Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to convert some of its nuclear facilities to curb its pathway to a nuclear weapon. Above, the Arak reactor.
Photo: hamid foroutan/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesSecretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. would stop allowing foreign companies to facilitate Iran’s civil nuclear activities, a core provision of the 2015 international nuclear agreement.
Tehran has “continued its nuclear brinkmanship by expanding proliferation sensitive activities,” Mr. Pompeo said Wednesday in a statement announcing his decision.
The Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in May 2018 and has ratcheted up U.S. sanctions against Iran while pressuring the remaining parties—China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K.—to dismantle the deal entirely. The State Department has been urging the United Nations Security Council to renew a conventional-weapons embargo against Iran that is set to expire in October.
Mr. Pompeo said waivers which protect foreign firms from U.S. sanctions for helping Iran convert its Arak reactor to produce less plutonium, will expire in 60 days. So will the waivers for the provision of enriched uranium for Iran’s Tehran Research Reactor, and for importing Iran’s spent and scrapped research reactor fuel. He said the U.S. is providing a 90-day extension to the waiver for work on the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant over safety concerns, but warned that allowance could also change depending on Iran’s activities.
Mr. Pompeo also announced sanctions against two officials of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Majid Agha’i and Amjad Sazgar, for “engaging or attempting to engage in activities that have materially contributed to, or pose a risk of materially contributing to, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Officials said the Treasury Department would add Messrs. Agha’i and Sazgar to its list of specially designated nationals.
Opponents of the 2015 nuclear deal said the continued waivers for work on Iran’s nuclear facilities would help Tehran safeguard key elements of a nuclear program as the temporary restrictions built into the agreement expire.
Department officials framed the termination of the waivers as another step in the progression of the administration’s pressure campaign against Iran, and pointed to the country’s economic crisis as a bulwark against further escalation.
Christopher Ford, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, said the U.S. government’s assessment is that returning the Arak reactor to its prior design would require “a number of years and quite a bit of money” that the regime doesn’t have. He also expressed doubt that the country has the requisite expertise to complete such work, saying prior efforts relied upon foreign assistance.
Further, Mr. Ford said that Iran’s efforts thus far, even where they violated the nuclear agreement, have been measured in nature due to its desire to preserve the deal. Work to create a plutonium production reactor, by contrast, would be “an extraordinary provocation,” he said.
Critics of the U.S. approach say it will prod Iran into quitting the accord, revving up its nuclear work and allowing the facilities to be retooled for that work. European diplomats have consistently lobbied Washington not to undercut provisions of the 2015 agreement designed to reduce Iran’s nuclear-proliferation threat.
Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to convert some of its most important nuclear facilities in ways that would curb Tehran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon through the production of enriched uranium or plutonium.
A waiver for foreign companies helping Iran to convert its underground Fordow uranium-enrichment facility had already been scrapped after Iran started enriching uranium there last year.
Under the nuclear deal, Iran agreed to convert its unfinished Arak heavy-water reactor into a facility that would produce much less plutonium than initially planned. Experts from China and the U.K. have continued working on the facility over the last six months.
Experts say it would take Iran several years to complete the modernized design, which would produce a type of plutonium that might not be useful for nuclear weapons. However, they say it would likely take Iran just as long to return to the original design, which was supposed to produce sufficient plutonium for two to three nuclear weapons a year. Iran never completed the Arak facility but had done most of the work needed to do so before the nuclear deal was sealed. Convincing Iran to change course was widely considered a major accomplishment of the nuclear deal.
The administration also said it would close a loophole allowing foreign companies to provide enriched uranium to Iran for the Tehran Research Reactor, one of Iran’s oldest nuclear facilities, supplied to the country by the U.S. in 1967. The 5 megawatt-thermal, light-water research reactor uses nearly 20% enriched uranium.
The Trump administration also canceled a waiver on the export of Iranian scrap oxide material. The material was used in commercial transactions that allowed Tehran to exchange it for imported 20% enriched uranium it could use for the research reactor. Iran downgraded and then scrapped all its 20% nuclear fuel as the nuclear talks advanced between 2013 and 2015.
While Iran has stepped up its enriched uranium program in defiance of the nuclear deal over the past year, it has only produced enriched uranium up to 4.5%--well short of the 90% generally needed for weapons. But Iranian officials have said they would increase the purity of enriched uranium if the country had any technical needs to do so. The scrapping of the waiver could give Tehran a rationale for once again enriching uranium to 20%, which would represent a significant advance in Iran’s nuclear work.
Supporters of the U.S.’s move said it wouldn’t necessarily push Iran out of the existing agreement. “The Bushehr reactor is both a money pit for Tehran and living proof that Iran does not need domestic enrichment. Keeping it open in the short term helps the administration,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based organization strongly opposed to the nuclear deal.
“Second, revoking waivers could be the administration negotiating in plain sight with Iran. By resetting what Washington will and will not tolerate, it is forcing Tehran to fight for every inch of its ‘civil’ nuclear program in any potential agreement,” he said.
Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, repeated the administration’s calls for a comprehensive agreement on Iran that covers not only its nuclear activities, but actions that destabilize and threaten the security of the region.
Mr. Hook said the leaders in Tehran must decide: “Either negotiate with us, or manage economic collapse.”
Write to Courtney McBride at courtney.mcbride@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
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