Iran Agrees on Uranium Enrichment Deal

Israel Fumes as Deal Moves to Tehran to Be Finalized

Iran’s negotiators have reportedly agreed to a third-party enrichment deal in which the nation will send much of its stockpile of low enriched uranium to be enriched to a higher level.

Iran has been enriching uranium to the level needed to produce energy in a soon to be operational Russian-build nuclear power plant, but requires more highly enriched uranium to produce medical isotopes at a Tehran plant built by the United States in 1967.

The deal will not officially be finalized until the governments involved in the pact approve of the deal, though it is widely expected that this will happen. A dispute over French involvement was reportedly ironed out by having Russia outsource some of the enrichment to France, which would presumably leave Russia as the guarantor of the agreement if the French, as feared by the Iranian government, attempt to keep the uranium and back out of the deal.

The Israeli government is already lashing out at the deal, which would likely significantly damage their push for military action against Iran. At least one Israeli official is now claiming that Iran has an entirely separate enrichment system with an entirely separate uranium stockpile for military purposes. So far neither Israel nor any other nation has delivered any evidence of such a thing to the IAEA and it seems virtually impossible that Iran could have even hypothetically obtained enough uranium to do so without anyone noticing.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.