The world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism is getting closer to producing a nuclear bomb. In January 2021, Iran announced that it had started the process to enrich uranium up to 20 percent. Although the statement prompted worried responses from Jerusalem — Israel has been warning the world about the Iranian threat for decades — the reports coming out of Tehran shouldn’t surprise those who have been following the Islamic Republic’s repeated breaches of the terms of the ‘Iran Deal’ over the last few years.
What is the Iran Deal?
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – more commonly known as the Iran Deal – was struck in 2015 by Iran, the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, together with the European Union.
It was theoretically designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons by increasing the oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in exchange for sanctions relief. According to proponents of the JCPOA, full compliance by Iran would lengthen the country’s “breakout time” to one year.
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The deal was implemented to great fanfare on January 16, 2016, but quickly failed to deliver what it had promised. Already in early 2016, Iran violated the spirit of the agreement by testing ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel, marked with slogans calling for the destruction of the Jewish State. These tests would continue in the years to come, in defiance of the UN Security Council resolution endorsing the Iran Deal.
According to Iran, its missile program serves a defensive purpose but a plethora of evidence refutes this claim. “If Iran were telling the truth, it would be the only nation in history without a nuclear-weapons program that nonetheless developed missiles with a range of 2,000 kilometers or more,” former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz argued in April 2016. “Iran is not building long-range missiles to carry warheads full of dynamite or to fire monkeys into space.”
Iran’s Sinister Plans
In the months and years that followed, more and more breaches of the nuclear deal came to light. For example, the second report by the IAEA after the implementation of the JCPOA noted that Iran was in possession of too much heavy water, which is used in nuclear reactors.
In July 2016, Germany’s domestic security agency published an incriminating report alleging that despite Iran’s promises, the Islamic Republic continued to acquire materials that could be used to develop illegal weaponry in secret. “This holds true in particular with regards to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology,” the report added.
A document leaked to The Associated Press that same month revealed more of Iran’s plans. According to a confidential annex to the JCPOA, Iran intended to replace its current centrifuges with more advanced ones as early as January 2027, allowing the regime to enrich at more than twice the rate it had been doing so far. This would have allowed Iran to build a nuclear bomb even before the end of the deal in 2030.
By November 2016, the IAEA reported that Iran was once again breaking the terms of the deal. In a classified document, the UN nuclear watchdog wrote that Tehran surpassed the agreed upon threshold for heavy water for the second time. Less than a year after the regime vowed not to continue down the path of developing a nuclear weapon, numerous members of the international community voiced concerns that Iranian misdeeds were undermining the JCPOA.
Iran Deal Undermined By Lies?
Those concerns became even stronger in 2018, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed some 100,000 files obtained by the Mossad from Iran’s secret atomic archives in a warehouse in Tehran. Netanyahu claimed that just like it lied about the purpose of the ballistic missile program, Iran misled the international community about its past and future nuclear ambitions.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei claimed in 2012 that “the Islamic Republic has never been after nuclear weapons.” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani stated in 2013 that nuclear weapons have “no place” in Iran’s security and defense doctrine. In April 2015, the same month that Iran agreed to a preliminary framework of what would become the JCPOA, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Bloomberg that his country “didn’t have any program to develop nuclear weapons anyway.”
The information obtained by Israel made clear to many that Iran had lied.
At the press conference on April 30, 2018, Netanyahu described how Iranian officials deceived the world in three respects. First, they lied about never having had a nuclear weapons program. According to the Israeli premier, the documents showed that Iran’s Fordow plant was “designed from the get-go for nuclear weapons.”
Second, Iran didn’t shutter its nuclear program. Even after forging the Iran Deal, the Islamic Republic continued to secretly preserve and expand nuclear weapons know-how for future use.
Finally, Iran never came clean about its past activities, even though the JCPOA was conditioned on an IAEA report that cleared the country of prior nuclear activities for military use. In other words: not only did Iran violate the nuclear agreement after signing, but the whole deal was undermined by the false pretense of the Iranian regime as being an honest and constructive party.
20 Percent Enrichment
Shortly after Netanyahu’s revelations, US President Donald Trump announced Washington’s departure from the JCPOA, asserting that the “disastrous deal” placed “very weak” limits on Iran’s nuclear activity. While the remaining parties struggled to keep the accord alive — even launching efforts to bypass renewed US economic sanctions — Iran quickly ramped up its production of enriched uranium, surpassing the cap of 3.67 percent purity set by the deal.
After the assassination of its top nuclear scientist in November 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a law calling on the government to produce and store uranium enriched to 20 percent purity before February 2021. Reportedly, President Hassan Rouhani has already ordered to start this process at the Fordow nuclear facility.
This is the most significant step towards a bomb that the Islamic Republic has taken in the last few years, according to Israeli intelligence sources and nuclear weapons experts. Enrichment at 20 percent is only a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
The Media Angle
When reading the news, it’s possible to come away with the impression that Iran is reacting to draconian sanctions and provocations by the West. Repeatedly, media reports focus on the latest events, without providing the fuller context of Iran’s persistent violations of the nuclear deal.
In some cases, widely-read media outlets have even claimed that Iran only began violating the deal in response to America’s withdrawal, an inversion of the facts, and a journalistic failure which misleads and misinforms the public about the reality and the severity of the Iranian threat.
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