Iran is in a position to make a nuclear bomb, but the country has not decided whether to develop an atom bomb or not.
Kamal Kharrazi, adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told media a day after US President Joe Biden ended his four-day visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Kharrazi’s comments were a rare suggestion that Iran might have an interest in nuclear weapons, which it has long denied seeking, Al-Jazeera reported today.
“In a few days we were able to enrich uranium up to 60% and we can easily produce 90% enriched uranium. Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one,” Kharrazi said.
Iran is already enriching to up to 60 per cent, far above a cap of 3.67pc under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Uranium enriched to 90pc is suitable for a nuclear bomb.
In 2018, former US President Donald Trump discarded the nuclear pact, wherein Iran curbed its uranium enrichment work, a potential pathway to nuclear weapons, in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.
In reaction to Washington’s withdrawal and its reimposition of harsh sanctions, Tehran started violating the pact’s nuclear restrictions.
Last year, Iran’s intelligence minister said Western pressure could push Tehran to seek nuclear weapons, the development of which Khamenei banned in a fatwa, or religious decree, in the early 2000s.
Iran says it is refining uranium only for civilian energy uses, and has said its breaches of the international deal are reversible if the United States lifts sanctions and rejoins the agreement.
The broad outline of a revived deal was essentially agreed in March after 11 months of indirect talks between Tehran and Biden’s administration in Vienna.
But talks then broke down over obstacles, including Tehran’s demand that Washington should give guarantees that no US president will abandon the deal, the same way Trump did.
Biden cannot promise this because the nuclear deal is a non-binding political understanding, not a legally-binding treaty.
