Defying the warning of European leaders, Iran said Monday that it was removing the seals placed by the United Nations nuclear agency at one of its nuclear sites to restart activities there.
European diplomats said that if Iran did go ahead and resume the nuclear activities, then they would have little choice but to ask for the agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to place the issue before the United Nations Security Council for possible political and economic sanctions.
A senior Iranian official, Ali Aghamohammadi, said technicians were going to break the seals to the uranium ore conversion plant in Isfahan on Monday afternoon in the presence of the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who are currently in Iran, the IRNA news agency reported.
By the end of the day, however, it could not be determined whether Iran had actually broken the seals...
Iran agreed nine months ago to freeze all its enrichment-related activities for as long as talks with Germany, France, Britain and the European Union continued. The United States maintains, and the European countries had come to agree, that Iran intends to make nuclear weapons. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes...
Iran says it is keeping its freeze on another, more advanced, process in the program to enrich uranium, which can lead to making nuclear fuel for power plants, or if enriched to high levels, for making nuclear weapons.
And tensions resume... I wonder how Bolton will handle this? (Regardless, this is bad, bad news.)
No comments:
Post a Comment