On Sunday, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, told that state-run press that Iran has the power to begin enriching uranium – needed to create nuclear weapons – to 20% within just four days of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei giving the order.
This statement has backed up the claims that the Trump administration and the Iranian Resistance have been making for months: that Iran never fully disclosed the extent of its nuclear work and that they had never really given the programme up.
One Republican foreign policy adviser who is close to the White House said:”This is exactly what President Trump means when he says the Iran deal is the worst agreement ever negotiated.”
It comes as the Trump administration continues to press European allies for additional restrictions on Iran’s nuclear research, as well as its illicit ballistic missile programme, which was recently used to supply the terrorist Houthis with ballistic missiles fired at Saudi Arabia, according to the UN.
Another one of those flaws is insufficient inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, as cited by Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser and expert on rogue regimes, who noted that Iran operates many secret sites which may be used for nuclear research.
These comments are supposed to “warn” the US and the other signatories to the nuclear deal against making changes to the deal, which at present largely benefit Iran and no other country.
Salehi said: “Iran can even show more extensive progress in other parts of its nuclear activities to go beyond the previous levels.”
Some have even threatened that Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities can now go further than they could before the deal.
In 2017, Iranian atomic official Behrouz Kamalvandi said that Iran’s nuclear programme could “soar” if they wanted it to, which would probably invite the revamp of the Arak heavy water facility.
Nuclear expert Mark Dubowitz believes that these threats expose massive flaws in the Iran deal that the Trump administration wants to address.
Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think-tank, said: “[Iran’s] threats confirm that the Iranian regime never gave up on its atomic weapon ambitions. [The nuclear deal, aka the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA] merely hit the pause button temporarily on those aspects of Iran’s nuclear program that it had already perfected — and, as [Salehi’s] threats underscore, could be easily restarted—while leaving Tehran with the time and space to develop technologies that it hadn’t perfected such as advanced centrifuges and missiles. His threats reveal what many deal skeptics have long argued: unless the JCPOA is fixed, Iran has pathways to dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking US forces, US allies, and eventually the US homeland.”
Those close to the Trump administration said that if Iran did take this route, they should be prepared to force the full weight of the Trump administration.
