Now, we may be only a matter of days from the JCPOA’s “Implementation Day”.
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During his stay in Vienna, Javad Zarif will meet the US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini on the implementation of the nuclear agreement.
These steps, combined with ultra-close IAEA inspections, extend to at least one year – from just a few months previously – how long Iran would need to make one nuclear bomb’s worth of fissile material.
The White House said earlier Friday that sanctions relief would not come until the IAEA had verified Iran had met the terms of the agreement and that it was not yet ready to do so.
“Implementation Day”, if it is indeed upon us, would mark a major milestone in the deal that Iran made in July with six world powers, including the United States – a deal meant to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons while allowing it to continue a peaceful nuclear program and lift painful economic sanctions.
But the incident also shows that the nuclear agreement has done little to remove tension between Iran and the Unites States.
IAEA “inspectors will be in Arak this evening, and they will verify Iran’s measures and their report will be sent to the IAEA”, Kamalvandi said. Verification will pave the way for the unfreezing of billions of dollars of assets and an end to bans that have curtailed its oil exports.
Zaiwalla also noted that Iran is subject to a “snapback” re-imposition of the terminated sanctions in the event of significant non-performance of its JCPOA commitments. But Iranian officials have not designed a plan for attracting this capital or overcoming the financial and technical problems that might cause worldwide companies to delay their return to Iran for over a decade.
Given that background, the Iranians’ decision to take the USA sailors prisoner raises serious questions about motives.
The Iranian official said Tehran planned to revive supply deals with European partners in order to ramp up exports.
Iran has the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world and intends to increase output by half a million barrels a day nearly immediately.
The money to be released from sanctions won’t seriously boost that economy or improve the lives of everyday Iranians. There is “not going to be a flood” of business into Iran because there is “still a tangled web” of sanctions.
Iran violated a United Nations resolution in October when it test-launched a medium-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, a United Nations panel of experts concluded in a report in December. For the most part, restrictions on US actors will remain in place. “At $30, the profitability of selling their oil is rather low to be even happy about”, Phillip Futures said in a note on Friday.
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The U.S. confirmed Thursday that Iran has poured concrete into the core of the Arak nuclear reactor, making it almost impossible to produce weapons-grade plutonium at the facility. That “will supersede the limited sanctions relief extended today”, the bloc said.
