Washington:
Iran will have to stop enriching uranium under each deal with the United States and could only import what is needed for a civil nuclear program, said the American State Secretary Marco Rubio before the conversations between Tehran and Washington on Saturday.
However, Iran has already made it clear that the right to enrich uranium is not negotiable. When asked about Rubio's comments, a senior Iranian official, close to Iran's negotiating team, on Wednesday again said: “Zero Enrichment is unacceptable.”
The US trying to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb and President Donald Trump has imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and threatens to use military violence if Iran is not a termination of its nuclear program.
Iran has denied that he wants to develop a nuclear weapon and says that his nuclear program is peaceful. The American and Iranian officials meet on Saturday in Oman for a third round of conversations about the disputed nuclear program of Tehran.
“There is a road to a civil, peaceful nuclear program if they want one,” Rubio told the podcast “with Bari Weiss” on Tuesday.
“But if they are on enriching, they will be the only country in the world that has no 'weapon program', but is enriching. And so I think that is problematic,” he said.
The American Midden -Oost -envoy Steve Witkoff said last week that Iran does not have to enrich more than 3.67% -a comment that called for questions or Washington still wanted Tehran to dismantle his enrichment program.
Witkoff then said a day later that Iran “should stop and eliminate his nuclear enrichment.”
Rubio said on Tuesday that Witkoff was initially talking about 'the level of enriched material they were allowed to import from outside, such as several countries around the world for their peaceful civilian nuclear programs'.
“If Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one like many other countries in the world have one, and that is that they import enriched material,” he said.
The Nuclear wake dog of the UN – the International Atomic Energy Agency – has said that Iran is “dramatically” accelerating the enrichment of uranium to 60% purity, close to the level of around 90% weapon quality.
Western countries say that it is not necessary to enrich uranium to such a high level for civil use and that no other country has done this without producing nuclear bombs.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
