington rather than to Tehran and try to convince the United States to return to the 2015 agreement, also called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Nameh News described the shuttle diplomacy by European and Persian Gulf officials who frequently visit Tehran to encourage Iran to return to direct talks with the United States as "useless shuttle diplomacy." However, the website acknowledged that perhaps the visits to Tehran by Qatari officials could be more fruitful.
"As long as Washington is not willing to return to the JCPOA, talking with Tehran is not likely to be effective. They come and go and take messages here and there and express hope in further developments. But the train of the negotiations is stuck and will not move forward," said Abolfath.
Eleven months of talks in Vienna were said to be close to a successful conclusion when diplomats ended the process over remaining differences between Washington and Tehran.
Since then, statements by both sides have indicated that Iran demands the lifting of all US sanctions imposed since May 2018 when former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed heavy economic penalties on Tehran.
Among these sanctions, the trickiest are those imposed on the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and its web of companies that are closely intertwined with its financial empire.
The IRGC is Iran’s primary military force, but it is also an intelligence organization that secretly supplies weapons and money to a host of non-state actors involved in terror activities in the region.
In a lecture delivered in Australia Tuesday, Grossi said that “challenging” diplomacy aimed at restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear was taking place in an “important” context.
“The lack of progress in verifying the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program may affect other countries’ decisions,” Grossi said at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Canberra. “We are now in a situation where Iran’s neighbors could start to fear the worst and plan accordingly. There are countries in the region today looking very carefully at what is happening with Iran, and tensions in the region are rising. Political leaders have on occasionally openly stated they would actively seek nuclear weapons if Iran were to pose a nuclear threat.”
Grossi did not elaborate. There have been intermittent, but unsubstantiated reports, that Saudi Arabia has an arrangement with Pakistan over an option of importing technology needed for nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia plans to operate two nuclear reactors for civil purposes by 2040. Like Tehran, Riyadh is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT).
Grossi said “a defining moment” was being reached for “global nuclear non-proliferation,” with continuing “tendencies towards proliferation” despite a “strong” international non-proliferation framework with 192 NPT signatories and 175 member states in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA director-general emphasized the importance of additional protocols, agreements reached with non-nuclear states giving greater inspections powers to the agency than required under the more limited NPT ‘safeguards’ arrangements. He argued that additional protocols developed by the 1990s reflected experience of Iraq, where a declared nuclear program in the 1980s hid an undeclared program that was “far from peaceful.”
Grossi also cited a lack of agency access in the nuclear programs of apartheid South Africa, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.
Iran – ‘periods of tension and cooperation’
Turning to Iran, Grossi surveyed 20 years of “countless interactions between the IAEA and Iran aimed at verifying that Iran’s nuclear program is purely peaceful.” He referred to “UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease all enrichment… times when Iran provisionally applied an additional protocol and times when it did not…[as well as] periods of cooperation and periods of tension.”
Grossi recalled the days of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which ended with United States withdrawal in 2018 and Iran in 2019 beginning to exceed JCPOA limits on its nuclear program.
“The IAEA was charged [under the JCPOA] with verifying that Iran respected the new restrictions on its nuclear program,” Grossi said. “Of great importance also was Iran’s acceptance once more of the additional protocol.”
‘Credible Information’
Iran ceased to apply the additional protocol in early 2021, leading to restrictions on IAEA inspectors’ access. A series of ad hoc arrangements reached by Grossi with Tehran did not prevent the IAEA chief from declaring in June that with the prevailing level of access he would within four weeks being unable to certify the peaceful nature of the Iran nuclear program.
In his speech Tuesday, Grossi also highlighted agency dissatisfaction at Iran’s explanation of uranium traces found at sites linked to work before 2003 in the face of “assembled credible information indicating a possible military dimension.” The IAEA board last month passed a resolution censuring Iran over its alleged failure to resolve these “longstanding safeguards issues.”
Grossi defended a return to the JCPOA in the face of last week’s failure by the US and Iran, meeting in Doha ‘proximity’ talks, to agree a path back to compliance. The IAEA chief said that after decades of work to combat proliferation “what remains constant is that the Agency is the ultimate guarantee of any agreement.” Without IAEA participation, he argued, “any agreement is unverifiable.”
“The American position has somewhat changed,” since talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal stopped in Vienna, Mohammad Marandi said in an interview published by the news website close to the Revolutionary Guard on Thursday [July 7].
Marandi, a US-born media advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, who was in Vienna during many rounds of talks since April 2021 until March this year, argued that “The Europeans and the Americans have high motivation for an agreement as we speak and insist to continue negotiations.”
After 11 months of talks in Vienna all sides were signaling in early March that an agreement was at hand, but suddenly two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine talks stopped without a positive outcome.
Since then, statements by both sides and by observers have indicated that Iran demands the lifting of all US sanctions imposed since May 2018 when former President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of action or JCPOA and began imposing heavy economic penalties on Tehran.
Among these sanctions, the trickiest are those imposed on the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and its web of companies that are closely intertwined with its financial empire.
The IRGC is Iran’s primary military force, but it is also and intelligence organization and has its extraterritorial unit, the Qods or Quds Force that secretly supplies weapons and money to a host of non-state actors involved in terror activities in the region.
Tehran argues that if the IRGC and its companies are not removed from US sanctions list, it will not be able to fully receive the economic benefits of a nuclear agreement. But Washington apparently regards this demand as “extraneous” to JCPOA because these sanctions are not related to Iran’s nuclear program, having been imposed for IRGC’s terror related activities.
Marandi also said that there is a difference in the negotiating positions of the European E3 – the United Kingdom, France and Germany – and the United States. “If the control of the talks were with the Europeans, an agreement would be reached, but the Americans face a lot of domestic opposition to making a deal with Iran, although they also need an agreement.”
Marandi went on to say that President Joe Biden is not popular and his political fortunes in the upcoming Congressional elections in November are not good, while opponents of the JCPOA are very vocal and assertive.
“We should not forget that during the Vienna talks two members of the American negotiating team resigned, because they felt that Iran had received a lot of concessions,” Marandi said, referring to the resignations of Richard Nephew and two other members of the US negotiating team in December over differences with chief negotiator Robert Malley over how far Washington should be willing to go in concessions to Tehran.
Marandi, however, underlined that the US and especially the Europeans need Iran’s oil in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion.
Asked why some in Iran are criticizing the negotiating team for having failed to make a deal with the West, Marandi said, “One group is influenced by Persian-language broadcasts [from abroad] by Western governments and their allies including the Saudi government and their cyber armies, and another group has political motives.”