Iran is playing with nuclear fire. Sixteen days before the inauguration of the new American president, Joe Biden, Tehran announces the resumption of enrichment to 20% of uranium on the Fordo underground site.
This decision, revealed on Monday January 4 by a government spokesperson, represents an important step in the successive violations of the commitments made by Iran under the nuclear agreement (JCPoA), signed in 2015. It was confirmed in Vienna, Austria, by the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi. The latter informed the member states of the organization that “Iran had started supplying six cascades of centrifuges with uranium already enriched to 4.1% (…) with the aim of increasing to 20% ”.
Poker game
This Iranian decision testifies both to the balance of power within power and Tehran’s desire to improve its hand, as in poker, before starting negotiations with the new American administration. If these negotiations failed, Iran would be closer to the finish line anyway.
The “maximum pressure” policy chosen by the Trump administration has brought no results, underlines the Iranian regime. On the contrary, it brought the Islamic Republic closer to the bomb, thanks to the violations of its commitments under the agreement. The time to accumulate the necessary fissile material has been greatly reduced, well under one year. But Tehran also takes the risk of overestimating its game, of isolating itself by tense Russia and China, and of weakening the JCPoA even more.
The withdrawal of the United States from the JCPoA, in 2018, had led a year later to the beginning of a forward, controlled and gradual flight from Iran, feeling free to resume its program, since the economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic were reinforced, not lifted. The JCPoA had reduced the number of centrifuges available to Iran from 21,000 to 5,060, and limited the enrichment rate to 3.67%, when it had already reached 20%. In addition, the agreement capped stocks of enriched uranium at 300 kg.
The transition from 20% to 90% enrichment, the level necessary for the bomb, is much faster than that of 3% to 20%, from a technical point of view. On December 31, 2020, Iran informed the IAEA of its desire to produce uranium enriched to 20%. So far, the Agency has been able to work properly on site and carry out its inspections, Tehran even agreeing in August to open two sites to its experts, until then banned. But the sophisticated and daring assassination at the end of November of one of the fathers of the nuclear program, physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, put the Iranian authorities under pressure, bolstering the conservative wing of the regime.
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