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What Washington considers de-escalation, Tehran sees as an opportunity to consolidate its nuclear gains, avoid accountability, and position itself to cross the nuclear weapons threshold at a time of its choosing.
The Atlantic The Case Against the Iran Deal Reviving the JCPOA will ensure either the emergence of a nuclear Iran or a desperate war to stop it. January 21, 2021 Mohammad Berno / Iranian Presidency Office / AP Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement are sounding the alarm. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and since then, Iran has increased the quality and quantity of its uranium enrichment well beyond what the deal allows. Recently, it has even begun enriching uranium to 20 percent, a short distance away from weapons-grade. Iran, JCPOA advocate...
With every requirement of that plan. but this was just the first step. from that moment, we pushed ahead, seeking a broad and enduring agreement and maintaining our stance between the partners and arrived at the good and effective deal we had sought. and i ask you today, and in the days ahead, as we have asked members of congress over the course of the last months, consider the facts of what we achieved and judge for yourself the difference between where we were two years ago and where we are now and where we can be in the future. without this agreement, iran's so-called breakout time was two ...
Positioning itself, quote, to rush forward to build nuclear bombs before the international community can detect it and much less prevent it. the prime minister argued rightly that the so-called breakout time, the interval required for iran to produce enough fissile material for one bomb has dwindled to as last as two months. even though it would take significantly longer to build the bomb itself, the prime minister's message was clear. iran had successfully transformed itself into a nuclear threshold state. in the obama administration, we were well aware of that troubling fact. and more import...
In that. now, the way this works, at least in my view is that clearly in the very long term the idea is that iran has had the opportunity and hopefully has succeeded through its actions to convince the international community that its program is peaceful. at that point, they behave -- they have all of the flexibility of any country developing civilian nuclear power, although very importantly with a commitment to having been made to remain of course within the nonproliferation treaty restraints. >> and the supreme leaders demand the sanctions be lifted immediately up front before iran has to pr...