Global Courant
The Iranian leader said some international stakeholders cannot be trusted, but cooperation with the IAEA should continue.
Tehran, Iran – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said claims that Tehran may be pursuing a nuclear weapon are a false “excuse” used by untrustworthy international stakeholders.
He told a group of nuclear officials and scientists in Tehran on Sunday that Islamic values prevent Iran from pursuing a weapon of mass destruction.
“If it wasn’t and we wanted to do it, they couldn’t have stopped it, just as they couldn’t and won’t be able to stop our nuclear advance,” Khamenei said. .
“The excuse of a nuclear weapon is a lie, this is not the problem, something else is going on. They know that nuclear progress will be a key to progress in other issues of the country.”
Iran is currently enriching uranium to 60 percent, which is a short technical step from the more than 90 percent purity required for a bomb, and would have accumulated enough fissile material for more than one bomb. But Western intelligence sources and observers say there are no signs Tehran is currently working on producing a bomb.
Iran’s supreme leader said two decades of challenges with world powers stemming from the country’s nuclear program have shown that some of them, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), cannot be trusted to deliver on their commitments in full. fulfill.
“One of the results of this 20-year challenge was that we realized we can’t trust their word,” he said.
However, Khamenei stressed that cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog should continue under safeguards agreements and in line with a law passed by the Iranian parliament in late 2020 that paved the way for advancing Iran’s nuclear program. Iran.
“You can make agreements about some things, there is no problem with that, but make sure that the infrastructure of the nuclear industry remains untouched,” he said after visiting an exhibition that included advanced Iranian IR-6 centrifuges .
Iran and the IAEA reached an agreement in early March to strengthen their cooperation to resolve issues Tehran said must be finalized before the country’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers — which the United States unilaterally abandoned in 2018 — can take place. be restored.
The agency said earlier this month that it currently has no further questions on two of its four nuclear site cases after Iran provided plausible answers.
This meant that the Western parties to the nuclear deal, which have repeatedly blamed Tehran for insufficient cooperation with the watchdog, did not introduce a censure resolution at the last IAEA board meeting last week, as they had done on two previous occasions.
But stakeholders appear no closer to reinstating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal is formally known, amid media reports this week indicating progress has been made on an agreement, or that a temporary agreement may be in the works .
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron had a phone call on Saturday about the nuclear issue.
The Iranian president’s office said Raisi told Macron during the 90-minute call not to “politicize” or engage in “unconstructive” behavior on the nuclear matter, while Macron’s office said he had expressed France’s concern over the trajectory of the Iranian nuclear program.
Meanwhile, Washington continues to impose sanctions on Tehran, most recently targeting Iran’s missile program earlier this week after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled the country’s first hypersonic ballistic missile.
In October, the UN resolutions underlying the nuclear deal will lift some restrictions on ballistic missile development, an issue that could cause further concern to the West.
