Washington:
Under any contract with the US, Iran has had to stop enriching uranium, and could only import what is needed for a private nuclear program, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said ahead of Saturday’s meeting between Tehran and Washington.
However, Iran has already made it clear that the right to enrich uranium cannot be negotiated. When asked about the comments of Rubio, a senior Iranian official close to the Iranian negotiation team, he once again said on Wednesday that “zero enrichment is unacceptable.”
The US is trying to prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs, and President Donald Trump has imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign on sanctions and threatened to use military force if Iran does not end its nuclear program.
Iran has denied its desire to develop nuclear weapons and says its nuclear program is peace. US and Iranian officials will meet in Oman on Saturday for third round consultations on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“If they want that, there’s a path to a civic, peaceful nuclear program,” Rubio told the “Honestly Bali Weiss” podcast on Tuesday.
“But if they insist on being rich, they will be the only country in the world, although they don’t have a ‘arms program’…but they’re becoming richer, so I think that’s a problem,” he said.
US Middle Eastern envoy Steve Witkov said last week that Iran doesn’t need to enrich the past 3.67%. This is the statement that Washington raised questions about whether Tehran still wanted to dismantle its enrichment program.
Witkov then said a day later that Iran “must stop nuclear enrichment and eliminate it.”
Rubio said on Tuesday that Witkov had initially spoken about “the level of rich material that is permitted to be imported from outside, as does multiple countries around the world for peaceful civil nuclear programs.”
“If Iran wants a civilian nuclear program, they can have one, just like many other countries in the world, and that’s why they import rich material,” he said.
The United Nations Nuclear Watchdog Agency – the International Atomic Energy Agency – says Iran has “dramatically accelerated uranium enrichment, close to about 60% purity.
Western countries say there is no need to enrich uranium to such high levels, while others say they have not done so without producing nuclear bombs.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published by Syndicate Feed.)
