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 on 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 United States imposed on Iran after President 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 United States 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 told the country in a speech about why Iran would no longer abide by an agreement that Mr. Trump has abandoned. But he made clear that he regarded Fordow as a mere bargaining chip, saying that when the United States begins “living up to their commitments” to suspend sanctions while Iran was in compliance with the deal, “then we will stop feeding gas to the centrifuges.”
The State Department criticized Mr. Rouhani’s actions on Tuesday. “Iran has no credible reason to expand its uranium enrichment program, at the Fordow facility or elsewhere,” it said in a statement, “other than a clear attempt at nuclear extortion that will only deepen its political and economic isolation.”
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 three-year-long negotiating process was intended to stop, at least for a while: Iran’s ability to develop the material for a bomb in a year. President Trump’s complaint with the Iran accord was that key restrictions expired by 2030, but the net result of the recent announcements is that those restrictions are largely being thrown out now.
The potential for an Iranian “breakout,” producing fuel for a nuclear weapon within three months, was why Mr. Trump’s top advisers in his first year in office — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — all urged him to remain in the deal, but press to extend its duration and expand its scope to include Iran’s missile production. Mr. Trump eventually discarded that advice and, over time, all three of those advisers.
The exact details of Iran’s move were difficult to discern. Mr. Rouhani talked about injecting the gas into 1,044 centrifuges at the Fordow nuclear facility, a major step toward uranium enrichment. The 2015 agreement had restricted the centrifuges to non-nuclear uses.
But Mr. Rouhani stopped short of saying that actual enrichment would follow at Fordow, though it is already underway at the larger Natanz facility. Enrichment moves Iran closer to being able to build a nuclear weapon, though it has denied harboring such ambitions.
The announcement came a day after Iran said it had doubled the number of more advanced centrifuges operating at Natanz, and planned to install even more efficient centrifuges.
While Mr. Rouhani portrayed the announcement on Tuesday — as well as three previous steps it had taken beyond the deal’s limits — as reversible, Iran has made clear that it would step back only if the European signatories to the deal find a way to relieve the economic pressure caused by the American sanctions.
“Resistance lays the ground for negotiation, and negotiation takes advantage of resistance,” Mr. Rouhani said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
Fordow was of deep concern to the United States and Israel because it was unclear they could destroy it in a conflict with Iran. The United States conducted secret operations to simulate what it would take to collapse the mountain outside the holy city of Qum, using the largest bunker-busting bomb in its arsenal. The commanders concluded that they could destroy it but that the site would have to be attacked repeatedly.
In the negotiations in 2015, the Obama administration sought, and failed, to close the facility entirely. One American negotiator conceded that leaving it in place was a “bitter pill.” An eventual compromise allowed the centrifuges at the facility to remain in use on the condition that gas was not injected into them.
With the steps taken in recent weeks, Iran might be able to produce enough fuel for a single nuclear bomb in under a year, according to some analysts, but it was not immediately clear how the announcement on Tuesday would change the equation.
Sanam Vakil, a research fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program, said that the Iranian authorities had remained “relatively calibrated” with the announcement on Tuesday.
“Iran is pushing the red lines, as part of its own maximum pressure campaign to reverse Europe’s position,” she said. “But Iran could have done more and they’re not. This is still one of those steps that Iran can reverse.”
The American sanctions, which Mr. Rouhani described Monday as “wrong, cruel and illegal,” delivered a blow to an already fragile Iranian economy, and the Iranian government has responded with what is effectively a two-track strategy — rebuilding its capability while insisting that Europe make up for the economic losses caused by American sanctions.
Mr. Rouhani, who said the work at Fordow would be carried out under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, expressed a willingness to restart nuclear talks if Washington returns to the deal and removes the sanctions.
“We should be able to sell our oil,” Mr. Rouhani said, according to The Associated Press. “We should be able to bring our money” into the country.
Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said the union was “concerned” about the announcement, urging Iran to reverse earlier breaches of the nuclear deal and to refrain from any further moves that would undermine it.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that Russia would like to see the nuclear deal remain in force, but he also expressed sympathy for Iran, citing the “unprecedented and illegitimate sanctions” against it.
The United States recently extended a waiver from sanctions for foreign companies, including Russia’s state-run nuclear company, Rosatom, to continue work at the Fordow site, but Moscow does not expect the developments on Tuesday to affect its role there.
Elian Peltier and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.
Source : Nytimes
