Tehran will not abandon nuclear enrichment, says FM Araghchi
Monitoring Desk
TEHRAN: Iran has no plans to abandon its nuclear programme, including uranium enrichment, despite “severe” damage to its facilities after US strikes last month, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday.
For now, enrichment “is stopped because, yes, damages are serious and severe”, Araghchi told a foreign media outlet.
“But obviously we cannot give up enrichment because it is an achievement of our own scientists,” he continued, calling it a source of “national pride”.
He stressed that any future nuclear deal would have to contain the right to enrichment.
When asked whether any enriched uranium had been saved from the strikes, Araghchi said he had “no detailed information”, but that Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation is “trying to evaluate what has exactly happened to our nuclear material, to our enriched material”.
Washington bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran on June 22 to support Israel’s 12-day military offensive, including the Fordow underground uranium enrichment site located south of Tehran.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called the strikes a success that “completely destroyed” the sites, lashing out at media reports citing intelligence findings of more conservative assessments.
Iran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons and says its programme is for civilian purposes only. A US intelligence assessment found that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon programme and was “years away from producing one”.
Araghchi, while saying there was no military solution to the dispute over Iran’s programme, said that “yes, facilities have been destroyed. They are severely destroyed”.
“But the technology is there, our nuclear programme, our enrichment programme, is not something imported from outside that can be destroyed by bombings,” he said.
