Iran announced Tuesday it would resume operating centrifuges at its landmark underground nuclear facility, taking the most provocative step so far in its strategy of slowly violating the 2015 nuclear agreement in protest at US sanctions.
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, said his country would begin injecting gas into 1,044 centrifuges at Fordow, a nuclear centre carved into a mountain which has long worried Western and Israeli officials as a potential site for bomb development.
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The nuclear agreement forbids any uranium enrichment at Fordow, which Iran kept hidden from the world until 2009. Mr Rouhani acknowledged the move was likely to cause alarm but said Iran would reverse it if the deal’s other signatories complied with the agreement.
“We know their sensitivity with regard to Fordow,” he said. “But at the same time when they uphold their commitments we will cut off the gas again.”
It was not immediately clear if Iran was resuming uranium enrichment at Fordow or merely injecting gas back into the centrifuges. Both steps would be a breach of the nuclear deal but a full-scale resumption of uranium enrichment would be a much more significant step.
The announcement on Fordow comes a day after Iran said it was deploying advanced centrifuges also forbidden under the deal, which would allow it to enrich uranium ten times faster than older centrifuges.
Neither move brings Iran significantly closer to a nuclear weapon. A weapon would require uranium enriched at 90 per cent, whereas Iran is currently enriching only at 4.5 per cent. Iran insists it has no interest in developing a nuclear weapon.
However, the growing violations increase pressure on the EU to reimpose its own sanctions on Iran, a move that could lead to a complete collapse of the nuclear agreement and see Iran return to a path that could lead to a nuclear weapon.
Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Iran deal in May 2018 and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian economy. Iran continued to abide by the agreement for a year despite the US sanctions but announced in May 2019 that it would begin violations of its own.
Tehran said it could no longer continue following the terms of the deal when the US had abandoned it and also lashed out at Europe for not doing more to get around American sanctions and ensure Iran was receiving economic benefits.
The last six months have seen Iran slowly but steadily breaching different sections of the agreement, while also insisting that it would return to full compliance if it received the economic benefits it was promised in 2015.
Britain, France, and Germany have urged Iran not to violate the agreement but have been reluctant to impose any sanctions of their own. A US official said: "We see this as a continuation of nuclear blackmail.”
The US imposed a fresh round of sanctions targeting senior officials around Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, including his son, his chief of staff, and his closest personal aide.
The sanctions, imposed on the 40th anniversary of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, also targeted the head of Iran’s judiciary and its most senior military commander.