TEHRAN – Iran has resumed uranium processing to 20 percent in the country’s biggest breach to date of its major nuclear deal with world powers, government spokesman Ali Rabiee told state-run Mehr News on Monday.
According to the news agencies IRIB and FARS News, Iran’s revolutionary guard also seized a South Korean vessel carrying thousands of tons of ethanol in the Persian Gulf on Monday.
The enrichment campaign puts Iran a technical step away from enrichment at 90 percent, the level needed to produce a nuclear warhead. Prior to the announcement, Iran had enriched uranium at about 4.5 percent, in violation of the nuclear treaty, but at a significantly lower level.
The news comes amid provocative tensions between the United States and Iran in the last days of President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and placed a series of escalating incidents that culminated in the assassination of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq on January 3 last year.
The announcement of the enrichment and the seizure of the ship took place the day after the one-year anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination, in which thousands of people took to the streets to protest his death on Sunday in Iraq.
According to Iranian officials, the enrichment is being carried out at the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran, which is hidden deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom. Under Iran’s nuclear deal, Tehran may only enrich uranium by about 3.5 percent and no enrichment is allowed in the Fordo plant.
The agreement stipulates that the world powers will grant Iran in return, in exchange for agreeing to limit its uranium enrichment.
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Since the United States withdrew from the treaty in May 2018 and imposed crippling sanctions against Iran, Tehran has gradually violated its own commitments to the agreement, which has raised alarm among the other five parties to the agreement: France, Germany, the United Kingdom , Russia and China.
Iran’s decision comes after parliament passed a bill aimed at increasing enrichment to pressure Europe to provide sanctions relief.
Uranium enriched to 20 percent can be used to fuel nuclear reactors, according to Eric Brewer, deputy director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic International Studies, a think tank in Washington DC.
Iran has a research reactor that uses nearly 20 percent enriched uranium, but that fuel is supplied by other countries under the 2015 nuclear deal, Brewer added. It remains unclear what Iran plans to do, if anything, with the higher enriched uranium.
Tehran has long denied that it wants to develop a nuclear weapon, saying it would be against Islam.
The march also serves as pressure on incoming President Joe Biden’s incoming administration. Biden, who was vice president when the United States signed the nuclear deal under President Barack Obama in 2015, said he was willing to return to the treaty if Iran complied with the agreement and proposed building on the agreement. .
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last month dampened hopes that it would be possible to expand the scope of the agreement, saying the country’s ballistic missile program and its local influence are non-negotiable.
“There is one JCPOA that has been negotiated and agreed upon – whether or not everyone is committed to it,” he said, referring to the 2015 Nuclear Power Agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that inspectors were monitoring the activities at the Fordo site in Iran and that Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi was expected to submit a report to the IAEA countries later Monday.
Ali Arouzi and Amin Hossein Khodadadi reported from Tehran; Saphora Smith reports from London.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Amin Hossein Khodadadi contributed.