The United States presented its first official proposal in Tehran for the elements of a nuclear agreement on Saturday, just a few hours after the UN inspectors reported a major increase in the last three months in the size of the almost bombed uranium stock.
The document was described by familiar officials with diplomatic exchanges as a series of chips but not a complete draft of an agreement. He calls on Iran to stop enrichment of uranium and proposes the creation of a regional consortium to produce nuclear energy which would imply Iran; Saudi Arabia and other Arab States; and the United States.
The offer has marked the first time since the negotiations in early April that the main American chief, Steve Witkoff, had presented a proposal on paper.
The delivery of the document was made public in a tweet in Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister, who said that she had been delivered by his Oman counterpart, who was mediaking the talks. The White House then confirmed the action.
“President Trump clearly said Iran can never get a nuclear bomb,” Karoline Leavitt, a press secretary of the White House, said in a statement. “The special envoy Witkoff has sent a detailed and acceptable proposal to the Iranian regime, and it is in their interest to accept it. Out of respect for the current agreement, the administration will not comment on the details of the media proposal. ”
Many experts are skeptical about the fact that Iran’s aging supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will approve an agreement that would essentially close advanced nuclear production facilities that Iranians have spent billions to build, and which have been sabotage targets by the United States and Israel.
Mr. Araghchi said Iran “would respond to the American proposal in accordance with the principles, national interests and the rights of the Iranian people”. In recent weeks, Iranian officials have publicly rejected US requests for nuclear enrichment, declaring that they would never abandon their right to produce civilian quality nuclear fuel. This capacity gives Iran the status of a threshold nuclear state, which could quickly build a weapon if it decided.
The revelation of the overvoltage of Iranian production of uranium enriched at 60%, just below the bomb, was a lively illustration of its efforts to obtain a lever effect in the negotiation. This increase gives Tehran the capacity to produce fuel for around 10 weapons, against around five or six when President Trump was inaugurated in January.
A pair of reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency, obtained by the New York Times, represent an Iranian regime which has decided to advance its production, probably to obtain a lever effect in negotiations with Mr. Witkoff, who is the envoy of the administration for the Middle East.
The director general of the IAEA, Rafael M. Grossi, said that the Iran production report said that “we must reach a diplomatic resolution, as part of a very robust IAEA inspection system”. In recent years, Iran has disabled many cameras and sensors of the agency on key sites, but has enabled inspectors to come to the country and measure its growing uranium stocks.
In the quarterly assessment of the nuclear production agency and Iranian stocks, Mr. Grossi wrote that “the production and considerably increased accumulation of Uranium highly enriched by Iran, the only state of non -nuclear weapons to produce such nuclear materials, is very worrying.”
This report concluded that the Iranian uranium stock enriched at 60% purity – almost 90% required to produce weapons – was now around 900 pounds, compared to 605 pounds in February. Although Iran can quickly increase this bomb fuel, it would take months, and perhaps up to a year, to produce an feasible weapon. US intelligence managers concluded earlier this year A secret team of Iranian scientists worked on a faster and brutal approach to build weaponsif necessary.
The outbreak of Iranian production comes at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Trump to join Israel in a military strike against Iranian nuclear installations. Netanyahu argued that the main Iranian fuel production facilities in the cities of Natanz and Fordow have been more vulnerable than for years, after Israeli forces have struck the Iranian air defenses last October. Time reported In April, Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites in May, but was agitated by Mr. Trump.
Trump confirmed this story earlier this week, saying that he had told Israel that he would be “inappropriate” for him to bomb the facilities when he thought he was close to an agreement. But he also argued that any diplomatic agreement concluded by Mr. Witkoff would allow the United States to dismantle Iran’s nuclear production facilities – which the Iranians have said that they would never allow it.
“I want it to be very strong where we can enter with inspectors, we can take what we want, we can explode what we want, but no one is killed,” Trump told journalists. “We can explode a laboratory, but no one will be in the laboratory.”
While the two IAEA reports began to circulate on Saturday morning, Netanyahu published a statement saying that they had painted a “serious” image and that the nations of the world must “act now to stop Iran”. But he did not publish any military threat. Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and is widely considered to have its own nuclear arsenal of around 100 weapons.
The second report published by the Agency described Iran’s continuous effort to mark the agency’s inspectors because they asked the access, for more than nine years, of military sites where the agency thought that the country had conducted nuclear experiences more than two decades.
Experts suspect that these experiences were part of a secret program in the early 2000s, to develop a nuclear weapon. American intelligence concluded, during the Bush administration, that the program had been suspended in 2003. Israel maintains that the elements of the program continued, drawn by the best Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Israel murdered Mr. Fakhrizadeh while going to his weekend house at the end of 2020, In a robotic attack assisted by an artificial intelligence.
Iran has constantly denied that sites were part of a nuclear program. He said on Saturday that the report included “baseless allegations that could not be validated”.
The report describes, in dry technical language, how Iranian officials provided intelligence reports and reports which, according to them, have proven that nuclear materials had been planted on the sites. The inspectors rejected the Iranian explanation, citing a “lack of technically credible responses”.
We do not know if Mr. Witkoff, as part of any final agreement, insists that Iran is cleaned on past activity.
David E. SANGER reported to Washington, and Maggie Haberman And Farnaz Fassihi from New York. Jonathan Swan Contribution of Washington reports.
