Iran says "not interested" in having a nuclear weapon

Iran says

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations Majid Takht-Ravanchi has said that Iran is not interested in having a nuclear weapon, "because we have a very clear, clear-cut religious edict by our supreme leader prohibiting nuclear weapons," PBS reports.

"At the same time, there is no place for nuclear weapons in Iran's defensive doctrine. Therefore, we do not want to have nuclear weapons. We are a member of NPT. We have said, in the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, that Iran will not have nuclear weapons," the Ambassador said.

"But, at the same time, JCPOA was a deal. It was a give-and-take. We have been — we have been doing our part for some time, with almost nothing in return. Unfortunately, the European partners which were supposed to give us the benefit of the nuclear deal, they didn't act in accordance with the deal.

"If Iran is given the benefits of the deal, we will go back to the full implementation of it."

On January 5, Iran made a major announcement regarding its nuclear program, stating that it will no longer observe limits on the number of centrifuges that it uses to enrich uranium. While the announcement is significant, it was not altogether unexpected. And it most certainly does not constitute the “harsh revenge” that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised following the killing of Qasem Soleimani last week.

Ever since May 2019, Iran has been taking one additional step every 60 days to decrease its compliance with the nuclear agreement. Over the course of summer and fall of 2019, Iran made successive announcements that it was abandoning limitations on its level of enrichment, its stock of enriched material, and its research and development work on new centrifuges. In this latest announcement, Iran said it would abandon the limit on number of centrifuges. Experts had been expecting Iran to announce such a “step five” for weeks.

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