LONDON, November 28. /TASS/. Iran may end its ban on possessing nuclear weapons should European countries move to reimpose sanctions on Tehran at the UN security Council, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview with The Guardian.
"We have no intention to go further than 60% for the time being, and this is our determination right now," he pointed out, as cited by the newspaper. "I would like to re-emphasise that we have chosen the line of cooperation in order to come to a dignified resolution of this problem," Araghchi added.
However, the top Iranian diplomat noted that "there is a debate right now in Iran that it was perhaps a wrong policy." "Why? Because it proved we did whatever they wanted and when it was their turn to lift sanctions, in practice, they didn’t happen. So maybe something is wrong in our policy," he explained.
"So I can tell you, quite frankly, that there is this debate going on in Iran, and mostly among the elites - even among the ordinary people - whether we should change this policy or not, whether we should change our nuclear doctrine, as some say, or not, because it has proved insufficient in practice," Araghchi went on to say. He noted that if European countries reimposed sanctions on Iran at the UN security Council "then they [will] have convinced everybody in Iran that, yes, your doctrine has been wrong".
Still, the top diplomat also stressed that the fatwa against the possession of nuclear weapons could only be rescinded by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "Nuclear weapons have no place in our security calculations," he concluded.
Iran nuclear deal
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed by Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, the United Kingdom, China, the United States and France) and Germany in 2015. The United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018 under President Donald Trump and re-imposed the sanctions on Iran that had been lifted in accordance with the deal. Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, the US and France launched talks with Iran in April 2021, seeking to restore the JCPOA in its original form, but the negotiations ended without result in 2022.
In response to Washington’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran reduced a number of obligations under the nuclear deal, particularly suspending inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) outside a safeguard agreement related to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and banning the use of strict monitoring measures. According to the Iranian authorities, the West must return to full compliance with the JCPOA in order to restore monitoring mechanisms for the Iranian nuclear program.