Officials from Iran and the US will meet on Friday in Rome for the fifth round of the Iran nuclear deal, confirms Oman’s foreign minister, despite the growing tensions between the two countries over the dismantling of centrifuges and enrichment stoppage.
This comes days after a prevailing deadlock between the two countries over irreconcilable positions on Iranian uranium enrichment.
On Tuesday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that the “US demands were nonsense and unacceptable to Tehran, especially the dismantling of nuclear centrifuges,” adding, “Saying things like ‘We will not allow Iran to enrich uranium’ is nonsense,” according to reports.
US officials on Wednesday told Omani representatives that they want Iran not just to scale back its nuclear program but also to stop enriching uranium altogether — a position that Tehran has said is a non-starter.
Enrichment means the process of modifying and altering the Uranium atom to create nuclear fuel.
Khamenei’s statement was in response to the US’s lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff, dubbing uranium enrichment a “red line” and saying that Washington “cannot allow even 1 per cent of an enrichment capability.”
Leaders from both nations have openly expressed their desires and the stance of their respective countries.
The US has said Iran can operate nuclear reactors for energy production by importing already enriched uranium, arguing that the domestic uranium production by Tehran risks potential weaponisation.
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Iran, which denies seeking a nuclear weapon, says uranium enrichment for civilian purposes is its right as a sovereign nation.
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested that the US position has been shifting, stressing that “there is no scenario” in which Iran will give up enrichment.
“Iran can only control what we Iranians do, and that is to avoid negotiating in public, particularly given the current dissonance we are seeing between what our US interlocutors say in public and in private, and from one week to the other,” Araghchi wrote in a social media post.
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